I don't think much, to be honest. In fact I think the excitement of the 90's and the advent of the internet acted as sort of a fountain of youth for people that didn't want to go the corporate route. I have been an independent consultant for 20 years and have never had to buy into the corporate life because of the freedom the internet gave me coupled with my desire to learn and understand it and share that with people. Now it just feels like everyone is selling something. There used to be a genuine sense of community far and wide but now it just feels like everyone is out for themselves. Blogs are written in a very methodical way to get that sweet SEO juice. Everyone is "witty" and sarcastic, everything is cute and silly to the point that none of it is cute and silly and so contrived that it just feels gross.

I seriously sit here some days and think, "does mark zuckerberg have no real self awareness?" I mean, this guy is the poster boy for everything that is wrong with the internet today. I guess when the inevitable shift from the open internet to the corporate internet happened, this is the result. Facebook is a multinational advertising platform, why can't they just admit that? What is wrong with this guy? But the real problem is that Facebook and Google make BILLIONS of dollars doing this.

I read an answer to a question on quora awhile back in which someone asked "what's it like to be a millionaire?". The best answer was something along the lines of many people ask this question but what they really want to know is "what is it like to spend a million dollars". I feel like this type of thinking is what is wrong with the internet today. No one wants to start a real business, they just want to start a business to get VC funding. No one wants to figure out how to really write, they want to figure out how to write a blog to make $10,000 a month from affiliate marketing bullshit. Every bit of "friendly" advice I see, I think, "ok, what's the catch here, what are they selling". And you know what? the people that just come out and say, "hey, this is me, this is what i'm selling" are the people that I will gladly give my money to.

Sorry for the rant, probably doesn't make a lot of sense but none of this does anymore.

Some of it I honestly feel a lot of it is more the deep commercialization of the Internet, frankly. A lot of modern "commercialization" has involved "clickbait" that is designed to produce some sort of emotion (often outrage at frankly incorrect information). This goes beyond the adverts -- a fair bit of Youtube entertainment feels like cheap stunts chasing clicks to me, reminding me more of the type of tactics reality TV engages in than anything else.

The Internet of the 2000s was more about blogs (eg Livejournal) and forums (like Something Awful, Fark, etc.). A lot of these were not solely advertiser-driven businesses (LJ and SA in particular relied on premium features for revenue from what I recall) and maybe that's a key difference. True, maybe some of it was because "we were young" -- I am in the same age group. But I dunno -- there was a time when I used Facebook quite a bit as well. This is no longer the case. Yet I'm still on a few obscure phpBB forums that seem quite fine to me.