this post was submitted on 17 Oct 2023
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It wasn't though. It was slow and didn't really work properly and didn't work on phones. The underlying technology is vastly improved.
What's gone wrong is businesses, but that's got nothing to do with the internet that's just capitalism fulfilling it's inevitable conclusion of charging for everything and letting you own nothing.
There needs to be a law that says that once a customer buys something online (e.g a movie on Netflix or a game on Steam) the company must compensate then if their access to that thing is lost due to licencing changes. They can prevent new people from gaining access to the content but they cannot revoke access to people who have already paid money.
It's soul vs soulless, not clunky vs robust. The modern Internet is arguably much more robust and secure, but the internet of yesteryear was actually pleasant to use, even if it was more prone to random crap going wrong. Each website had a unique look and feel, and things were less predatory. There wasn't as much of an arms race between companies to control every second of your attention, because they don't know yet how to harvest data generated by your usage meaningfully.
It worked fine on phones starting in 2010, but even before that it didn't because devs are lazy. Even today the number of sites that don't work on iOS is appalling (and iOS represents a massive number of clients, with a single dev target).