[JohnFen]

It's true that the internet was already well down that road in 1999, but it has become much worse since then. I'm really comparing it to internet earlier than that. It was about 2000 when I started considering the internet as effectively dead in terms of being able to provide the value I used to get from it.

But "more hostile" includes not only advertising and tone, but spying, overtly hostile actors such as crackers and other criminals and so forth.

> Or you drop into a public game of CS, and a dozen teens start screaming at you

I don't count this as part of the general degradation of the internet, though. That's more about the online gaming community. Things were that way before the internet was the most common method of online gaming.

[Karrot_Kream]

Wait do folks not remember the "I get to tell my wife 'sudo make me a sandwich'" jokes on Freenode into the early 2000s? "Pool is closed due to AIDS" from Habbo Hotel?

I think this "genteel internet" that came pre-Web was much shorter lived than the periods after it. It reminds me of crypto where the initial halcyon period of Bitcoin seemed full of hope but once the technology had to scale it just couldn't keep its initial values due to both technological and social issues.

[nooormal]

Interesting. My frame of reference for the internet started in 1998, after "eternal september" and the earlier culture. Which makes me curious about baseline expectations.

I agree many aspects are growing... overtly bad. I think LLMs are well on their way to rendering the mainstream internet, search, and social media effectively worthless. The signal to noise ratio is unfixable.

I still get value from my habits, which haven't changed for decades: niche forums, personal websites, blogs, podcasts, youtube. I would be satisfied as long as those remained more or less intact, the rest can go. Requires a lot of curation though.