alt Hacker NewsThis is going to come off glib, but I don't think you can believe any of this having actually used the Internet of 1999. As is so often the case, there are lots of real annoyances and offenses behind the sentiment, but still, the Internet of 2026 is vastly better than that of 1999. The amount of things you're just one quick search away from right now would break the brains of a 1999 netizen. We were still required to buy paper books for all sorts of routine knowledge work tasks.
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Different people have different tastes, or balance the good and the bad of the different eras differently.
Personally, I prefer the Internet of the 1990's. Part of that was the novelty and excitement. That led to a lot more experimentation. Part of that was the accessibility of the information that did exist. There was less wading through crap to simply find something, and the useless stuff that did exist tended to be easy to detect. (A lot of it was simply: I have an ambitious idea for a website but, Under Construction!) Most of all, the diversity was easier to access.
Today's Internet is much more polished and much more is available. Yet a lot of it is also siloed behind accounts, paywalls, or is a profit project rather than a passion project. That's not to say there is anything wrong with profiting off of good work, but there is a lot of people putting up low quality junk either because they don't realize how much effort is involved or because they are trying to make a quick buck.
Dunno. The internet was definitely smaller, but it was also largely uncorrupted, so you could literally just email a random university professor or an industry expert and get answers to dumb questions.
And today, if you want to learn something the right way, you probably still should buy a book (or, I guess, pirate an ebook). I don't think you can really learn much from YouTube influencers and the like.