Yeah sure, but it doesn't explain why. If I were to point out to anything, it would be monetization - starting from early ads ruining everything with pop-ups, through corporations gathering data, bad actors exploiting every little vulnerability to get some leverage, to users themselves aligning themselves with money; less and less people doing what they want just for fun, but rather adhering to corporate guidelines and ad strategies to get as much as they can out of this system. So much that other internet users who don't get anything out of it would also start behaving that way, maybe with hopes of getting a slice of the pie at some point. Maybe their next tweet will be a hit?

And in totality, it's not a bad thing - people that would probably have a boring job all their lives otherwise have built their wealth and connections, and the audience has been entertained. But money sucked the fun out of it.

I think the big change has been a shift to massive platforms for everything - so before you'd have hundreds of little vBulletin forums, IRC servers etc.

Nowadays the vBulletin forums have been replaced by subreddits, the IRC servers by Discord channels etc.

It's concentrated the people all in these few platforms which then gives the platform owners (and subreddit/channel moderators) an incredible amount of power and just made everything feel more homogenous and corporate.

Every single discussion around UI is now laden with "this isn't 100% optimized for user interaction" like there's some rulebook dictating exactly what you have to do for your website to be useable.

There's benefits to this, but the main con is that now everyone wants everything to look the same and the fun of the internet disappeared. Everything's a product, nothing's an experience.

And a little while before that, the desktop computer was a mystical thing that could take you to wonderlands. I was truly an intriguing machine, instead of just another home appliance.

I too am waiting for the pendulum to swing from clean corporate cookie cutterism back to dumb fun and I believe it's up to us to make that change. It probably won't happen on its own.

Some corners of the web are still real places: https://projectvv.de

As an aside - anyone else really dislike the typeface used on this page? I find it difficult to read.

“This has resulted in fractured attention, anxiety, and sadly, a diminished sense of place and belonging even with the connectivity the internet could offer.”

Do you think this might also be related to recent people’s estrangement from housing?

Housing seems to become a commodity as other things…

The article seems to repeat its thesis almost verbatim three times.

i love those days where we uses visit internet cafes to play games and enjoys the internet through searching in google.com

The thing that kills me is how serious it's gotten. Can't joke around anymore, not unless you're doing it ironically.

> In the 1990s and 2000s, the internet was a deeply physical thing, a location. One “arrived” at the internet with purpose and intention. It was an embodied experience.

As much as I think Google, Facebook etc... should be removed - that view shown in the article is also strange. It assumes that we all had "intentions", all of the time; and now that we don't have those intentions. That's not true.

For instance, searching for news was always one big thing with the old internet too. How old is the BBC website? I am sure it is old. Same with many other websites.

I remember when Wikipedia was founded in 2001: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Wikipedia

That is not necessarily the "old" internet as I would call it, since I refer there more to the 1990s, but still it was at the tail-end. Clearly people had a requirement or need to find articles and read up on staff, already before 2001. But you did not always necessarily have "intentions" all the time. Browser games were quite popular in the late 1990s. Also Java Applet games too. And of course commerce as well, though possibly not as convenient as amazon initially was (before succumbing to the prime slop). Amazon was launched in 1995.

Today's internet has various problems, largely created by, say, youtube owned by Google trying to get people "connected" on the platform 24/7. But we should not have nostalgia kick in too much when looking back at the old internet. There was no "embodied experience" - I would not even know what that should be. It may have been slower but you had broadband connection in the 1990s too, as I had that. I never used model dial-up (though, perhaps very early on ... but for the most part no, just broadband).