i'm not oblivious to the improvements, but the nostalgia goggles always forget a lot of basic experiences.
being disconnected from dialup because someone picked up a phone, being punted from a chatroom with racist shit because rate limits and a moderation staff don't meaningfully exist. File sharing where the main effort is to rename malicious executable into whatever the newest Britney Spears album is called for mass distribution. the pop-up wars, a new remote code exploit weekly..
I could keep going with the bad parts forever, but my point is that when people talk about geocities and napster they forget about what a shitshow the rest of computing was for the majority; this didn't stop them from partaking -- it was still amazing , but it was the Wild West in a lot more ways than it even is today, and I say that as someone who still views the net in that regard.
It's good to take off the nostalgia glasses and to be honest about how things were far from perfect in the past, but I feel like people sometimes overcompensate when doing so. Frankly, things weren't that bad most of the time.
I don't know what chatrooms you were in, but I've been on IRC for many years and there were always plenty of moderators. And if there weren't, people would just move on someplace else. It's not like the concept of moderation hadn't been invented yet. File sharing might actually have been easier in the past than today due to DCC transfers and fserves on IRC (and torrents already existed since the early 2000s). Sure there were pitfalls, especially on networks like Kazaa, but you can't really expect to be pirating content on the open internet and not have some basic smarts to avoid getting taken advantage of. It's not like that's meaningfully different today.
Either way, I think it's sort of beside the point. Nobody is denying that a lot of things have vastly improved today, especially in QOL -- it should be better, as we've had years to develop the tech -- but the point is that the internet has also gotten extremely commercialized, filled with spam and low quality generated content, and neutered to the point where individuality has mostly been lost.
You can talk all day long about how the modern internet is technically far superior to the old internet, and how we don't have dialup anymore -- sure, I get that, and you're right. But this article is about how the joy of being part of a great new frontier has been lost. Everything is owned by some big faceless company now, everything is being curated according to some algorithm designed to maximize profit, and you're not allowed to touch anything anymore. That's a shame! And we can legitimately look back and say it wasn't always like this.
