[dada78641]

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.