Comment by thsag

During the first bubble (1998-2000) there were Java stock ticker applets that were better than what we have today. You could already get actually cheap flights via travel sites. There was a short window where you had access to the Sabre booking system directly. Travel sites are expensive and garbage nowadays.

There were flash games that are better than what we have now. In Usenet there was real free speech.

There also was the uninteresting AOL walled garden that was quickly replaced ... by other uninteresting walled gardens. Except that everyone is now a sharecropper in some walled garden, depending on the moderator's grace and feeding AI scrapers.

The only thing that is better now is Rumble/YouTube, which depend on the vastly improved bandwidth. Ironically, YouTube also still allows far greater free speech in the comments that other platforms except for some newspaper comments sections, which also allow a lot.