Dunno, how much of this is also just getting older and set in our life routine? When was the last time I explored my own city on a bike like I would as a kid? Our interests and patience for browsing change.
How old are you now vs in this "golden era of the web"?
Most of those stories just sound like nostalgia to me. Like suggesting that games these days aren't as good as they used to be because look how less time you spend gaming these days.
It pretty much sucked, honestly. Translation was obscenely expensive and not much better than Google can do today. You paid by the minute or, in my case, the university did.
It was pretty terrible.
Then, this fancy world wide web came about, only it had been world wide before that, albeit at a different scale. It was pretty great.
Now? It's much better in that it is much more useful. I can still make discoveries of novel content, but I seldom do. I search, rather than browse, when I seek information on a subject.
It's not nostalgia, I don't think. It's much more useful today. It was pretty terrible the first times I used it. In fact, it wouldn't improve for like a decade, maybe longer.
If it helps, I also hated computers back then. They were slow, unintuitive, and I had to learn to program to actually have a functional (well, useful to me) device. They clanged, beeped, and whirled. They made dreadful noises and did exactly what you told them to do, even if what you told them to do was stupid. They didn't have things like a recycle bin. Hell, they didn't even have internal storage.
One computer was so horrible that I had to buy 'memory chips' (RAM) just so I could use lowercase letters. All told, it cost me more than a brand new car. You know what I did with it? I played Zork.
Edit: that translation was done by a human, by the way. It could take a week, or more, to get something translated.
It's the same with the web. When it went big in 1994, no one knew what they were doing, so everybody was pretty much throwing everything against the wall and seeing what stuck. But over time, people learn, genres develop, budgets rise and you get less original and more homogeneous pages, only this time with so many ads that it takes 500 requests to download your typical page these days.
What I think people are missing is this original, outrageous and anything goes type of experience. But I suspect the Cambrian explosion of web expression is dead for the time being.
[1] Qix (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qix). An abstract game that was mainstream and quite popular at the time. Haven't seen much like it sense.
[2] "The Earth Dies Screaming", a game I've never seen but the name alone is so evocative that I still remember it to this day. I think it was in the "alien invasion" genre popular back then.
Yep, that's exactly what I used to do. That's really what "surfing the web" meant back in those days -- that you would spend hours just clicking links, seeing where they would take you. And of course, they would quite often take you to completely unexpected but cool things that you never would have found or even thought to look for otherwise.
It's just that the web has gotten bigger and more mainstream, and most of us now limit our browsing to a few silos and then act as if everything that no longer bubbles up the filter must have ceased to exist.
But perhaps you are right. Any tips on how to find the new gems?
That's a good question - I don't know. Discovery of anything not SEO optimized is difficult, and a lot of that content was on Geocities and Tripod, so the modern equivalent might just as likely be on Wordpress or a service like Wix, making the design homogeneous even if the content isn't. Ironically, I've found most off the beaten path sites through references in Youtube videos and Reddit. When I was getting my CS degree, the web design class involved building a quick personal site, so URLs connected to colleges might also be a good place to look.
But what's more likely, that no one is writing their own custom HTML sites anymore, or that some people are, but we just can't see them because they exist in their own ecosystems beyond the Googlesphere (and possibly even the Anglosphere?)
...I just realized I'm vaguely arguing for (but not defining the parameters of) a Drake Equation for the web, where N is new personal content. Even if the parameters are low, the scale of the web means N should be significant.
For better or worse, the closest thing today to the feeling of the old personal webpage era is Tumblr. The kids get up to some crazy stuff over there.
It was/is different: folks who are excited enough about something to build a website to share it have more interesting and deep content than you typically find on social media.
These days The same goes for people with personal blogs (or website) as opposed to medium and other one design blogging platforms.
I used to like those.
I sometimes still do that with Wikipedia articles and their sources, it's a fun way to kill a couple of hours and can lead down some really interesting rabbit-holes.
I remember 10+ years ago we designed websites so that important content was "above the fold". Today people are addicted to scrolling their Facebook feed.
But individual entries are definitely advanced examples of "above the fold" design that is good for advertisements, not for pages.
It's faster but, as you say, I don't think it is as fun. I used to enjoy picking a subject and then clicking all the DMOZ or Yahoo! links. I'd dig through webrings and and link aggregators with wild abandon.
Now, I search a term and click on the first few results, at most. Sure, there are exceptions but they are rare. As you say, it's much more useful.