I'll concede the ratio of crap:good might not have changed, but I feel the point being made is the nature of the crap has changed to be louder. Also, the time

I'll concede the ratio of crap:good might not have changed, but I feel the point being made is the nature of the crap has changed to be louder. Also, the time spent across the web has changed as do-it-all companies like Google or Amazon came along: why go find 5 different perfect services, when Google has an alright implementation of them? Sure, you can say "well just discipline yourself to go look at it", but like I said, that's not how human nature/addiction work. And even if I as an individual am some sort of dopamine-free superhuman immune to manipulation (I'm not) the average human isn't, so this means the average conversation about the web is more focused on fewer centralised services, as that's what people spend more of their time on. All of this makes it a lot harder to "just go and browse some personal websites" compared to the early internet. I agree with you that there are many services on the web that weren't around before, and lots of things we could do now that we couldn't before. But that's not the point of the post, the point is specifically saying they preferred the compromise of personal, slightly rustier, less featureful web, compared to the modern, sterile, polished, depersonalised web. > there is nothing to gatekeep about the early internet, it was shit compared to what we have today. That's your opinion, and the upvotes and frequency of these posts suggests it's an unpopular (although still valid!) opinion. It's clearly not a fact though. You know there are also an increasing amount of people who had smartphones who now have dumb phones? It's not unheard of for people to want to step back in preference of simplicity.