I'll start: it wasn't too long ago that one wasn't expected to pay out of one's coked up nose for programs (apps). One used to be able to buy a thing and then own the thing. Vacuum cleaners. Video games. Photoshops. Now one has to sign up for it, enter one's credit card info and fucking pay monthly for some harebrained "service."
And I blame all of you. Probably 9/10ths of you are on apple products and/or are locked into absolutely insane digital ecosystems and you all laid down and took it. All of you fucking libs. You took it, you normalized it, and fuck all of you.
Nah. 15 years ago was 2005, right before social media really took off, during the height of places like newgrounds. There were individual forums or IRC channels for any niche interest you could possibly want - things were a lot more federated. Corporations weren't viciously after every single crumb of metadata about you. Things weren't nearly as ad-driven. Now pretty much all the content on the web is on reddit, twitter, facebook, instagram, and maybe tumblr. It was easy to glue together a geocities page or cobble together some spaghetti php and have your own little corner of the internet.
It's good that more people are able to get online, of course. But the quality of the internet itself has been completely rotted by capitalism.
This is what I mean by nostalgia doing your head a fuck, because Friendster and Myspace were already huge in 2005. And let me tell you, adtech was already very much keeping track of your shit and cobbling together your interests. While it's true that Facebook has made that easier, there was already a massive infrastructure in place to get your eyeballs on ads at every step of the way. Remember at this time that the internet was still being driven by AOL, although it was already past its apex at this point, and it would provide a model for content engagement that's survived through today.
Adtech of the mid-2000s was childs play compared to now. Storage was still expensive enough that it wasn't seen as worth it to collect every single scrap of data and metadata about your online activity. You didn't have people tracking your gps position at all times. Companies weren't trying to put corporate spyware in peoples' homes.
Friendster and Myspace were big then, yes, but this was before the corporate push to add social network features to everything. Pseudonyms and not linking your real life to your online life were still highly encouraged (long before this practice was thoroughly stamped out by things like required facebook omniauth).
Do you think the internet is better now?
I don't really get into that one way or the other, to be honest. I don't think the internet is necessarily better or worse because I find the question to have so many parameters to it as to render it useless. If I catch myself thinking on something in the past and saying, ah, it was BETTER then, I'll stop myself because that's a destructive pattern of idealization.
Ah right, you can't say that anything used to be better because there's zero difference between good and bad things, how could I forget. The american space program didn't used to be better when it had funding. Unions didn't used to be better before they were defanged and disbanded.
That's a mischaracterization of what I said.
Just because something is nuanced doesn't mean it can't be "overall better" or "overall worse". The internet has gotten worse since 2005. Faster, but worse.
What's your criteria? From what I can see you miss forums, Newgrounds, and Limewire. I still got uTorrent, this space is just the new evolution of forums, and I was always on albinoblacksheep myself so I can't speak to whatever Newgrounds offered although there was a lot of shit-tier content on there too. So what's worse about it?
I miss the stuff that got squashed by big companies or DMCA or whatever, and that falls under my first bucket, but my two main problems with the internet now vs the internet 15 years ago:
Content: The vast majority of content is consolidated on just a small handful of heavily-astroturfed platforms. There are obvious problems with a half dozen or so private companies getting to control who sees what and what is or isn't allowed. Beyond the implications about being able to spread leftist propaganda or express dissent about the owners of said platforms, There are so many content creators these days making good forward-thinking content that got their start making content on some corner of the internet that doesn't exist anymore, or at least not at the same level, and there's the question of what sort of art and ideas we're missing out on because they're trying to get their start on a platform that's actively trying to suppress them. (I'm thinking specifically about the way that tik tok deprioritizes content from people who aren't attractive and wealthy-looking, but it's easy to make a case for any of the other major platforms doing the same thing.)
Privacy: When you visit a webpage, everything about you is recorded, your browser is fingerprinted, and a profile is built around you. Even if you don't ever interact with a service they can build a profile about you based on other people who have your phone number in their contacts, your email in their send history, etc. Thanks to smartphones, these companies have data on where you live, work, visit, when you sleep, when you're out of the house, how big your house is, where your bedroom is, etc. Right now, as far as we know, they're just using and selling that information for ad revenue, but the other implications - especially as we descend further and further into fascism - are terrifying.