Sure, there's definite improvements. More people have access, more of the time, and that's brought in interesting & creative people and projects. (As well as the obvious opposite.) It's easier to publish graphics, sound, video -- anything beyond text was difficult before. For a while, discovery was much improved, although I actually think that's gotten worse lately.

What gets to me the most, though, are three things:

1. The loss of interoperability. When the internet started, there was a clear, strong value placed on interconnection. First it was through low-level protocols like NCP or TCP/IP, then through application protocols like FTP, SMTP/POP/IMAP, Gopher, HTTP. This effort seemed to peak with network APIs (RESTful or not) and other standards like RSS/Atom. The protocols changed, but the idea remained: we, the users, should be able to build our own view of the internet, each according to our needs. This whole trajectory seems to have been greatly devalued in modern times. I understand that it's due to economics -- advertising wins over community -- but it's depressing as hell.

2. Centralization of services. We talk about this a lot on Hacker News; I don't need to elaborate. But take it from an old net.geezer that it feels extremely uncomfortable that most people only use a literal handful of sites -- and more and more people seem to question the idea of independent websites at all.

3. General complexity. I've retired from the tech world, in part, because of the overwhelming complexity of the technology. Maybe this is like the old days of science, where after a point, one person could not comprehend the field. But still, it saddens me that there seems less and less space for simplicity. I run all-static sites (with no Javascript and minimal CSS), not much different than I did in the mid-1990s -- and for that I'm a radical. I find that strange.