Remember when blogs felt like secret gardens of the internet—personal, quirky, full of doodles, random thoughts, hand-coded charm, visitor counter at the bottom (!) and little animations that made you smile? Each one was a window into someone’s world, made not for profit but for the pure joy of sharing. People wrote about what moved them: their pets, their weird dreams, their favorite fonts or recipes or memories from childhood. Back then, blogs had soul. I remember Animation Express, it was originally part of HotWired, the pioneering digital offshoot of Wired magazine, hosted on hotwired.com from around 1998 to 2002, it featured a selection of Flash, Shockwave, and QuickTime web animations—serving as one of the earliest showcases for independent animators. By the way, some of the stuff can be found via the
Nowadays those same spaces are buried under pop-ups, Camouflaged ads, Deceptive ads, paywalls, and clickbait headlines engineered to feed the algorithm, not to mention viruses and other crap. Every post feels like it’s trying to sell you something or trick you into clicking. What was once a vibrant patchwork of genuine expression has been swallowed by ad trackers and content farms. The intimacy, the creativity, the quiet corners of the web—so much of it has been lost.
If you still want to find lost gems you can search https://web.archive.org/
