I think you pretty much nailed it. Whilst I look back with a certain - undoubtedly rose-tinted - fondness on the days of chaotic and garish Geocities sites, and

I think you pretty much nailed it. Whilst I look back with a certain - undoubtedly rose-tinted - fondness on the days of chaotic and garish Geocities sites, and personal homepages with endless "under construction" images, the fact is that the people who built that sort of thing were very much in the minority relative to the general population. Now, a much larger portion of the general population is online and, whaddya know?, the internet is dominated by a few big players great at exploiting a large market who have catered their offerings towards that very large non-technical majority. The web has been ruined only in the sense that everything is ultimately ruined by over-popularity. It's certainly a shame, but is it really a surprise? What I am quite enjoying nowadays is the resurgence of a more creative side to the web amongst people beginning to react against the dominance of social media sites. The pendulum always swings the other way eventually.