(1) User-authored experience (2) Everyone being on the same team
Tim Berners-Lee imagined the web browser and web server running together in a single package. The same person who was observing other people's pages was also capable to do anything Facebook or Google could do, for good or for ill. And weirdly enough, little bits of the politeness that came along with that freedom -- robots.txt for example -- still survive, somehow, to the modern day, heartbreaking in their innocence next to the mutated horror that is the modern internet's grim realpolitik, yet still around.
Myspace and Geocities have nostalgia factor today because they carried over a little piece of an era now long forgotten, the ability to make your page weird and misshapen. There was no person examine the experience your page conveyed, who could decide it was horrifying and they didn't want their brand associated with it. Make music play that everyone hates every time they visit your page? Figure out a way to craft a link so everyone on earth becomes your friend? Knock yourself out, kid. It was the last little gasp of free control that many people on the modern internet have never experienced, before it was fully silenced in favor of CSS that was fully crafted by a professional, and all your stuff HTML-sanitized before it could be displayed.
Posting to alt.hackers used to be forbidden to everyone; in order to post that you had to know how to get around the permissions.
You used to put your email address into anonymous ftp as the password, not because anyone would verify what you typed, but just to help the server operator keep tabs on who was using their site for their own curiosity.
Everyone was on the same team.
The very first person who sent an internet spam message got called up and yelled at by someone in the Air Force, who told him to knock it the fuck off because the network wasn't for that.