[OwlsParlay]

I don't think it was that different on the internet per se, but SE itself was relatively young at that point and more lax with its own rules. This early period is when you also had funny answers for bad questions, like using RegEx to parse HTML.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open...

[mcv]

I also recall answers solving simple problems with an overuse of jQuery. Some answers got comments "not enough jQuery".