I can talk and meet people all around the world.
I can stream hundreds of videos around every conceivable topic, in 4K60 resolution, on-demand.
I can make a livelihood without ever stepping feet out of my home; and conversely, work from almost anywhere that'll give me a visa.
The digitized information of our civilization is just one search away.
For example, many twitch channels have an active offline chat that isn't advertised or even sanctioned by the actual streamer. I lurk/idle in the offline chat for a streamer who gets maybe 200-300 viewers per stream and there are now about a dozen of us from all over the world who have become friends over a decade. At this point many of us have met in real life or sent each other packages.
When I was younger I was very active on a small independent irc server and it was almost an identical experience.
I was just a kid growing up far removed from the information and happenings of the rest of the world and the web was this magical new thing that connected me to it. It was a bit of a firehose at first (well, I guess still is), but I loved it.
The only difference between now and then is that now I know how it all works. Back then the technology was completely magic. It's still just as magical in the human sense, and I am so grateful to TBL and CERN for making it happen and giving it the public! It has been so game changing for me and I grew up in the USA, I have to imagine it would be even more game changing to people curious about the world who grew up in more remote places.
Talk and meet? Skype, Zoom don't run on "the web" as such; need dedicated apps even if those may be based on Electron.
Video (Youtube) only has left Flash-based playback behind like 3 or 4 years ago; the resulting DRM required for video playback hasn't made purist happy, and resulted in a bitter controversy over TBL accepting interfaces to proprietary DRM into (proprietary) browsers.
Digitized information of our civilization being one search away hasn't been my experience at all in the last five years or so, with ads and ad-heavy sites being shoved onto you all the time. Even if it were, there's no strategy going forward to preserve that wealth for generations to come in times of monopolization.
As the first ever website demonstrates, the web originally was a means for easy self-publishing of digital text. Today, with platforms, verticals, network effects, the privacy minefield the web has become, and the complexity of the browsers left standing to support modern experiences as expected by consumers, it's questionable if that has actually been achieved.
The spirit of the early web was around building hierarchical multi-level directories of stuff, around search and categorization. The Web 2.0 ideology changed all that to transform it into a user-centric “social” experience that required you to use an online identity, build your own profile and be passively bombarded with stuff on your personalized feed.
That's not a comment on whether the regulations are good or bad. It's just that, as a business, if you're not a profitable customer or potential customer, I don't want to interact with you if you create any risk/cost for me.
The Internet (including the Web) of the mid to late-ish 90s may have been refreshingly non-commercial and open relative to today but it was also much smaller.
That's because it's increasingly mirroring the real world when it comes to nationalism, regulations, barriers to access, censorship, culture. That outcome was always inevitable, nothing could prevent it. Nations were never going to allow an unencumbered Internet or Web to remain in their territory.
If you think the Internet is geofenced now, just wait until you see what it looks like in another ten years. It's going to get dramatically worse. It'll be almost unrecognizable compared to the Internet of 2010. We're only maybe 1/3 the way to our fully balkanized destination.
There is also no going back. Governments now understand the technology and will increasingly tightly regulate it accordingly, no matter what it looks like or what it's called. They no longer view it as a separate entity, they view it as falling under the same exact regulatory domain as everything else in the physical space that they claim dominion over.
If you have any business or development dreams you want to pursue on the Internet, do it as soon as possible, do not wait. The Internet and Web will only suck more in the future.
But in terms of suckiness I think that it's not primarily caused by regulation (although the cookie law does try very hard to inflict maximum pain for zero gain). The funding model is just broken and I don't really see a way to fix it without losing even more freedom and privcy.
I’m not commenting on whether they are a good idea to use, but they are easy.
I really hope TPTB don't mess it up, it seems they're always trying to.
Not enough people appreciate it, just like they don't appreciate the computing power and amount of knowledge in their pockets. I see people on buses, on the streets, in cafes, just endlessly scrolling down in Facebook or something, seeing random people's videos and images... Seems like such a waste imo.
Why do you think it's flat? Does it seem mundane now? I experienced that era and it still seems like a magical transformation to me.
There are tons of entirely legal topics for which this statement is simply not true. Censorship is rampant on the modern web.
Of course, one is free to self-host, but there are special bandwidth deals for the 4K60 platforms that allow them to stream to millions of users, something you won't be permitted to do from the internet connection you have presently.