Ask HN: Why do you think the web of the noughties was better than it is now?
I think the internet peaked in about 2008. I pick that year because by then, everything I care about worked fine: online banking, online shopping that wasn't mostly just Amazon, newspapers and magazines, and that summer, I watched the 2008 Beijing Olympics over a relatively slow network link (I think a 2 Mbps DSL line or something like that), so streaming video worked fine by then. I also learned a ton of stuff from various bloggers after the 2008 financial crisis. And Netflix was still DVD by mail, which I liked a lot better than the Netflix of today.
Not easy to think of things that have actually gotten better since then. Many of the stores I used to shop at have been driven out of business by Amazon and what's left of the blogosphere of the time has migrated to things like Medium and Substack, which I guess is more convenient (and monetizable) for writers, but is more annoying for readers.
Newspapers and magazines mostly still work fine but it's hard to think of a way in which they're actually better, they just haven't gotten very much worse.
> I think the internet peaked in about 2008.
Yeah, that seems about right. I would have said the peak was earlier, but until the web started really declining in earnest, the quality was roughly constant so we're talking relatively minor differences that far back.
The vast majority of the web now is manipulative, sterile, corporate, surveillance-ridden and aimed at making money. The web that has passed was more about people.