The Internet Chronicles – Part 10 of 12: User-Created Content           

Andrei Mihai

We take it for granted today, but the internet is one of the most impactful inventions of modern times — possibly even of all time. But how did it all start? The story of the internet is a fascinating journey through the minds of visionary thinkers and relentless innovators, many of them coming from mathematics and computer science. In this 12-part series, we dive into some of the stories and contributions of the trailblazers who laid the foundations for the interconnected world we live in today.

Previously, we looked at how RSA and prime numbers gave the internet a public lock. This enabled people to send secrets and prove their identity. But security only matters if people actually use your platform. To grow, the web also needed something messier, louder, and far harder to control: people.

For all its early promise, the first web was mostly a reading machine. You clicked on something and consumed information, and then moved to the next one. You were like a visitor in someone else’s museum. In order for the internet to truly take shape, that needed to change.

The irony (or perhaps, testament to a visionary mind) is that the web was never meant to be passive. Tim Berners-Lee, the “father of the World Wide Web” envisioned the internet as a dynamic space. His original browser was also an editor, allowing people to read and write together. He wanted the internet to be self-correcting. But it took a while to get there. The next revolution was not one revolution, but rather a swarm of browsers, scripts, wikis, blogs, feeds, and eventually, social media.

The Read-Only Web Was Never the Plan

The early users of the internet were, with a few exceptions, technical people. For regular users to access the web, it needed a simpler, more visual interface.

Berners-Lee created the first browser called WorldWideWeb (later renamed Nexus) in 1990. Several other browsers followed, but it was NCSA Mosaic that triggered the first browser boom.

Mosaic was the first browser that displayed images inline with text. Before that, browsers often showed an icon that users had to click to open an image separately. This was an intentional choice, meant to make it easier for people to browse the internet. Mosaic’s innovation proved to be groundbreaking.

Developed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Mosaic was released in 1993 by a team led by Marc Andreessen. Andreessen later co-founded Netscape, whose Navigator browser became one of the defining products of the early commercial web. Microsoft also licensed technology from a Mosaic-related commercial product to build the first Internet Explorer.

If there is such a thing as a spiritual ancestor of the modern graphical browser, Mosaic has a strong claim. But browsers were only one part of the battle. Websites themselves also had to change.

HTTP, the web’s basic protocol, treats each request as independent. In other words, a website has no built-in memory of who you are from one click to the next. That was fine for reading pages. It was not fine for shopping carts, logins, forums, or accounts.

The solution came in the form of a cookie.

The cookie was developed at Netscape in 1994 by Lou Montulli, as the young commercial web was trying to support shopping carts and user sessions. There had been earlier attempts at solving the problem, but Montulli’s idea was elegant. A server could store compact data in the browser and retrieve it later.

That small mechanism became one of the quiet pieces of infrastructure behind the interactive web. Cookies made logins, e-commerce, personalization, and many modern web services possible.

In modern systems, the cookie usually does not contain the full sensitive record itself. More often, it contains a session ID that points to information stored more securely on the server. Still, this simple invention helped turn the web from a library into a place where things could happen.

Hello World

In 1994, Justin Hall, then a student at Swarthmore College, launched Links.net, a personal home page filled with links and reflections. This could be the world’s first blog.

It was a rather audacious idea at the time, that you could use this still-new platform called the internet to broadcast whatever thoughts you wanted to the world. After Hall, many others followed, especially once the technical barriers were reduced.

At first, maintaining such a site meant hand-editing HTML. Then came hosted tools like Blogger or WordPress, that made blogging feel less like programming and more like writing text in a box.

With blogs, the internet started to truly become a dialog. Blog posts had dates and permalinks. They could reference each other. They had comments sections where the audience could engage. Importantly, they also had RSS feeds that let readers subscribe without visiting every site manually.

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. It is a web feed format that lets a site publish a list of its latest updates (usually headlines, links, summaries, and timestamps). A reader could subscribe to that feed using an RSS reader or aggregator, which would automatically collect new posts from many sites in one place. So instead of visiting 30 blogs every morning to see who posted what, you opened one reader and saw what had changed. For a user looking to browse their favorite blogs, RSS offered the perfect medium (and it is still widely used today).

Around the same time, another strange and important project emerged: GeoCities.

Founded in late 1994 by David Bohnett and John Rezner as Beverly Hills Internet, GeoCities gave ordinary users a way to build personal homepages without needing to understand the deeper machinery of servers and code. It was a project stunningly ahead of its time. It enabled users to become “Homesteaders,” and their pages were placed in themed neighborhoods like “Area 51” for science fiction fans, “WallStreet” for finance, “Colosseum” for sports, and “EnchantedForest” for children.

At its peak, GeoCities was messy and looked amateurish, but it was deeply human. It was one of the first projects where users could truly feel like they had their own piece of the internet. By 1999, it had become one of the most visited places on the web, hosting millions of user pages before Yahoo! acquired it.

But its decline also revealed a pattern that would haunt the social web: People built the culture, while companies owned the land. When Yahoo! later shut down the main English-language GeoCities site, archivists rushed to preserve what they could, turning GeoCities into both a monument to early online creativity and a warning about how easily digital communities can vanish.

Wiki Wiki Wiki

So far in this series, we have mostly looked at technical breakthroughs. But it would be unfair to ignore the role of users.

Today, user-generated content is filtered, ranked, and monetized by giant platforms. In the 1990s and early 2000s, it was much wilder. The internet burst with creativity and experimentation. Some of it was brilliant, and some of it was undoubtedly awful. Much of it shaped the society we now live in.

Perhaps none of those experiments was as ambitious as Wikipedia.

Science fiction writer Isaac Asimov gave us many visionary concepts, including the “Three Laws of Robotics.” He also proposed, in his Foundation universe, an encyclopedia that would preserve human knowledge. He called it Encyclopedia Galactica. Wikipedia was similar in spirit, though not quite identical to Asimov’s idea. It was even stranger: an encyclopedia that never stopped arguing with itself.

Nupedia (Wikipedia’s precursor) was launched in 2000 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger. It tried to build a free online encyclopedia through expert review. It was noble and careful and painfully slow. Just two articles were published in its first six months. Wikipedia, launched on January 15, 2001, was much more open. Anyone could write and edit, which proved to be one of the most inspired decisions in the history of the internet. In an interview I conducted with Wales for ZME Science at the Cheltenham Science Festival, he recalled:

“In the very early days we switched to the wiki model from a previous model which was very old-fashioned, very top down. Suddenly this burst of activity came from the community and we got more work done in two weeks than we had in almost two years. I was like ‘this is cool’. This is actually really interesting. We’re having this very open model [..], we’ve unlocked people’s excitement and energy and this is fantastic.”

 

It grew to more than 20,000 articles across 18 languages in its first year and reached one million articles by 2006. Currently, the English version of Wikipedia has 7,189,591 articles (containing over 5 billion words), while for all languages, the total number of pages is 65,690,650

Whereas Asimov’s encyclopedia was conceived as an expert-built monument (more like Nupedia), Wikipedia became a living system built by millions of contributors, corrected in public, revised constantly, and held together by rules such as the Neutral Point of View. To this day, it still fundamentally works the same way.

It sounds too idealistic to ever work. Yet somehow, much of the time, it does. Wikipedia is far from perfect, but academic studies show that even now, it is on par with professional sources even in specialized topics such as biology or medicine. We have an imperfect, ever-changing, often vandalized database of human knowledge which (almost magically) is still reliable most of the time. A key part of that is transparency and admitting when things go awry, Wales also mentions.

“We’re very happy to tell you all the things that are wrong with Wikipedia and all the criticism we’ve gotten because that’s just part of history. It’s part of the process.”

 Wikipedia is just the biggest one of the thousands of different “wiki” projects on the web. The name wiki comes from Hawaiian, meaning “quick.” It was coined by programmer Ward Cunningham, who created the first wiki software in 1995, borrowed the name after remembering the Wiki Wiki Shuttle at Honolulu International Airport. He wanted a phrase that captured the speed and ease of the system, a “quick web” where visitors could create, edit, and link pages without waiting for formal approval.

Nowadays, you can find wikis for everything from programming languages to your favorite series. Internet users have proven that at least sometimes, they can be reliable curators of knowledge.

The Web We Built, the Web We Lost

By the mid-2000s, the internet looked vastly different. The world needed a word for it, and that word became Web 2.0. It was popularized by authors Tim O’Reilly (who also promoted the term open source) and Dale Dougherty (sometimes called the Father of the Maker Movement). It was simply a popular name, as Web 2.0 did not bring a new protocol or invention; rather, it was a new way of building services. The web was finally a platform.

Berners-Lee objected to the term. He reminded people that the web had always been meant to be collaborative. But “Web 2.0” captured a real change in scale and behavior, and it just became commonly used.

This user-generated structure also paved the way for social media before “social media” had a name. Early platforms like Friendster or MySpace did not always work out, but some (like YouTube or Facebook) became behemoths.

Yet gradually, bit by bit, something changed in the process. The early participatory web was messy and decentralized. People built pages, chose layouts, joined webrings, ran blogs, and linked outward. That gave us Wikipedia, YouTube, blogs, social networks, open-source communities, creator businesses, crisis reporting, fan cultures, and a billion tiny acts of public self-expression. As social media took over, it became more centralized. It also became faster, optimized, and more addictive. We no longer have the chaotic Geocities, we have highly curated video streams that algorithms tailor for our individual personality and responses. Meanwhile, generative AI is adding a fresh twist, flooding the internet with questionable content at industrial scales.

Yet in a way, the web is still fighting the same battle it has fought since the beginning: Who gets to speak? Who gets heard? Who owns the room where the conversation happens? In the early days, it used to be the few people who had the know-how and infrastructure; now, it is whoever controls the platforms and algorithms.

But, of course, we will explore that in more detail in our next installment on the current state of the internet.

The post The Internet Chronicles – Part 10 of 12: User-Created Content            originally appeared on the HLFF SciLogs blog.