reddit was originally a bit of a niche site for a tech audience, kinda like Hacker News. However, techies used over-represented on the internet anyways. "The internet used to be a lot more like HN" is generally a pretty decent first approximation.
A few decades ago there was a strain of progressive techno-optimism which has all but died out by this point. "Information wants to be free", Creative Commons, excitement about Wikipedia, Clay Shirky, One Laptop Per Child, Obama hope & change. I think of Aaron as being the poster child for that -- both a hacker and a progressive activist, advancing internet technology because he felt like it would help us advance as a society.
Another thing I'd point to is Eric S Raymond's stuff. He was one of the major pioneers of the open source movement:
If you want a book to read, I've recently been reading a book "Because Internet" which includes a linguistic history of the internet, going back to the earliest days.
An interesting point is that the non-techies who initially used the internet socially were mostly teens and young adults on sites like MySpace, Xanga, LiveJournal, etc. (and IM services like AIM -- essentially like Google Chat) If you want to see what MySpace was, I suppose tagged.com is the nearest modern equivalent?
Here are some things I might include if I was writing such a guide:
All-time top stories on reddit in 2006: https://web.archive.org/web/20060415194256/http://reddit.com...
reddit was originally a bit of a niche site for a tech audience, kinda like Hacker News. However, techies used over-represented on the internet anyways. "The internet used to be a lot more like HN" is generally a pretty decent first approximation.
This is the reddit story which best captures the curiosity and wonder of its early days for me: https://www.garlikov.com/Soc_Meth.html
Aaron Swartz's blog would be another thing I would include: https://old.reddit.com/domain/aaronsw.com/top/?sort=top&t=al...
A few decades ago there was a strain of progressive techno-optimism which has all but died out by this point. "Information wants to be free", Creative Commons, excitement about Wikipedia, Clay Shirky, One Laptop Per Child, Obama hope & change. I think of Aaron as being the poster child for that -- both a hacker and a progressive activist, advancing internet technology because he felt like it would help us advance as a society.
Another thing I'd point to is Eric S Raymond's stuff. He was one of the major pioneers of the open source movement:
http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html
http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/
If you want a book to read, I've recently been reading a book "Because Internet" which includes a linguistic history of the internet, going back to the earliest days.