in light of much discussion about the ways the internet has changed: be mindful of reactionary inclinations blooming within you. things might have gotten worse, but that doesnt mean the way things used to be was all that great either.
listen. club penguin had microtransactions for children in 2005. geocities stuck a stupid ass watermark on everyones sites and then blew itself up. if you think startups raising a bajillion dollars before earning even a cent of profit and then tanking is a recent affliction, i hate to burst your dotcom bubble, but um, look up the dotcom bubble? lol
i have been the 1 millionth visitor all my life. the internet has always been a bit shit. its ok. we can make a better internet without returning to the past.
I think one of my main memories of the 2000s internet was also a real "boys club" atmosphere- there were memes like "tits or GTFO" and "there are no girls on the internet" and basically the threat of sexualisation and cyberbullying from all these points on the internet and I remember the first major pushback against it being that wave of online feminism around 2013 and 2014, to which "gamergate" was an explosive reaction in response to.
I feel like we wouldn't have the internet as it exists today without those things happening- and I think that wave of feminism has allowed for way more of these female-orientated and gay spaces to foster on the internet, while the reaction to it has lead to the nerdy internet dividing into two sides
...before any of this though, the internet was a mostly horrible place to be. I said a while back "elon musk would've been considered smart on the old internet", because it was genuinely that fucking bad most of the time
