This site has the vaporwave neon and the intentionally shitty gifs (like the Under Construction one that used to be the landing page). The website for r/SubredditDrama is intentionally disastrous (it’s rdrama.net, but be warned it’s even more full of brainworms than the subreddit). A lot of sites will use chan or PhpBb boards. Even the plug-and-play Reddit alternatives have universally opted for the “old” Reddit style combined with whatever nightmarishly boomer custom CSS their ancestor community used to have.
Maybe this point seems obvious, but I think there’s probably more to it than “current Internet sucks and the old internet looks good by comparison”
Preach it. Social media has been a boon to surveillance.
It’s its primary function. Social media monopolies exist in a symbiotic relationship with intelligence agencies worldwide. I’m pretty sure that if this wasn’t the case, their contradictions would have heightened already and they would have been heavily regulated