There is a sweet spot. Between around 2000-2005 ish the internet was available to a lot of people, and not yet fucked.

Until the MSN messenger rebrand in 2005 sounds like a good rule of thumb.

Yeah, you used to get web space and email thrown in with your ISP, in the UK. Snobbery hadn't taken hold, you could just upload a few pages from File Explorer, via FTP. Yeah sure it was rough around the edges, but in many ways far more accessible or rather, less confusing. Not as much a big pile of mud than it is now.

That does not sound in any way more accessible than the current situation.

HTML? FTP? People just want an online presence.

Well you didn't even have to write HTML back then. You could author it in whatever program and FTP it. Which to be fair was still a stumbling block for some, but out of all the hurdles and hoops you have to jump over and through to put something on-line anyway, it wasn't that difficult.

> Until the MSN messenger rebrand in 2005 sounds like a good rule of thumb.

I think the point of no return was the launch of the iPhone. Not that the writing wasn't already on the wall, but everything accelerated after that, and it was clear things weren't going back after those devices took over.

The hand-helds gave access to the web without a the burden of a large personal computer. Which could and can be a PITA to maintain. And were slow. The hand-held OSs are in some ways easier to use.

My Uncle was a headmaster for about 35 years. When I presented a laptop to him, he couldn't use it. Told me he had never had to use a typewriter and couldn't use one. It was a really hard hurdle for him to adapt to a keyboard. And he still struggles.

The thing I'm really uneasy about is the Googles tracking everywhere you go, and all of that. It's very difficult to opt-out of tracking. I desperately tried to suppress my location from Google for years, and in one afternoon with a product activation via location/bluetooth they finally appeared to get it. Play services etc., make harvesting your contacts, reading your mail, and following you much easier. And it then becomes that bit easier to turn you into a commodity.

My Samsung was pre-loaded with Facebook. These are shitty little tricks. But advert networks in the browser also make it very difficult to escape the big trackers without a fight. Fingerprinting is everywhere.

We also dump files into the cloud these days. Which is very trusting.

Indeed. That rapidly accelerated the shift from the Web, for most people, being a physical place you went (a desk with a computer on it, in a specific spot) to being everywhere at all times. You had to choose to go use it before, and make an effort—now it follows you around, wherever you go, never more than a few seconds away.

I'd extend the sweet spot to 2010ish. The commercialization of the '00s didn't screw things nearly as badly as the arothighmization of engagement we've seen since IMO.

Google started to go to shit around '08 or '09, allowing their results to be taken over by ad-spammers and a handful of top sites. At the same time, that's about when they adjusted search to make it extremely hard to narrow in on something obscure, even if you know for a fact it's there (this used to be a thing one could reliably do, with some guesswork about word and phrase rarity in the target page and in link text pointing at the target page).

2010ish sounds right to me, APIs used to be widely available and accessible, which still left a way for people to have control over how they used the internet.

But maybe the API was ultimately a trap. A la "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish". Offer an API to encourage adoption, and then start restricting it later.

Which got us to leave our federated platforms with open protocols and enter closed silos.

At the risk of splitting hairs, even 2008-2010 was still decent. But I agree with the core of your idea.