People used to share videos on forums by passing around WMV files. Eugh.
Fortunately, they weren't as difficult to download as they would be today, since not many places required stupid shit like registration and javascript to download a file.
There used to be actual free website hosts where you could host whatever pages you like (arbitrary HTML) rather than today's services that only host blogs or images or whatever. You could host whatever you wanted there. No dynamic content (server-side scripting), but there was hardly any such thing anyway. It was pretty nice. They'd inject ads into the page (often just tacking something on at the end, after the </html> - it works, who cares if it's correct) and often people would employ equally hackish methods to remove them (put a <title> at the very end of your page and use Javascript to set the title).
People also often used them as file/image hosts, but they'd deny external linking for certain extensions - so you'd see images with .txt extension and instructions to download a file and change the extension from .txt to .zip or what have you.
ANIMATED GIFS AND BLINKING MARQUEES EVERYWHERE WITH EMBEDDED MIDIS AAAAAGGGHHH
You'd see the same goofy GIFs all over the place. They liked the kind where it looked like there was a hole in the page with gears or sometimes circuits showing, and pulsating bullet points.
Not a lot of structure. You didn't have blogs and forums and galleries so much as just pages full of random information about some particular subject with images strewn about here and there.
Flaming text, and static glowing text with an IE filter.
AOL chat rooms, which tended to be nothing but a flood of broken HTML from 200 spambots at once in all different fonts, sizes and colours.
Yeah, there were some nice things, and then some ugly things.

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