Probably asking for people to be educated on the difference as to what they’ve missed out from the internet back then compared to today. I think I have a good perspective since I’m one of the few out there who’ve been around the internet for three of its decades and have seen it develop into what it became.
For one thing, the internet wasn’t reliant on Cloudflare and it was fine. Try to imagine an internet, where you weren’t prompted by a stupid Cloudflare verification check that has a 50/50 chance of it failing. Captcha did exist back then but was no where near as annoying as it’s been designed to now. The only thing between you and getting into your account was a password. Nothing else. No stupid verification codes having to be sent to your phone or whatever else.
And it was fine.
Social Media was tamed. If we could only go back to where it was just Reddit, Facebook and MySpace, then things would be fine. Because that was all that we needed. Now we just have too many and it’s all saturated. Plus the versions of all of those platforms were at their best back then, no where near their broken malformed selves now.
The internet used to be a library. You could visit where and when you want, browsing information relatively undisturbed.
Now; every corner of the internet is trying to sell you something, with many of them stealing your information in an attempt to leverage it against you to coerce or even force you to pay up.
I miss when an adblocker was a foreign concept, because it used to be a solution in search of a problem. Now ads are so invasive and overwhelming that browsing without blocking them is unbearable - if you can even browse without having to signup and subscribe to yet another ‘service’.
I read this here recently - used to be a library, now it’s a store.