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.