I don't think there was ever a point where the Internet existed in a "pure" form. Everyone will have their own recollection of the past, different from someone else. It's easy to be nostalgic about the past: some things were better then (industrial scale tracking of users was not a thing), other things are better now (like video streaming).
- Search engines: There was more variety in search engines (including country-specific search engines). Examples: Alta Vista, Lycos, Yahoo, Excite, meta-search engines like Dogpile.
- Serendipity: The earlier web felt more serendipitous - free web hosting sites encouraged people to put up personal sites on any topic that led you down a rabbit-hole of discovery. You may say: isn't that the case now? Maybe. It doesn't feel that way - but maybe that's perception rather than reality?
- Designing web sites: CSS was full of crippling layout limitations in the early days. But there were also dozens of desktop website builders. They may have spit out horrible code, but they were far more accessible and usable to non-technical users compared to the dozens of static site generators loved only by developers today.
- Complexity: Developers love complexity, and they simply cannot recognise it. What's striking today is how ludicrously complicated it is to deploy and host your site or app on a server. Who would have thought in 2019 that only WordPress would offer users a simply one-click install on the server. Meanwhile, developers stuck in their own little command-line bubble, remain baffled that anyone would struggle to self-host using a docker image or via cloudron ("What do you mean it's complicated?")
- How reliable was information in the past? I don't think it was any more or less reliable in the past. There are reliable sources now that didn't exist in the early days of the internet (e.g. https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/). But there also plenty of unreliable sources.
from Hacker News - New Comments: "WordPress" http://bit.ly/2MaPxPO
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