What these people are remembering is when the web was small and dorks-only. Now it is huge and full of normies of all kinds, including every shade of commercialism and fraud.
It's disgusting how bad its gotten. It's assuredly partially nostalgia, but I think also partially truth, but the internet of my younger years I remember as being filled with labors of love, pasionately created content most places you look. Now it's difficult to find much that isn't lowest common denominator pandering or essentially white noise.
The other thing they're missing is that it was also rife with child porn and snuff videos.
I too have nostalgia for the old days of the internet where there were lots of niche sites about specialist interests and things were easier to find, but I don't think the internet was ever really an idyllic garden of rational discourse. It was from nearly the beginning a manifestation of humanity's id.
"Now it just seems like every website online is trying to steal and sell your data."
I remember the days before the Morris Worm, the days before we were all drowning in malware, before you had to worry about your bank account being hacked in to, before your personal data stood a good chance of being leaked, stolen, or held for ransom, before the corporate/government gold rush for profit, spying, and control. Spam and the occasional troll seemed to be about the worst one could encounter back then.
Maybe I'm just remembering the past through rose-colored nostalgia glasses, but it seemed back in those days the internet was a mostly positive place -- or at least not a hostile one where you had to constantly watch your back and pretend to be who you weren't lest records of your past come back to haunt you.
Overnight popularity was the best thing and the worst thing to happen the internet. Perhaps if its growth wasn't so explosive, maybe we could have had time to deal with all the crap.
Back in those days we used to laugh at how clueless the corporations and governments were about the net, about how they'd never be able to control it. Well, now they've got us all by the balls.
> I'd imagine since then awareness has risen massively, so if anything people would likely be more concerned today.
It's sadly the opposite; It's so normalized that a whole generation was born into it and don't even see anything wrong about it.
All a lot of them see is how Google is giving them "free services" and how Facebook allows them to make "free friends", and then they declare; That's the web, and that's how the web has always been and how it should be.
And who can blame them; They never knew any other web than the glorified digital mall [0] it has mostly become.
When reporters on Twitter freak out about the trolls on 4chan like it's some disease infecting our precious wholesome web, I can't help but remember (through my biased lenses of course) when most of the web (that I visited) looked like 4chan. What the folks who think the web is 'degrading' don't seem to realize is how much of a wild west it used to be, and how much corporations have tried to (and somewhat succeeded in) sanitizing it.
Funny how most of us who grew up on the internet that included crap like Ogrish, Bumfights, hardcore porn ads, Newgrounds, hentai, etc., turned into everyday citizens rather than low-lifes and criminals.
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