From what I gather from Oblomovka[1] [and based on my own memory of this period]:

It was a place where the primary early users of the Internet did not frequent, but could be something an ordinary person would be exposed to out of necessity. (Think, maybe some service that lets one send faxes via email; notably you'd need to create an account and spend money.) But, at some point, this reversed, and ordinary use cases dominate - online banking, e-commerce, school - such that even finding the original sort of content that comprised most of the Internet can be very difficult.[2]

As an example, cooking recipe websites in the early Internet contained cooking recipes - no stories, no SEO optimization - and then sometimes at the bottom of the page participated in some sort of link exchange with other recipe websites and perhaps a page hit counter. This was an Internet for the technologist, and one might find their way there from a BBS, IRC, email, word of mouth, or early search engines that naively indexed keywords, or you know, by surfing a webring. These sites seldom existed for any sort of commercial gain and were often a hobby project.

Today you could reasonably expect to find your way to a cooking recipe site via a search engine where each recipe has been SEO optimized with a nonsense story and you might be prompted to log in with Google or create an account to view the actual recipe. The target audience are the people who are the norm and would have been those visiting the hinternet two decades ago, out of necessity [e.g., pay to send a fax via email], but today they are just normal people performing normal activities.

Something like today's network of sites two decades ago would be hinterlands by the blog's definition - not frequented[2]. Today, it is the norm.

1. two competing definitions, circa 2001-03: https://www.oblomovka.com/wp/2003/04/16/hinternet-fallout/

2. it's been decided to call this sort of genuine content "Small Web" https://kagi.com/smallweb

X. the competing definition of hinternet, which I also like (search "hinternet"): http://thegestalt.org/simon/cluetrain.html