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> And then what you have left will be a small subset of people who know how to reach their desired corners of the internet, just like before.

Blue skies mentality. The old web was good because it wasn't crowded or accessible to most, and everything was new. That, great filter, was unique and will never happen again; Pandora's box is open and cannot be shut.

Pretty much akin to one's childhood being yearned at old age...

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Just connecting to other people all over the globe was novel. At least for me as a kid, my window to the world in the 90s was TV and a satellite dish, and maybe a local library. Speaking to relatives in other european countries meant a long distance phone call over a landline and it was expensive. My view of the world was shaped by physical books like encyclopedias or comic books, magazines, TV shows and documentaries. But everything was filtered through translations and choices made by local editors (a famous example is a local TV editor who spent decades at the national broadcasting service selecting foreign documentaries for broadcast, so his name in the credits meant a quality choice). A similar shift happened when we got the satellite dish and could get hundreds of new programs (mostly german, but some english) after having only a handful on terrestrial channels. And then suddenly with dial up, I could connect to the internet and find various web pages from all over the world and join forums and download images and later on videos, join discussions on forums. I would say this lasted from the late 90s to maybe 2010s or even before, things changed with wider facebook adoption and when youtube started streaming high definition videos and you could just watch it like it was TV.

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