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Comment by cosmic_cheese | Hacker News Reader

In terms of enjoyment, I think that as a whole things were much better in the late 00s and early 10s. Proprietary crashy resource hog browser plugins had effectively been killed off and JS bloat was still relatively low, so with a few notable exceptions the web was fairly light and sites on average weren’t nearly as irritating or intrusive. Furthermore, devs hadn’t normalized feature chasing and so any modern browser worked correctly for the overwhelming majority of the web and adblock extensions generally didn’t break things.

It’s all been downhill from there.

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I wonder if it's only downhill once you have reached your own point of enlightenment. For me, that wasn't late 00's, but more like late 90's and early 00's. Maybe that was my coming of age.

To me, it's been downhill pretty much before it got started. I'm always feeling "behind" having missed the fun at any stage.

I like the late 00s/10s because it represents a particular level of refinement and balance of functionality in contrast to earlier eras. As much as I enjoyed the web of the 90s and early 00s, it was still quite nascent and in some ways a bit too basic for my taste.

90s web was fun in a wild west kind of way. Sites were small, but the net in general was slow.

00-10 had a lot of forums in which I remember being very fun. At the same time it brought in the age of popups and ads everywhere.

10+ brought in the age of large social media and the feeling everything was trying to scam you. A lot of the forums that felt special and interesting started disappearing for multiple reasons, but mostly their userbase had moved to FB or something else huge. Then those large sites started moderating anything interesting away.

In the late 90's, I attended a talk by Ted Nelson, the guy who coined the term Hypertext. To him, things started going downhill with HTML, and the URL. The gist of his complain is that he wanted links to be bi-directional.

In the 80's, telecom operators were complaining that TCP/IP and packet transmission was a regression over circuit commutation.

So it looks like the internet has progressed through perpetual regression.

The internet is 30-40 years old, and has brought an entirely new paradigm to the world. It has abolished distances, disproportionately increasing the reach of a few.

I'd love to share your optimism that things will keep improving in the long run, but I don't see what you're basing that off.

> Furthermore, devs hadn’t normalized feature chasing and so any modern browser worked correctly

What you are saying seems much larger than the web itself. I don't think Chromium or for that matter "technology" is responsible for that. I think it has more to do with massive capital in funding technology startups building on every random idea which in turn led to the tremendous demand for platforms with the promise of "shipping fast" at the cost of short sighted technical decisions.

That’s definitely a consideration, but alongside the rise of Blink within the web dev sphere there’s also been a growing culture of sitting on the bleeding edge of new features regardless of how necessary doing so is, which influences both hobby and production projects alike.

On other platforms it’s still much more the norm to stick to proven tech for anything non-trivial and to only adopt new APIs when there’s high adoption and adequate justification for doing so.

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