Remembering Internet v2.0: When We Surfed, Searched & Actually Read Stuff

Long-Form Royalty — “Blog Posts Were King, Threads Were for Sewing”

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Hi friends; a short rant…

Prelude: A Quick Scroll Backwards ⏪

Blow the cyber-dust off your mental browser, dump every biscuit, and picture a web with no algorithm slyly spoon-feeding you yesterday’s viral Strictly clip. In Internet v2.0 the long-form blog post wasn’t some quaint relic; it was legal tender. We clicked “Publish” instead of Post, and the only thing “For You” was the mug of tea cooling beside your wheezing 56 kbps modem.

Exhibit A for our current malaise: last month I emailed an 18-page draft contract to a newly qualified solicitor. His entire reply – addressed to me, a Partner – opened with: “TL;DR.” I had to look it up, then looked him up, and was briefly tempted to bill him for the Google search. If that isn’t the algorithmic age’s attention span in miniature, nothing is.

Today’s nostalgia tour salutes three rituals from that earlier court: 2 000-word rambles, comment-section salons, and the sacred “Read More” fold.

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1. 2 000-Word Rambles in LiveJournal & Blogger

Word-counts? Nobody bothered. We typed until the tea went cold or the Uni halls Wi-Fi timed us out. A typical entry:

“Week 4 of my first year: I’ve discovered both the best local and instant Pot Noodle. This post will connect the two.” — me, 2005

Those epics were:

• Confessional – oversharing long before it became a revenue model.
• Link-laced – we adored footnotes masquerading as hyperlinks*.
• SEO-agnostic – no one sprinkled keywords like hundreds and thousands. We wrote for humans we’d never meet—and maybe one mate who’d promised to comment.

Finish one of these Everest-length entries and you’d earned a medal in stamina and a peek at the writer’s unedited psyche. Strangely, they felt shorter than a Shorts clip you can’t swipe past.

• Yes, that’s a link to a cached GeoCities page. Click if you fancy the risk.

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2. Comment Sections as Mini-Forums

Picture it: beneath your magnum opus sprawled a chronological, unfiltered thread where strangers:

1. Debated your stance on the Oxford comma.
2. Posted rebuttals—often longer than your post.
3. Forged friendships that outlived the web host’s electricity bill.

Avatars were 90-pixel squares, usernames were totallynotanAI92, and hardly anyone accused anyone else of being on the payroll (there wasn’t one). Moderation? You, the author, armed with Delete and a gut instinct.

Chaotic, earnest, occasionally flaming, but undeniably community – HTML in timestamp order and nothing smarter in between.

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3. The Lost Art of the “Read More” Cut

Behold the fold: one bold horizontal rule plus a cheeky “Continue reading →”. A covenant between writer and reader:

• Writer’s privilege: stash the next 1 700 words of tangents out of sight.
• Reader’s consent: a conscious “Right then, let’s have it.”

Today the fold’s a casualty of infinite scroll, but in v2.0 it was side B of a cassette. Those who clicked were initiates, rewarded with deeper takes, Easter-egg GIFs, and sometimes a comments section locked to “Friends Only”.

I miss that deliberate moment. Reading felt like a choice, not background radiation.

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Curtain Call: Can We Crown Long-Form Again? 👑

Will a 2 000-word blog post thrive in a world trimmed to 30-second Shorts? Perhaps not. Will I keep writing them anyway? Absolutely, because:

1. Nuance needs elbow-room.
2. Search-led discovery still works (hi, Google delivered you here).
3. People crave depth—they’ve just forgotten the taste.

So here’s a gentle dare: the next time a hot take bubbles up, skip the micro-rant and craft the macro-essay. Hide half behind a pristine “Read More”, then lay out chairs in the comments. Let’s revive that v2.0 energy – one gloriously scroll-worthy post at a time.

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Thanks for reading!

Your turn: Were you around for the reign of Long-Form Royalty? Drop a memory, a rant link, or a relic of your own below (bonus points if you survived LiveJournal’s purple default theme).