[jjbinx007]

The early web had so much more diversity than the current web, and with far fewer walled gardens.

Try browsing the modern web in an incognito window and see how far you get before you are asked to login and then forced to login to read more. The big social networks force you to not only login to read stuff, they also strongly push you towards the mobile app because there's so much more data they can harvest from your phone.

Oh, and the ads. In the late 90s we had to contend with popup ads and animated gif banners but the modern web without an ad blocker is much worse. I'm not against ads, but why do 95% of them have to be so scummy?