3 ms·

I'd extend the sweet spot to 2010ish. The commercialization of the '00s didn't screw things nearly as badly as the arothighmization of engagement we've seen si

• fouc 5y ago
  2010ish sounds right to me, APIs used to be widely available and accessible, which still left a way for people to have control over how they used the internet. But maybe the API was ultimately a trap. A la "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish". Offer an API to encourage adoption, and then start restricting it later. Which got us to leave our federated platforms with open protocols and enter closed silos.
• handrous 5y ago
  Google started to go to shit around '08 or '09, allowing their results to be taken over by ad-spammers and a handful of top sites. At the same time, that's about when they adjusted search to make it extremely hard to narrow in on something obscure, even if you know for a fact it's there (this used to be a thing one could reliably do, with some guesswork about word and phrase rarity in the target page and in link text pointing at the target page).