I think the author is conflating technology with people. To me, this is a natural effect of getting everyone online. In the beginning the web was 'nice', beca

I think the author is conflating technology with people. To me, this is a natural effect of getting everyone online. In the beginning the web was 'nice', because only a certain kind of people had access and interest in publishing content. Geeks, programmers, scientists, students, etc. The place felt more 'elitist' because it was. We worshiped those who fell asleep coding in a basement, fueling on left over pizza and coffee, so that they could give that software away to us all for free as 'open source'. Those were the people building the early internet and then there was the rest of the people who were not yet online - on TV, on the streets, government, etc. But the people building the internet were building it for the people not yet online. As soon as hardware got cheap enough for everyone to afford it and software got 'simple' enough for everyone to use it, the masses flowed, bringing with them all the 'bad stuff' from the offline world times 100. They also brought some 'good stuff' too, like better visual designs, fonts, icons, images and videos, online payments.. but we're focusing on the bad now, so let's ignore the good for now. Trolls, criminals, swindlers, script kiddies, everyone was welcome and so the flood dissolved and even reshaped the original 'elite' and now every kid wants to start a startup and become a billionaire. But whenever I think that 'the old Internet was better', I keep reminding myself that, hey, 'the old Internet' is still here and it's alive and kicking, nobody forces me to go to the sites I don't like (well, in fact, I'm often forced to interact with terrible UX of utility companies or airlines). There's a lot of noise, sure, but it's not that hard to access the 'good internet' if you really want to. Maybe there's something else at play, maybe the dopamine hits less after all these years, maybe we're getting older and are just nostalgic about something we used to enjoy a lot more when we were younger.