[spr93]

usenet and irc are quite old. how are they examples of some mythical point at which the internet was unlocked by services?

centralized and decentralized would include almost any service. your comment is so vague and ambiguous as to be meaningless. (that's a hallmark of LLM output. are you a bot?)

it was easier to find authoritative answers 20-30 years ago. google and, before that, altavista and yahoo, were quite good at directing queries to things like university-run information sites or legitimate, curated commercial sites. for the last decade the first google page has been crammed with useless SEO optimized fluff.

as for shopping, that was the first dotcom boom. what really took it mainstream was covid. not centralized or decentralized collaborative nonsense.

[keithnz]

no.... not a bot, and please see HN FAQ before making comments like this.... I'm talking about decentralized common services, like IRC, Usenet, email, same service and they all interact together. But the old internet was super fractured when we got websites, nearly everything did things completely different, was very hard to trust anything. It was not easier finding authoritive answer 20 to 30 years ago, I started in 91, and it was hard to find anything. Search engines were a great improvement, but kind of hard to find what you wanted, things drastically improved with google and page rank, but that brought in other problems