I would imagine it was harder to get information on topics as you would’ve had to buy/borrow encyclopedias to do.

Were there proprietary predecessor websites?

Tell me about the dark ages!

  • bitwaba@lemmy.world
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    18 days ago

    I’ll be honest man: it sucked.

    Imagine a time where you had a question, and you just… didn’t get to know the answer. Like, literally every time you just had to hope someone in your general area had some level of confidence in their answer to satisfy your curiosity until you could confirm it later. Or you’d just go around repeating it to people with out confirming. Whatever.

    If something was important enough, you’d go track down an answer. Remember to look it up when you got home using your parent’s encyclopedias. Or make a trip to the library.

    In a way, we kind of lost something: conversation and discussion. Before I feel like people really picked apart an issue where you’d all come up with a consensus over a few hours of discussion about a topic at a party or something. Then someone would come back with the answer another day, and bring in some more stuff they learned while looking it up, and it would start a whole new conversation.