>>7766537
>On top of this, I think the culture of just exploring the internet, and looking at different websites, has kind of disappeared. People only like sticking to what they know these days.
This never disappeared. It was ALWAYS a minority. What happened is that you are now more likely to meet people from other walks of life online.
It used to be that people would celebrate 2000 hits on your website as a giant milestone. Now 2000 FOLLOWERS is some kind of rookie numbers.

>>7766662
>how tf do people even set up their own webcomic pages like when people said it was like decades ago?
>>7766689
>From my understanding, the pay and the chances of getting paid on webtoon are just too low, so it's not worth putting your work on that.
Most webcomics used to work off of donations. They were passion projects, not moneymaker ventures. They frequently went on hiatus or died because the creator had no time to keep making strips. Some had a donation button and a few had ads (and the ad revinue was never that big). It was only a handful of bigger ones, mostly in the later years, that managed to get some form of monetary "success", typically via releasing a print version. Megatokyo, Van Von Hunter, and Spinerette come to mind. And that's ones with some semblence of story. Remember that PAX is actually a convention that exists because of Penny Arcade. The fucking name stands for Penny Arcade Expo. The only other webcomic I can think of that has had conventions is Homestuck. Two out of a giant sea.

Everyone in the early internet was a goddamn weirdo and often some kind of social outcast. It's why it was so interesting. People would WILLINGLY burn money on hardware, spend time learning how to and coding their websites with shitty tools, draw using crappy primitive digital art software or scan and adjust it with the same, and pay to host their shit to share with others all for free. They made the choice to do this INSTEAD of other things with their time.