this post was submitted on 18 Jan 2024
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I hope you remember the amounts of spam and machine-translated text back then.
Being not an English speaker, you'd basically expect most of what you find to be machine-translated and badly at that.
Pirate localizations of games were basically translated the way that you'd get some basic idea sometimes somewhere, but in general it was probably worse than the English version, which would at least make some sense if you knew some English.
It's people and IT companies which were better.
Since I am an English speaker, my '90s Internet experience was very different than that. There were "link farms" (pages designed to exploit early search engine algorithms that scored pages higher when they got linked to a lot) and e-mail spam, of course, but being unsophisticated, it was generally a lot easier not to get suckered in by than the firehose of AI-written advertorials and shit we have today.
Here's the summary for the wikipedia article you mentioned in your comment:
An advertorial is an advertisement in the form of editorial content. The term "advertorial" is a blend (see portmanteau) of the words "advertisement" and "editorial. " Merriam-Webster dates the origin of the word to 1946. In printed publications, the advertisement is usually written to resemble an objective article and designed to ostensibly look like a legitimate and independent news story. In television, the advertisement is similar to a short infomercial presentation of products or services.
^to^ ^opt^ ^out^^,^ ^pm^ ^me^ ^'optout'.^ ^article^ ^|^ ^about^
Right, but what we have today has been predicted by people seeing what was then (and even earlier).