The internet has become soulless and I hate it
What ruined the web is one word: monetization.
Before it was used for fun, people weren’t looking at it as a source of income, unlike now, take YouTube for example, in ~2010 it was those amateur captured videos where people are just happy they can share some clips with the world, right now, you have “content creators” with their soulless faces and setup, all have the same LED setup, thumbnails with reaction-face pics, shilling and a lot of it, try hards on everything from the tune of how they speak all the way to staged conversations, why? Monetizing the contents. Remove the monetization factor and you will see how it will fix 80% of the issue, following pareto chart method where 80% of the issues can be solved by fixing the 20% cause.
Just have a look at Mmm [1] or Kinopio [2] to brighten up your mood.
Gopher and FTP servers were fairly soulless as well, so I guess this is just a bit of a nostalgic perspective issue.
Just ignore the large websites, as you would ignore tabloids or commercial television. It is actually quite easy to learn that if something is massively popular, it will probably be so because of competitive marketing tricks, and not because there is something inherently interesting there.
"i was able to experience some of it during my first steps on the internet back in 2009"
Soo... 14 years ago? It was a magical experience in 2009? When Facebook existed for 5 years already?
The majority of users now are on the net to use products that have a practical function they want. Early net users were on the net because they could express their creativity by creating something or were part of a small community that filled a need for them. A relative small audience compare to the audience size today. Any products that fills the need for the largest audience becomes very superficial. We are seeing that with today's internet.
Discussions went from helpful and a personals experiences, to insulting and criticizing people. Not friendly or fun.
Ive been putting my own tastes and personality into building GloryWager.com but I wouldn't say it's anything special or 90s-esque
I do long for the old web, sometimes I think it's just best to build a new one. But the costs are astronomical.
Funny how the article was published on one of the most esthetically neutral website I have ever seen.