Comment by zzgo

BBSes were fun, and I had a good time exploring the mid 90s internet, between Gopher, FTP sites, Usenet, and eventually websites, there was always something worth checking out.

I don't know when it stopped being fun, I don't recall hating Facebook in 2008, but I do know that it had pissed me off on more than one occasion by 2012.

I think community building is what's been missing or done badly for the last 15+ years. I can find a few subreddits where I like the community, but Discord and similar have never worked for me. I don't think that live chat suits my temperament. I also suspect that up and down votes have been corrosive for social media in general.

I don't know that you can get the feeling back without either building and maintaining your own communities using the tools the corporatized Internet makes available to you, or finding and participating in the communities that you like. I do know that five years ago when the fediverse was a topic of conversation that there was a thread that content moderation and curation was going to be the only valuable work to be done in social media.

tl;dr: I suspect it's a community building and maintenance problem, not a coding problem.