How long have you used the Internet with that opinion?
Every now and then I’ll wander into the regular Internet for something (e.g. HN links some article). Usually it’s a jarring and deeply unpleasant experience.
Consuming any other kind of content on the Internet has gotten so much better it's hard for me to imagine, in the late 1990s, predicting how good it is. I had a laptop hanging 1 hop off a default-free peering core router and never would expected this network to replace all of radio and television.
Similarly, creating any kind of content is drastically better than it has been at any other point in the history of the Internet. For 90% of what I need a word processor or spreadsheet for, free Google Apps is more convenient than MS Office on my laptop; I'll use them simply to avoid launching the app. I'm still in native apps to draw diagrams, but I bet I won't be in 5-10 years.
Finally, with respect to written content, I think you take the good with the bad, too. Specifically: in the 1990s, every news source in the world wasn't crudded up with 100mB of Javascript grinding your machine to a halt, but there was much less news on the Internet. Add the Kindle Reader back into the mix and I think we're out ahead even on this axis.
And don't forget: Flash is dead.
On balance, I think we're much better off than we used to be.
There’s an ocean of content, but most of what’s actually born online is an aggressive waste time, designed to maximize engagement and nothing else. There are 10 minute+ YouTube videos on topics that could be better encapsulated in a paragraph of the written word, but of course it’s easier to monetize the video. The pervasive online business model is industrial scale invasion of privacy, news media is teetering, blogging is suffering, forums are mostly dead.
A majority of the population visits a handful of sites like Facebook and Google, the latter of which wants to subvert email. Brandolini’s law rules, and has been turbocharged with the power of a thousand retweets and a million echo chambers. White supremacists and all other manner of kooky fucks finally have the global audience they’ve always dreamed of. Twitter and other platforms have fueled an outrage culture with the soul of a jackal and the attention span of a gnat.
I do like streaming content, but it seems like a bad trade off.
Oh yeah, and we have the security disaster that is the IoT and resulting bothers.
As to content creation, I guess I don’t see the point. If you told me in 1998 that two decades from now I’d be using a word processor that wasn’t any more capable than Word 97, simply more resource intensive, I would’ve thought that to be a pretty bleak prognostication.
I bought a copy of BeOS back in the day, and avidly followed the newsletters: https://www.haiku-os.org/legacy-docs/benewsletter/Issue2-47..... An honest exchange of currency for useful software; plain HTML content. I miss that tremendously.