the discordification of wikis, the proliferation of javascript webapps, the rise of single page apps, and everything else you hate about the Modern Web is not because Companies Tricked Users into liking those things. it is because Users genuinely prefer that state of affairs. you wanted the web to do more things and so the web got more complicated.
a lot of the time i see culture vs technology issues when it boils down to what makes people vocal about things and what people actually use. that is to say i see discourse and most people keep doing the thing where since the culture and the technology are so interrelated it's hard to separate and then try to tackle cultural problems solely on the basis of the medium they're on (without considering other concerns and vice versa)
it's not entirely incorrect considering for example how much manipulation and dark patterns are prevalent on websites and monetization and the consolidation of tech corp power but when i see someone say "i'd like twitter without the twitter" i just read it as "i like the social media but i could do without the culture of it. it's useful but i don't want to deal with the massive complexity of issues being there entails"
and well what culture would you want? then web 1.0 comes up, and "oh could i somehow have modern web but with that early culture?" we may not actually like going back to web 1.0 tech but are instead perhaps nostalgic for the experience and culture. and maybe that's kind of what cohost has in part been facilitating as an alternative
but then cohost does have a similar issue with sometimes not being palatable to people who don't know css or are good with computers because that's what gets shared a lot and comes across as the culture here. even though it's likely most posts don't include anything with those.
(i feel like i should point at mastodon and say there's a compelling argument to be made about trying to force a culture entirely through the medium and ending up with something more complicated and with different problems because of people being people)
personally, i think most of the modern web actually is easier to use for a majority of people. there's a lot of reasonable criticisms to be made about it where it's not the most sensible or actually accessible, but i understand it's easier for most people to just create and use with it for their needs. users choose what they want, the community ends up doing what's great for it!
but also it has also made it very hard for some individuals outside of that community who have varying issues and no alternative. a lot of the modern web can be very unfriendly to old machines and people with limited data budgets. access and connection becomes gated through if you can open up discord or some other webapp, and looking for some piece of information becomes if you're patient enough to load through various youtube videos to see if one's actually useful.
the old internet was no different in having similar issues of finding things and digital inequality (broken links! really dead-end forum posts! having to register for a forum just to read one post you wanted which was the most annoying!) but it just feels like the differences are becoming more pronounced for some but still invisible for the majority of others.
and hey, webp is great for servers, fine with most users, and really annoying for the smaller portion of individuals who have little support for what they need so they have to deal with the complexity of their case themselves, whether it's because of the format itself or their issues in having to deal with the format without alternative, especially when they're used to it not being a problem before. feels like how a lot of foss alternatives get started.
maybe it's just with things changing, it's not really the tech itself but that it's becoming more an effort to be able to even have alternatives. it's like video guides for me, because i do not prefer video guides even though it has been like a decade but i make do with them. even though most of the time i would like organized text instead and then maybe i'll watch the video. (people who post their video transcripts are the best. thank you people who include video summaries and post video transcripts.)
now youtube is at least getting better to skim because of automatic text transcripts and sections/chapters things that the creator doesn't need to spend too much effort on. some things can get better. and a lot of valid concerns with other things getting worse.
