Let’s be honest, when you came to this site you weren’t looking for anything in particular. Instead the site invites you to simply look around, embrace the excitement of clicking randomly and not really knowing what you’re going to get, and not really caring either. Just be a thoughtless child, wandering a garden yanking leaves along the way. Now isn’t that rejuvenating?
When I need to find a store's operating hours so I can try to dash over after work and before dinner, I don't have time for the Scavenger Hunt in the Garden of Narnia Experience.
I consider the internet something like a library. I want to find relevant stuff, not sift through shit to get to something interesting.
I didn't even know what it had because I was overwhelmed with colors and unusual styles that I clicked around and left. Sure, it's a nice reminder of the old days and some people find it pretty, but it's bad at conveying information imho.
As an example: the modern replacement for this kind of fan-site would be a Fandom.com site, which has an interface full of cruft, focused mostly on ads and "engagement" stuff. Only a small portion reserved for actual content. Unless there is a lot of customization, list pages are often alphabetical and have a terrible design that make it very difficult to find stuff. So you need to use their terrible search that is hidden in a tiny 30x30 button on the top among other buttons.
Plenty of other examples there. For every website like Hacker News, there's dozens of forums whose design is more focused on useless ornamentation, monetization and increasing engagement through stupid tactics.
/edit: and browsers and plugins are our saviours, hail reader mode and not auto-playing videos! I consider that part of the UI/UX development as well.
Also, you mention auto play videos. Those are pretty much a staple of the current website era, with browsers themselves having to fight back [1]. Now, even Reddit's new version has it. Annoying animated gifs and annoying flash were mostly novelties in personal webpages.
If anything, needing ad blockers, reader mode and and anti-autoplay in browsers, is an indication of how things aren't exactly great in the web anymore. And that website from 1999 doesn't need any of those.
My point was that in the early days I couldn't really shape my browsing experience. Now I can because a necessity arose due to websites delivering shit (and imho this started in the early days). So now they are nice. That was my point, not really sure the delivery was on point haha. And with the demise of flash it really got a lot better. But maybe I don't visit shitty websites a lot.
Ah got it! We're in agreement, then. And I also can't live without those tools.