To start.. it was slow. Your modern gigabit internet can download a 700 megabyte file in 6 seconds; on a good dialup link that would take 30 hours. Videos for porn weren't an option -- just loading a single image could mean waiting for a full minute or two. Sometimes you'd get a JPEG that would load the entire (very fuzzy) image at first and then it would progressively become sharper, other times you'd watch the image load from top to bottom, one line of pixels at a time.

Browsers didn't have tabs, and the more browser windows you had open the slower your computer would go. All it took was one page throwing in a bunch of silly effects (like animated snow falling on the screen while you try to read, or an animated cat that follows your mouse cursor to pounce on it, etc) and it would take down all of the other browser windows you had open.

Uncensored was definitely one way of putting it. There were several "file sharing" systems, all basically completely un-moderated. After two weeks of downloading The Matrix it may turn out to actually be a collection of snuff films of people being decapitated (no joke or exaggeration - the Tukhchar massacre during the war in Dagestan was brutal). You could wait all day on a download of some song only to find it's the Barney theme music but saved with the filename "Metallica - Enter Sandman.mp3"

BUT, that said, there were a lot of forums and those where moderated by the owners who where trying to cultivate their own community. You can still find some of these, SomethingAwful.com and Metafilter.com are still kicking. I haven't looked at SA in ages, but Metafilter remains a lovely little community in the modern era. Metafilter also charges a single $5 fee to sign up (which is required to post), which I think really, really helps keep down the number of trolls and bots.

Search engines didn't really exist for some time. Yahoo was one of the first, but even Yahoo started as a manually cultivated list of sites. So you wouldn't search for "cheesecake recipe" but you'd look at Yahoo's list of recipe sites and browse through them looking for cheesecake. When it first came out Google was a massive game changer.

And if you go to pre-"web" days there wasn't even websites: Usenet / NNTP was basically just one big huge text-only forum. You would load up rec.food.baking or rec.food.cooking to read or discuss. There wasn't any moderation -- if somebody was being a shithead all you could do is block them on your side and ignore them. And the newsgroup naming scheme could be so inconsistent - there was comp.lang.python for Python programming discussion, but C/++ learners had alt.comp.lang.learn.c-c++.

I think that, ultimately, the largest single change has been the consolidation. Nowadays people can spend nearly all of their time just on a handful of sites like Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc. You could install the "StumbleUpon" browser extension and just spend all day finding new websites that other people thought interesting enough to submit to the index. We had entire websites/forums dedicated to niche interests like specific models of a car or motorcycle.

It was better in some ways, worse in others. You can still get a feel for it though: I genuinely recommend looking at MetaFilter and trying to explore the parts of the internet that aren't part of the consolidated corporate blob of Facebook / Threads / Twitter / etc.