We had IRC/ICQ/AIM/MSN Messenger!
We had Newsgroups & Mailinglists!
We had millions of PHPbb Forums for any thinkable niche, running on 50$/Month Shared Hosting!
We had Websites lovingly created with Frontpage!
We had Gameserver Browsers that ran as Desktop Software, without Ad placements!
We had "underground filesharing" websites that took 700MB Games and split them in 300 parts and uploaded them to 20 different "free hosting" providers so you could be as much of a pirate as you wanted!
We had Toplists of Websites (and Toplists) where communities and content providers fought over the highest rank which more often than not were completely arbitrarily awarded!
We had Online Shopping where we could send a wire transfer before the items were sent!
We had a world where the general public didn't want or need the Internet!
IMO, the internet was in many ways better around 2006-2010. I liked the web better when there was google reader, a google blogsearch, and google forum/discussion search and not everything was completely centered on twitter and facebook.
Is it surprising that when authors use clickbait, people ignore the substance and reply to the most egregious part? Especially if an awful title gives no desire to read the content.
I don't find the guardian article very interesting, it has it's own problems with a click-baity title. But your response simply loops over an irrelevant shopping list of "my favourite things about the internet".
The very existence of this article and its prominence on a news aggregator site refutes it.
Yes, I just called Google crap. And Apple, and Amazon, and Clouflare, and Netflix, and Spotify. Yahoo!, Hotmail, do I need to mention Facebook? Centralised, monopolising, giant corporate crap. I avoid them whenever I can.
The web most definitely was better before they got their grasping claws on every aspect of it.
It was better before Wikipedia (a legitimate giant) existed and Google sent them vast traffic to help them build out their service.
It was better before Yahoo gave me access to free, rapidly updated stock quotes.
It was better before Netflix carved up the old TV content monopolies. Those awesome days when old media held me entirely hostage.
It was better when classified ads were spread across the entire country in localized newspapers and you couldn't easily access them in a centralized giant service like Craigslist.
It was better when real estate pricing and information was a black book.
It was better before Spotify, Pandora, Apple, Amazon, YouTube gave me easy, low cost access to all the music I could ever possibly consume.
It was better before Amazon made shopping online easy, with a vast selection, relatively inexpensive for shipping, and very consumer friendly customer service.
It was better before I could easily and inexpensively send money to other people using PayPal or Venmo or 37 other solutions.
It was better before I could take ten minutes, plug in a few things, and accept payments via Stripe or Square.
It was better when I had to use a janky static Mapquest, or spend money on cumbersome physical maps just so I could navigate a new city. Back in those amazing days when hunting for stores or locations was so much fun.
It was better when I had to go through hell to operate my own hosted infrastructure. This whole insta-infrastructure AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, DigitalOcean, Linode, stuff must stop. And who the hell wants a free CDN, down with Cloudflare!
Those old glorious days.