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Right, one could say it was actually the smartphone that made the Internet as successful as it was being pitched to be in the late 90’s.

From where I sit, smartphones completely ruined the internet.

If you're defining "successful" in the sense of people-making-a-lot-of-money I completely agree.

If you're talking about the internet in 2005 vs 2025, smartphones completely ruined the internet. At one point I had half my high school using HTML in their AIM profiles because they thought mine was cool.

Now kids can hardly even type on an actual, physical keyboard.

We're in complete agreement.

The tech was there. The websites worked fine. The issue was number of internet users was too low. Look at number of internet users today vs 1999…

> The issue was number of internet users was too low.

I'd argue that's because the tech wasn't there yet. Not the network or other web tech itself but rather the average-person-using-a-computer tech.

The technology was there all along, and it's ironic that we're discussing it on this website of all. Look up ViaWeb.