Exactly. The problem with the 1993 web was that it was usable by and appealed to only a very small part of the population. When people say stuff like this, it sounds to me like they're saying "I wish the web could go back to being a more exclusive club of which I was a member".
Maybe it wasn't that it was exclusive, but that it felt manageable and comprehensible. It felt like you could be aware of the breadth of it all (even if some was already out of reach). Now, that feels beyond impossible - we have every niche and every underworld.
I started as a web designer as images were being added to browsers and you could change the default grey background colour. Things are a bit different now...
They're right though. The Internet was better when it didn't have tons of people giving their unsolicited opinions and corporations coming in and having every single one of their actions be antithetical to the esprit of the WWW. It was better when people had to put in effort to find something and not take 30 seconds to select the first Google-approved search result.
