Bad maps of 1994

I honestly don't think there is anything that better explains it aside from that. Or, more specifically, that is just a general statement that encompasses everything - the experience of the level authors, the quality of available tools, modding tricks yet to be discovered - all these take time. Two additional factors are the (in)existence of limit-removing and feature-enhancing source ports and the amount of accumulated content - as it increases, the good stuff tends to stand out among the bad and mediocre, and, in turn, raises the bar of what people consider good/acceptable to share.

The opening posts fucking bleeds toxicity all over the place, I can't pinpoint it to any single word but it smells flamebait.

In 1994, we (the family I am part of) heard of no fucking Internet. In mid 2000s, I finally had the Internet connection which was through the stationary phone line and a modem, and I was buying cards that granted a few hours of access and thus effectively paying for every second of connection. Picking a phone disrupted Internet connection, I also had no mobile phone at the time. I think I first got cable internet in 2008, now the pay was per Mb rather than per hour. I don't remember when I first got a mobile phone, though, but it was either the end 2000s or the beginning of 2010s.

So, perhaps English-speaking world had a bit better situation with the Internet, but I get it was still a luxury to many, so you just made something you can run, and it was a fucking novelty, like creating your own fucking world, and by sharing it you shared the joy you had when that realization happened. The directive to make it enjoyable to someone else simply didn't exist - the joy was imprinted in your mind when you made a map rather than in the result itself. The result was the fact that you made the map, not the kind of a map it was. I don't know if these words may help you understand but it is very easy to empathise with those people. It was not the feedback, there was no metric to satisfy - it was the "ability to create and breathe a new world into existence", and sharing was like on like leaving a note "VigilantDoomer was here" on some miniscule isolated planet which is later gets randomly visited by another person with no other human in vicinity, and that person discovering it.

Or at least that how it felt to me when I was watching porn pictures on the Internet when I was underage and the internet was effectively paid per second (that modem connection over a wired phone I wrote above). When I first got the internet, the father was constantly behind my shoulder, but later I was left to my own means of using internet, and so I began to look at the stuff that had nothing to do with education. Making a doom map in 1994 may have been triggering a similar kind of feeling. Today's internet is just cheap and without intimacy - there is plenty of porn, but the intimacy is not there anymore. Going on the internet today is like going naked in the crowd of naked people, every day, all the time, never putting on the dress and it hardly matters anymore.

Actually I just realized the toxicity of the opening post is actually quite simply - an accusation leveled at people who have since moved on with life, as if these fucking people owed you anything. [EDITED Ok, this thread actually provokes hard feelings in me, time to move on as well.]

That's a good point, a seemingly an obvious one that I didn't even think about. That the existence of these wads, despite being on the internet, archived for users to download, that doesn't necessarily mean they were made for me. It could be that the user was just excited about the prospect of easily creating a 3D space that you can move virtually within. An examination of the tools and the possibilities maybe. The prospect of making it good was a thought that came with the evolution in Doom's popularity, not at it's inception.

It may even have just been the excitement of knowing that you can communicate to someone far away using media. Like a message in a bottle, swept away by the ocean.

Say what you want, but playing tons of "bad" 1994 wads in early '10s is easily one of the most enjoyable experiences I ever had with Doom, and I think a big reason for this is exactly what vigilantdoomer said: they weren't necessarily made to be enjoyed by someone else. What this means to me is that loading up a 1994 wad is like landing on an alien planet where everyone speaks a different language and nobody is interested in helping you. Suddenly you're in a strange and hostile environment, the rules you're used to don't apply anymore, and noone is going to explain them. You just have to go and figure shit out on your own. For a fan of exploration it's like the coolest feeling imaginable, and one that's virtually nonexistent outside of very old "bad" wads. I feel like I never fully "recovered" from that dive into the unknown: I try different "good" wads and other games, but no matter where I look there is always this handholding aspect in level design that's so obvious to me now.

Too much negativity towards 40oz here in my opinion. It's perfectly normal to marvel at the staggering technical incompetence of 1994 wads by modern standards. I often can't help but think the same about a lot of ancient art, for example, which had like no perspective, featured comical faces that seem completely out of place, etc. These artists had such a different mindset that unless you study history to some extent, you just wanna ask: were they fucking blind? In 2005, when a few people began recovering and uploading 1994 wads to the archive regardless of quality, they actually got a symbolic "worst wad" Cacoward, so it's not like trashing them to the ground is something new. In 2014 I also expressed my bewilderment about them in this thread: www.doomworld.com/forum/topic/68669-why-are-there-so-many-unmarked-doors-in-1994-wads/ Relax peeps!

BIG DICK NIGGA, there is stark contrast between first and second post by 40oz, the second one is not toxic, also I specifically meant post and not the person.

I said before that I can't pinpoint it to certain words but actually I can. What is wrong is that the original post declares constraints which themselves should be called into question, and it uses value-laden language to define these constraints.
1. "In 1994, theres plenty bad maps that are -- plain and simple -- not worth your time for any reason."
Notice the language "plain and simple", "not worth your time for any reason". First is assertion "this is self-evident, can't be disputed", second is "you feel/think the way I tell you you feel/think". Like in Nineteen Eighy-Four, where O'Brien explains how the mode of though of authority (those in the power) evolved over time, from "Thou shall", to "You must", to "You are", where counter-point becomes not just forbidden, but inexpressible.
2. "old doom wads were such junk", "check none of the boxes" - once again, the original poster's opinion, but not mine. There was a thread on Doomworld which was meant for people who would be interested in playtesting wads other people make before they are posted public, and there was one person who told he wants only playtest the very first maps people make, as they don't subscribe to any standards and often feature very original things.
3. "Did the novelty of creating a custom FPS level from scratch override the necessity to actually make it good?"
Who declared there was such necessity at the time in first place? The entire paragraph from which I taken this assumes those people struggled to do good, but failed miserably at their own goals... but I think those people may have had other goals to begin with, and not necessarily failed them.
4. Implied (through value-laden language) but not explicitly written, is that the one who reads this is expected to like modern maps more than 1994 maps. But what if I actually consider modern maps to be not worth my time? Note that I said mine, not yours.

I also remember the joy of making a small unbalanced Doom I monster slaughtermap with no exit (and the layout was as simple as it can be, a square box with a corridor attached, with monsters entering the box from the corridor at faster rate than you can kill them), which I played for hours non-stop day after day, and I can tell you I never had such joy playing any maps made by anyone else, nor have I spent so much time playing any single wad/mod like that except for maybe Brutal Doom. I kept adding more and more monsters until I could survive maybe 2 in 400 attempts (and who knows, may be even less), and I would just keep trying to beat that over and over again. I didn't release it, though, but just as a point - I have more time playing my own unfinished and very raw stuff than those modern maps.

Anyway, I appeciate 40oz actually took time to understand my point, and succeeded at it.

I get the feeling, and I could be full of it, that one of the more popular methods of distribution was through CDs with thousands of levels. Some of which were just found off the internet, and some of which were made for those compilations. The ones made for the compilations usually weren't very good. Might have been about quantity over quality.