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Ask HN: Why do you think the web of the noughties was better than it is now?
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Re: Ask HN: Why do you think the web of the noughties was better than it is now?
#2[dead]
Re: Ask HN: Why do you think the web of the noughties was better than it is now?
#3The vast majority of the web now is manipulative, sterile, corporate, surveillance-ridden and aimed at making money. The web that has passed was more about people.
Re: Ask HN: Why do you think the web of the noughties was better than it is now?
#4I think the internet peaked in about 2008. I pick that year because by then, everything I care about worked fine: online banking, online shopping that wasn't mostly just Amazon, newspapers and magazines, and that summer, I watched the 2008 Beijing Olympics over a relatively slow network link (I think a 2 Mbps DSL line or something like that), so streaming video worked fine by then. I also learned a ton of stuff from various bloggers after the 2008 financial crisis. And Netflix was still DVD by mail, which I liked a lot better than the Netflix of today.
Not easy to think of things that have actually gotten better since then. Many of the stores I used to shop at have been driven out of business by Amazon and what's left of the blogosphere of the time has migrated to things like Medium and Substack, which I guess is more convenient (and monetizable) for writers, but is more annoying for readers.
Newspapers and magazines mostly still work fine but it's hard to think of a way in which they're actually better, they just haven't gotten very much worse.
Re: Ask HN: Why do you think the web of the noughties was better than it is now?
#5I think the internet peaked in about 2008. I pick that year because by then, everything I care about worked fine: online banking, online shopping that wasn't mostly just Amazon, newspapers and magazines, and that summer, I watched the 2008 Beijing Olympics over a relatively slow network link (I think a 2 Mbps DSL line or something like that), so streaming video worked fine by then. I also learned a ton of stuff from…
> I think the internet peaked in about 2008.
Yeah, that seems about right. I would have said the peak was earlier, but until the web started really declining in earnest, the quality was roughly constant so we're talking relatively minor differences that far back.