Okay, I'll clarify. Is it more
useful? Yeah, depending on what you want to do. But it's also a hell of a lot more dangerous. It's especially more dangerous if you're not careful.
+ Google Search is about as good now as it was back in 2007. I like that its interface has (largely) changed.
+ Google Maps with smooth scroll is nice, and its integration to 3d street view is nice too.
+ 1990s MapQuest without AJAX was nice though, in its own way. Even with Google's smooth scrolling, the only real thing Google Maps has going for it is IMO a cleaner display.
+ Wikipedia's generally better today than 10 years ago, yes.
+ Airline websites are a nightmare to use. Try getting an optimal route that doesn't use a single airline; and try getting that optimal route without ended up getting spammed or surcharged.
+ Youtube having virtually every song is nice for some people. It's not so nice for me. The songs on there are usually pretty boring or low quality audio or video or both. I pay for a music service (di.fm) for a reason.
+ Reddit/HN are pretty neat.
Okay, that's about where we agree (along with your comment on Facebook).
Let's look at some of the downsides.
- Personally, I find Reddit's method of linking to articles vs loading comments to be counter intuitive and confusing.
- Ebay is still about as trustworthy as you can spit.
- Amazon.com is among the crappiest web interfaces I've seen, and that's ignoring the company's history of abusing compensation and livelihoods of their employees and contractors. It's slow, extremely noisy (which contributes it to being slow), difficult to navigate, and I definitely never intend to buy from the marketplace specifically because I might as well have bought stuff from ebay.
- Just about every website has tracking up the wazoo. That contributes to a slower web experience both in bandwidth cost as well as hardware performance. Not everyone has a wonderfully new computer to handle all that. And if you're in America, chances are pretty good that your bandwidth is sub-par as well.
- Email. Why do we still have to deal with phishing and tracking? This is something that has been around pretty much since HTML was introduced to email.
- Instant Messaging. Slack and Discord are the newcomers but they're also somehow the best. They're popular because they get it "right"; it's super easy to text, talk, video, share files, share screens, etc. But they also get it wrong. That Electron UI has got to be the one of the biggest memory behemoths I've ever seen. Both are yet more walled gardens.
- The newer versions of Skype are absolutely dysfunctional compared to the older versions, MSN was better, AIM is (was) better, even IRC does file transfer better more reliably (although optional and clunkier).
- Mobile Apps. JFC banks going to mobile apps when the marketplaces are full of fake apps. This is absolutely not user friendly. Build on top of that the fact that phone numbers are super easy to fake or steal and you've got a clusterf!@# personal security nightmare just waiting to happen.
- Phones, operating systems, applications which track absolutely everything you do. It eats up my bandwidth, my system resources, and provides no visible benefit to me whatsoever. What happens when someone figures out how to track what I say to whom and when, and use that to "guide" me to buy things?
I could go on and on about more stuff but I don't care to at the moment.