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Unless you're talking even earlier, I did a lot of guessing at which download button was real and downloading pirated games in many parts from shitty download services that only let you download one part per hour and such. In the late 2000s when I was old enough to really use the internet
Yeah in the late 90s/early 2000s it wasn't that predatory in my recollection.
Early 2000s dial-up. It enshittified quite a bit even that decade. Back then you had like a Pentium 3 with Windows 98, XP just came out but was for people with very good machines. Netscape was still there but dying, Opera was paid and the free version had an ad banner but the browser was actually good and not just a Chromium reskin, but most people had Internet Explorer 4 or 5. DSL was new and expensive. There just wasn't all that much room to load ads, or even on screen: at 800x600, there's not a ton of pixels to put ads on. You'd look at your jpegs slowly becoming less blurry.
There was a time when even crack sites, it would just be like a list of cracks that just link to the exe and that was it. Sometimes there wasn't a page, just an FTP directory listing go find what you're looking for yourself. Of course there were popups and other crap but the web was just generally cleaner. Larger files were all P2P, it would already take you 15 minutes to download a single MP3 at those speeds.
The centralization and need for monetization for storage and bandwidth came a bit later.