> And the internet used to be more work to experience. Today, it’s more work to avoid.
Since the author likes analogies, I'll add mine: the internet now has become roads, bridges, towns. The internet used to be forests, rivers to ford, camps.
There used to be an exploration-aspect to the internet, not sure what you would find if you took this trail or that one. Now we all seem to travel the few, well-worn roads to the same handful of destinations.
I do like the internet-as-reference-book internet where I can quickly solve a programming problem that is stymieing me. I would keep Wikipedia, the Internet Archive, Stack Overflow.
I recently googled something like "modal fabric weave diagram".
On my phone I was given five places to buy modal clothing and a message that "x other similar results have been omitted".
I persisted, I rephrased. I was asked if I was a robot, I clicked on CAPTCHAs, and now Google is willing to give me some results that are relevant to textile design but I still haven't been able to find out what weave patterns are common in modern modal fabrics.
On my work computer Google knows I'm an engineer so it gives me papers on visco-elastic properties of the fabric but it's not actually processing my query well and giving me weaves, it's just saying "I guess you're fancy and technical, huh?"
In 1997 there would have been a text/image website with forty diagrams of various weave patterns and it would have come up in the top twenty results.
I would like a little more 1997 in my internet, please.
In 1997 there wouldn't have been 50,000 spam responses in the query.
In 1997 there would have been some place that made it, or someone interested in it that would have made the site for their own interests in spreading the information.
Today there are countless entities looking to scrape a penny from your view in any way possible, and will create an ocean of spam in order to capture that revenue.
At least with search engines we cannot go back. That internet is dead. Any new system you create to bring back the old internet will attract the previous group because your system would be valuable, and like parasites, they will steal value from your system.
> In 1997 there wouldn't have been 50,000 spam responses in the query.
If what the GP wants exists, and none of the given options are any bit similar to it, why do you think the amount of spam is relevant?
If Google couldn't find a real thing between a mountain of invented low quality content, you would have a point. But Google keeps pushing unrelated results instead.
Define "real thing". Again in the past it's really easy, people didn't put much "fake" content up. Now there is mountain of documents that have 'content' that matches your request... How much energy are you going to put in to determine if its low or high quality content? I did the search that OP did and I got tangentially related documents, but not the exact think that OP was likely looking for. And this defines the problem, there is far more noise than signal, and the ancient internet did not look like that at all.
I click on it and search for the keywords I gave and they aren't in the result.
Put the search in quotes. Nope.
Add +, -, whatever. Uh-uh.
Inspect the source. Search for the keyword in hidden keyword tags. Nada. The result is not fake, it's just not a result for my search.
Google is no longer a search engine. It is only a suggestion engine. It is the Mega-Clippy. "You look like you might want to buy Modal underwear!"
This works for the majority of searches but it's useless for research into any novel corridor. And now Bing using ChatGPT to get closer, for sure, but only until they figure out how to inject advertising into it better.
We really needed the first big search engine to stay focused on search instead of suggestion and they chose not to. That's where we are.
It would be a lot better if you could just search an index of all the words on the web, and then we can refine our queries against the results to narrow things down even more. As it is right now, search just doesn't work anymore.
These days, the internet is more a city from a cyberpunk movie where everything is covered with ads, everywhere. So much that some of use filtering glasses to hide ads from us. Tracking devices are everywhere and your every move is recorded and stored in a database of a company that produces very realistic sounding androids.
Oh yeah, and anyone with enough holodeck processing power can make an artificial video of you saying and doing anything they want.
I like technology and modern cities in the abstract. They provide people with easy access to certain things that were historically scarce. Some of those things are life saving, like cutting edge medicine.
But I can't live in a city. I hate the noise, the crowds, the people, the crime, the pollution and the vast majority of the time I'm not in any sort of immediate need for what they provide. Fine for the odd Saturday adventure one or twice a year. Any more than that and no thanks. I always come away feeling stressed out, anxious, tired and worse off for the experience.
Ironically, online shopping and remote work is what has made living in a city unnecessary.
I like that, and you're right. I find that discussions in the comment of HN articles almost always tell me something I don't know. Sometimes it feels like secret knowledge :)
Except that it's not. YouTube is a giant hole of suck that brings everybody else down to their level.
YouTube being subsidized has driven any competitor out of the space. Since YouTube has a monopoly, your content will get copied and posted over there even if you don't give permission. Since YouTube is backed by Google, they are larger than lawsuits which could bring them to heel.
If you wanted YouTube to improve, split it out from Google again.
I don't disagree that YouTube would be better off away from Google, nor that it's a monopoly, but in terms of content it is magnificent.
Vintage films, tutorials for the most niche practices, 4K videos of exotic locations, a better music selection than Spotify: all at your fingertips on one site.
YouTube is the modern-day video library of Alexandria. Yes, there are many negatives to it running the way it is, but it's undeniable that such a powerful gathering of information resources is available only on their platform.
Maybe splitting YT is a good idea, but even with all the junk YT still is a jewel. There are incredible things in there - art, lectures, philosophy, so much value packed inside.
I'm also fond of the internet-as-public-square paradigm. All news worthy events are posted in it. There's sections of the square dedicated to classifieds and vendors. There's a spot with chess sets.
Yes, there's also some people on soap boxes yelling into the crowd. I can usually ignore them just fine.
It went from an Internet of amateurs (those with an actual love for what they are talking about) to professionals (which are very slick, but the money is always there).
You can still find great content in videos and music from amateurs, but the professionals "outshout" most of them; and the best amateurs end up getting sucked into being professionals. Once your livelihood is on the line, things change.
Here's a simple example. In the mid 90s, if you found a website with recipes, it would have been by a cook with some technical ability and it would have been dedicated to recipes.
Such sites may still exist, but heaven help trying to find them amongst all the "professional" recipe SEO spam that exists today.
Not bombcar, but I take it to mean that professionals have more resources they can pour into publicizing their stuff. It's not so much taking away amateurs' space as overwhelming amateurs' voices, thereby diminishing their power.
I just don't understand it. Publishing space online is infinite and will continue to be infinite no matter how popular somebody else gets. Who gets overwhelmed by somebody else publishing something?
Those with more resources have...more resources. More money they can put into spreading their word wider. They often know people in media who can increase the number of voices that are talking, the ears that are hearing. I can say anything I want online, as many times as I want. I still won't have the reach of someone who is boosted by national news, the New York Times, a Facebook group with thousands of member, a friendly YouTube or TikTok influencer.
The users have a certain responsibility for finding what they are interested in themselves. If you rely only on Google in this year, you will miss out. Everything can not be on the front page at the same time. It's the same if you go to a store IRL, with the exception that you of course are free to start your browsing anywhere else than on Google - like most people do today with social media.
I describe it as, the internet of books and text became the internet of videos and music.
Except that the internet never was books, and was only text due to technological limitations.
When we started networking all the computers together, we (myself included) had this vision of an information utopia where everyone would be able to access all of the information previously locked up in books, magazines, and newspapers.
But that never really happened. Instead, people started making new content — the faster, cheaper, and lower quality, the better.
The old content remained locked up in libraries. Some of it managed to move behind paywalls, but the vast majority of the information — and lessons — learned in the last 500 years has been forgotten because it's not free and easy to access.
We had this naïve vision that with everyone online, people would rally around the best of what humanity had to offer, and we'd all be exposed to the planet's best art, literature, music, and knowledge. Instead, we got mostly the exact opposite of what we set out to build.
>the vast majority of the information — and lessons — learned in the last 500 years has been forgotten because it's not free and easy to access.
I guess I don't really agree with that. Yes, a lot of very detailed information (and primary sources) about things is in research libraries, at least some of which are not open to the general public. But that doesn't mean all that information is lost. A lot of historical information is accessible to the (admittedly relatively small percentage of) people willing to put the effort into digging it up.
> had this vision of an information utopia where everyone
When it comes to new technology and the impact it will have people are almost always wrong. The printing press not only made better books, it created oceans of shitty ones.
But we've had Sturgeon's Revelation[0] since 1957, and the idea has existed much longer. Why would one expect anything different just because it's "on the internet?"
I mostly buy Eternal September, or as rephrased by David Foster Wallace:
"[The internet] is the way it is simply because people tend to be extremely similar in their vulgar and prurient and dumb interests and wildly different in their refined and aesthetic and noble interests."
Like, the internet is banal because we're (the rich world) all on it. It's not a weird little niche anymore. So it's now subject to all the (rich) world's problems. Racism is a problem on Twitter not because of content moderation difficulties or the lack of sufficient compute power to run sufficiently intelligent AI, but because it's a problem off Twitter too. Getting nickel and dimed, scammed, deluged by ads, or tricked by dark patterns is a problem on major platforms because it's a problem in meatspace too. We all know this, because our main fear with AI (the latest and greatest tech) is that it will soon also have all of these problems, and just amplify them even more than the internet did. It totally will!
But FWIW I think cool things are happening. Wireguard and Tailscale are cool. I hate to admit it, but some Blockchain stuff is cool. MLS is cool. ActivityPub is (maybe) cool. You just gotta get out of the browser.
You list social issues and then list a collection of privacy-oriented technology as if it's a solution.
Those two domains are orthogonal. Perfect privacy won't make racism or banality go away. It may make it harder to be targeted by ad farms, but it will make it easier for scammers and other bottom feeders to infiltrate and exploit online communities for personal and sometimes political ends.
Instead of being flooded by spray-and-pray spam, users in online spaces will be targeted by more sophisticated attacks based on estimates of psychology and interests derived from their public posting profile.
The DFW quote sums it up nicely. There is no technological fix for a lowest common denominator culture which rewards predatory greed over sincere mutuality.
It was just a random list off the top of my head. I don't think there is anything privacy oriented about blockchains (which publish and store your transactions publicly forever) or activitypub (which literally publishes your activity to other people). They weren't meant to seem like solutions to humanity's problems.
The rest of your post I agree with; mostly that was my point.
Gemini:// is a protocol that currently feels a lot like the geocities-era web. It is not yet September there. You’ll find how to get in if you try hard enough.
Gemini threw the baby out with the bath water by disallowing in-line images and styles. It's not like GeoCities because there's very little if any ability to express yourself artistically with the medium. Half of the "Geocities" pages people harken back to were themselves artistic content.
In-line images are up to the user agent. A Gemini client can permit the user to turn these on. Besides, Gemini being a protocol that aims to be hostile to tracking, made it a bit harder to include tracking beacons/pixels by not allowing those to be downloaded by default.
Firewalls pretty much have made the internet and web the same thing, as discussed on HN in many threads. About the only services on the internet that are not wholesale blocked are DNS and HTTPS. The internet's usefulness as a tool has been greatly compromised because of this.
> About the only services on the internet that are not wholesale blocked are DNS and HTTPS.
Really? I'm so happy and fortunate that hasn't been true for me. If the only thing I could reach was the web, well over half of the usefulness of the internet would evaporate.
Is that true for personal internet connections, or just corporate ones? I've never felt any kind of big restrictions on what kind of traffic I send from my home connection.
> It is hard, though, to build and maintain the structures of the old, “smaller” internet.
I agree. Even just setting up an RSS reader and finding a little community of blogs to follow can take a lot of work. Interact with those blogs, whether that's by submitting comments to individual posts, posting responses on your own blog, or doing something fancier with IndieWeb protocols [0], takes time and know-how. Hacker News, subreddits, etc. can remove some of that friction, at the cost of less personalization and more spam.
There are so so many cool ideas in the small internet. Project Gemini [1] comes to mind, as do linkrolls and the Marginalia search engine [2]. There have been a lot of folks finding meaningful communities in the fediverse recently too. I think the small internet both benefits and suffers from this fractal of different tools and communities: among so much diversity, it's simultaneously difficult and rewarding to find your place. I hope that over time, we'll be able to reduce the difficulty and increase the reward by building better tools for discovering and participating in these communities.
Anyways, even if we're hard to find sometimes, there are a lot of us who feel at-home reading our RSS readers, posting to a blog from time-to-time, and maybe even making new tools to make these activities easier. I feel certain that over time, we'll be better connected in ways that make us happy.
I'm pretty darn sure I'm not the only independent content creator being largely ignored, attacked for "self promotion" if they post their own work while no one else ever posts it etc and then listening to people whine about the internet and how they wish this, that or the other while you roll your eyes and think to yourself again "This is the internet you helped create. If you don't like it, make other choices."
The problem isn't self-promotion per se, the problem is the sheer amount of self-promotion that occurs when it is allowed. If any is permitted, then often all is permitted, and a forum becomes inundated with people vying for attention. Classic tragedy of the commons.
> and a forum becomes inundated with people vying for attention
You mean spam. Any system in which does not quickly and harshly punish spam will quickly be crushed under its weight ruining the perceived value that attracted users to the service in the first place.
It's a no win situation. People ignore independent creatives while consuming more established and popular media. Share your own work, people attack you. Meanwhile if you don't share your work, no one sees it.
Then you read articles whining about how hard it is to find interesting content and escape the prison of social media.
It's not because independent creators don't exist. But there are a lot of barriers to getting traction at all.
And if you try to even comment on the topic in a discussion of this sort, odds are good people will act like it is a nefarious plot to self promote. It's maddening.
Exactly! That's what I meant by tragedy of the commons. It sucks for everybody, consumers and creators alike, and there is no satisfactory solution. I empathize, I am an independent creator myself, and I know the pain. For what it's worth, it helped me to change my mindset from sprint to marathon, and accept that success, if any, would be slow.
I also feel that the modern web's lust for stats is doing more harm than good. If one's follower count isn't growing, the dopamine dries up. Falling listener stats? Enjoy that depression! Better to ignore the stats and use "is this still worthwhile" as one's compass when possible.
I've been on HN a lot of years. Lots of people here have money and as a group most of them consistently object to essentially any means to monetize content, pay content creators, etc while denying that this amounts to expecting slave labor from writers and also decrying the tragic lack of good quality writing.
I used to try to consistently point out such patterns while being personally attacked, told to stop whining, stop expecting to make money from writing as it's simply not realistic and "get a real job."
People here want a quality experience online. And they want it for free (including ad-free).
Often while they, themselves, make good money for writing the code that runs the internet. Somehow, that's different.
Hey :wave:, I've been on HN for ages too and have seen you here forever. You're not the only one that's observed this behavior. A lot of us know it. The HN crowd thinks monetization is this gross, evil thing but also thinks the quality of content is in decline and only caters to the lowbrow. As you say, good writing from good writers (really good content from good creators) needs time, stability, and the safety to explore ideas. All of this requires money.
This crowd likes to point out that the early web had this kind of content, but they forget that the early web was composed mostly of perspectives from folks who had those luxuries and honestly had been only writing for a few years on the web. I remember trying in vain to find anything about the rap scene which was huge in my low-income area and in a lot of low-income America at the time but the truth was, none of the rappers who ended up making it in the mid-90s ever were situated in a way that would make it easy for them to use the Web to put their content out there. That's why everyone on the Web at the time was into heavy metal even though rap was flourishing in the US. The demographic that used the Web wore khakis at work and listened to metal at home.
I've (and my friends) just learned to ignore this content. It's a yearning for a more country club like internet. The neighborhood was a lot quainter when only the golfers with their luxury cars lived here. Now the riff raff wants to bike or drive their Mustangs and it's all lowest common denominator drivel.
I was homeschooling at a time when there were some really wonderful free resources on the internet to support that. One woman did handwriting consulting and eventually took the free resources off her website because it conflicted with her efforts to support herself as a consultant and at that time there was nothing like Patreon.
"Freedom isn't free." Neither is a free internet. Someone has to somehow put in the time and effort, etc.
You need to either find a way to pay some of these people or accept that what's here will mostly be the hobbies of the comfortably well off and can disappear at a moment's notice on a whim.
Well let me respond, since maybe I'm one of those guys.
You've fundamentally misunderstood what I want. If a "writer" wrote it as part of their job, I don't want to read it. I mean, I might, but that's not what I would be "whining" about here.
I've kept blogs most of my life. I'm after similar content to what I would post.
I don't care to read whatever you want to get paid to write. No offense, I'm sure it's great and worth all the money.
The quality experience is enjoying other people's gardens, and the point of having the garden is to share it with other people, not to have a ticket booth or a billboard. At least, that's the case at my blog. Which I've never shared here, and nobody else ever has either. Which I find totally fine.
> I don't care to read whatever you want to get paid to write.
Writers don't write to get paid, but they need to get paid to be able to continue to write. When writing seriously for high quality content, you need to treat it like a full time job, with massive focus. So if they can't get paid, then the only people with a voice are those with a comfortable income from somewhere else and a lot of time on their hands. And that's a very small subset of the population.
It's like enjoying food you get for free at a friend's house and returning the favor, but being insulted at the idea of paying in a restaurant.
You seem to be assuming some things different from my reality.
I make very little money from blogging. I took ads off years ago. It's not some kind of paid gig shilling for some product or whatever.
I have a Patreon that makes too little and I take tips. I try to write what I think is meaningful.
My writing has repeatedly made the front page of HN, often without making a dime.
I've stopped posting it here. I'm tired of feeling kicked in the teeth for "self promoting".
Journalism is in trouble. This undermines political freedom. Etc. And yet people just expect high traffic to pay the bills, which it can if your monetization strategy is ads, but the HN crowd is fond of ad blockers and vocally critical of ads.
Anyway, I don't care to argue it. You asked a question. I replies. This conversation is most likely a waste of time.
> And yet people just expect high traffic to pay the bills, which it can if your monetization strategy is ads, but the HN crowd is fond of ad blockers and vocally critical of ads.
For me the problem is not ads but the inevitable AdTech pushed under the guise of "ads". Too many sites want me to enable what they call ads but are really incredibly invasive spying systems. Many are compromised and actually deliver malware.
The whole situation is made worse by the "ads" serving up a bunch of shit I didn't ask for. The text content of some article is a fraction of the size of the tracking scripts and auto-playing video. Everyone could save a lot on costs by not serving me a multi-megabyte video next to a 30kB blog post.
I took ads off my websites years ago. I have no problem with the HN crowd being anti ad.
I'm just saying we have the means to pay content creators right now and the reality is people mostly expect free content and implicitly assume that if you have sufficient traffic, you are making money and the reality is that assumption de facto has baked in an ad-based monetization strategy.
Micropayments as people would like to imagine them don't yet exist.
Good writing takes time.
You want more of it, you should find a way to make it pay and, no, implicitly assuming an ad-based revenue model where you don't have to take a crowbar to your wallet and put it open and explicitly blocking ads and wanting nothing to do with them adds up to "Hello? Exactly how do you expect creative to make rent?"
I would love to see a viable micropayment model (a la Jaron Lanier's years of suggestions) that takes the baby steps we've already made (e.g. Patreon, Substack) and accelerates us to a place where all value is compensated.
Micropayments of just a few cents is basically how many ads work. I've already stated that HN hates ads.
You can currently pay as little as a dollar via PayPal and it's like 67 cents for the recipient (or was last I checked). Lots of people just feel that's not micro enough and not frictionless enough.
The point would be micropayments without the ads - which are mostly noise anyway.
From the creator POV YouTube and Kindle Unlimited approach this model. So does Spotify, to an extent.
But the payments are much smaller than the value generated. And creators are at the mercy of gigantic centralised content distribution machines which can destroy your career on a whim, or because of an unfortunate outbreak of stupidity and bureaucracy.
There isn't anything like a federated micropayments system which would offer aggregation and payment services, but would be run at cost - a bit like the cultural equivalent of a credit union.
And if the independent content creator starts charging for his or her work, even their most dedicated fans will abandon and people will see it as a great offense.
So much this. I created a website that matches people for voice calls based on their opinions, kind of like discord meets omegle meets twitter (https://frenemy.live), if you’re interested would love to have you join
Just put down your phone. Or better yet, just use the smolnet sites that already exist. If you pine for the days of a small, nerdy and exclusive internet then just go there it’s just a few clicks away.
At least until you piss some kiddy off and the entire subnet you're on is receiving a TB/s of packets till the point your ISP drops you or you have to hide behind cloudflare.
What I think can improve the situation is "curation", particularly manual, effort-intensive, thoughtful and reasonably timely curation by a person or people with good taste. That's asking a lot, with many subjective variables, but it's what keeps bringing me back to Hacker News, the consistently high signal-to-noise ratio.
Yes, I think this is a good point – it certainly reflects how I find the things I value most. People I know or have come to "know" by following for years have always the best sources of information for me.
There's no way to turn back time, if there was, I would probably be living in 1997 forever.
I'm all for a bit of nostalgia, but we must admit that the internet is indeed dead, we surf an encyclopedia thats mostly a money machine poisonning everything it touches. It ruins everything, everywhere.
Where is the RSS feed on your site? I tried /feed and /RSS and .RSS none of which work. There is also no visible link that I was able to see.
Assuming I'm correct in my assumption that there is none, I find the lamenting the loss of "the structure that a personal website, can-to-can structure, an RSS feed, and a browser provide" (emphasis mine) deeply ironic.
And no, email newsletters are not a valid replacement, no matter how much you benefit from pushing them.
Maybe you should contribute to the internet you want to see?
By far the best article about where we are today that I've seen!
The idea of the internet as a body that has gone comatose, that isn't really reacting or changing, is a good metaphor for me, matches my feelings. There's still so much potential, but we aren't in an interactive phase; we are continuing along only with the inertia we had.
But we could collectively wake up at any point, could restart creating interwoven connected experiences of our own.
I like to consider what will the Internet be in ten years. Who will control it? How will we interact with it? Will there be any humans present? Frankly, I am not too optimistic that it'll be the Internet that we want.
This can be addressed. Protocols not platforms™. However, these protocols need to have spam mitigation mechanisms built it. We need "RPoW" tokens deployed ubiquitously.
>It is hard, though, to build and maintain the structures of the old, “smaller” internet. You can, today, still go back to the can-to-can structure that a personal website, an RSS feed, and a browser provide.
I think the author ignores another reason that people (especially us techies) don't like to admit: The majority of people don't care about following a list of personal websites. Instead, websurfers just get whatever snippets of information they want (e.g. food recipe, medical trivia) from whatever website happens to have it and then move on.
The disinterest in personal websites comes from both the websurfers and many content authors themselves.
Some examples from the content creators...
Clay Shirky's essay "A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy" happens to be on the HN front page right now. But he doesn't maintain his personal website anymore. He gave reasons for it[1] and even said he regrets letting it rot. But even today, his personal website remains empty and previous links all return 404 errors. But he does stay active on Twitter: https://twitter.com/cshirky
John Carmack's old personal website "altdevblogaday.com" is gone now.[2] But he does stay active on Twitter: https://twitter.com/id_aa_carmack
Those 2 guys are obviously internet-savvy and need no lectures on personal websites -- and yet they chose to abandon them.
As to examples for websurfers, if you ask normal people if they sometimes search the internet for a cooking recipe, they'll say "yes". But if then followup with "Can you name a cooking website you got a recipe from?", most will say "no". The average websurfer cared more about the recipe and not the particular website. Sure, some will make a mental note of the domain url and maybe even bookmark it but many won't.
The lack of interest for following "little websites" continues to be reinforced with tools like ChatGPT. Most people would rather get some synthesized information instead of visiting a bunch of different websites they don't care about.
That book represents a different time when indie websites were a purposeful destination to visit. I notice that a lot of people don't bother doing that anymore. Me included.
You keep mentioning "websurfers," "the majority of people," the comment you linked describes "real people." Indeed, most people on the internet are not going to start their own blogs tomorrow and fill out their RSS readers with dozens of hand-picked blogs.
The content creators you list may have changed how they publish their content to reach a different/larger audience, and that's totally fine. It's a good thing that there are different groups of people who spend time in different corners of the internet. If you want to make a big splash, of course you won't (just) use the tools of the small internet.
There may be some people who want the "small internet" to make some sort of grand comeback. But I think most of the people interested in it are looking to build out a more intimate community of people who want to do the same. And that dream is already being realized for many. With an internet this large, even this niche can be a large group of people.
Yes, I love that – and it was a point I landed on, too. That any meaningful sub-group on the internet is going to be really really big because the whole of the internet, as far as people go, is really really really big.
I've certainly gone through phases of posting content of various types on various sites over time. I'll probably get back to posting on my own sites a bit more as one of my main channels went away. But it is easy to let dropping some comments on social media take the place of writing even a short blog post--and that's even assuming you have a blog all set up and everything.
Great points. I think you're absolutely right – social media in particular has given most people good reason to (a) not maintain a personal website and (b) not follow other personal websites. Ultimately, I'm not sure that's a good thing, but that isn't to say that it doesn't present some signficant benefits, like the ability to follow topics, follow a much greater number of people, increase the speed of conversation, etc. Thanks for reading!
it's rambly, but it's still not clear 'what is it that they want from the internet'. "you could find a point in there somewhere, but really, you had to"
Personally, I prefer the internet of today to the internet of the past. There's so much more to do and I just don't have any nostalgia for 1997-2002 (the first 5 years I used the internet) or any other time period in the past. The internet has gotten consistently better and more useful over time.
The one thing I would like (but will never get) is the way to pay directly for more things rather than pay indirectly with ads.
I think that's a totally valid perspective – and I agree to some extent. There are absolutely things about the internet that are better today than the way they used to be.
As for the micropayments thing – I couldn't agree more. Jaron Lanier has had a lot to say about that, and I remain hopeful that someday we can find a functional model other than advertising.
Since the author likes analogies, I'll add mine: the internet now has become roads, bridges, towns. The internet used to be forests, rivers to ford, camps.
There used to be an exploration-aspect to the internet, not sure what you would find if you took this trail or that one. Now we all seem to travel the few, well-worn roads to the same handful of destinations.
I do like the internet-as-reference-book internet where I can quickly solve a programming problem that is stymieing me. I would keep Wikipedia, the Internet Archive, Stack Overflow.
Outside that though I do prefer roads less taken.