As a nearly full time internet user since dialup, the web has changed a lot. Dynamic updates to websites is one of the nice things that’s changed. You no longer need to mash F5 to keep up to date on anything. Wifi is way better, though for a while there it wasn’t really a “thing”.

The people have changed for sure. Originally it was a lot of techies and nerds, either by circumstance or due to the efforts needed to make the internet operate. Most people online had similar hobbies and interests, so most people online were similar, and their interests varied only a little on specific things.

Ads were basically a joke. Everyone had a website, usually on Geocities or something. You’d spend hours painstakingly putting together your website, then when you went to other people’s websites, you’d skim over it and never look at it again.

No bots existed, if someone was talking to you, then you probably knew them somehow, or you were on a public forum/IRC. No YouTube, no Netflix, but mp3 file sharing was happening even before Napster.

There wasn’t a lot to do at first, but after you found a few websites you liked, whether Slashdot or fark, 4chan or something else, you were hooked. People were brutally mean, especially for sites like hotornot. No social media or social networks, no corporations, just people mostly. Most sites selling stuff were scams. Early eBay was a trip.

This all morphed into a more congealed mass when social media became a thing and “high-speed internet” was more readily available. WiFi g ERA, back when it was always referred to by the standard, 802.11g. only laptops for a while then the iPhone dropped and it’s been a steady downhill after that.

Now the internet is huge, everyone and their fridge is on social media. Ads are everywhere and worse than ever. Almost everything is trying to funnel you into one of a handful of categories that you don’t fit into to sell you something. A few gems still exist, like the Foss community and stuff like Lemmy.

IDK, the old web sucked in some ways, but was awesome in other ways. Now there’s just too much to keep up on, and unless you spend every waking moment consuming content, it’s basically impossible to do. Some people have staked their entire career on basically aggregating memes and popular stuff, to give an overview to those who don’t have the time to do it themselves.

Media streaming is pretty good, though, media companies keep trying to make it into the next cable TV bundle package, and keep raising the prices and enforcing rules that were not possible 20 years ago, and that sucks.

I’m don’t think that this is better. It’s certainly different, but not better. The way things are going well cause the internet to become a wasteland of AI bots and advertisements all run my corpos because everyone else will be unemployed and unable to find work because their job has been replaced by some AI or other technology that doesn’t cost the corp as much as humans do. I’m sure minimum wage and salaries will be corrected to match inflation right after the majority of the workforce is laid off to be replaced with whatever technology does their job for them, which will create an elite class of super rich (moreso than they already are) who own the company either through shares or by being in an upper management kind of position, and a “middle” class of the people hired to maintain and fix the technology… There will be no lower class, just a massive pool of unemployed people, unable to work because all the jobs have gone to, what is essentially, bots.

My prediction is that when that happens, it will maintain a steady state until the vast majority is living on unemployment benefits, at which point the unemployment system will collapse because the money will run out for it, and either we’ll go into a massive depression, which will set us back 50 years or more, or the entire system will collapse and either we will die off from all the pollution and destruction to the planet, or we’ll have to move to something that’s not capitalism to survive. I’m rooting for a star trek like economy, where your status is determined by reputation, and money no longer exists. Unlikely, but I still want it.

No idea when things will start to shift, but IMO, Amazon (the company) will make the first major move, since they burnout their workers so quickly (specifically in the warehouse and item delivery segment) that they’re already seeing the effects of running out of people willing to work in their warehouses in some areas, and as a consequence of them being unwilling to pay appropriately for the work, and/or afford the workers enough latitude to handle the work without burning out, by either hiring more people to reduce the workload, or give people… IDK, breaks to use the bathroom… They will very likely turn to robots to do the work instead. Once they get to that point, it’s all downhill as other companies will follow suit.