[Laminar]

I'd posit that they've already passed.

- Extreme pressure for monetization to the point where every video, article, and piece of content is plagued with ads, sponsored product placement, and overly intrusive, pushy recommendations.
- In service of the above, the push for increased engagement means pop-ups on every page, rewards clubs, mailing lists you didn't sign up for, unending junk email, "like, comment, subscribe, and RING THAT BELL, BITCH."
- The prevailing VC/startup strategy of "build a userbase then drive profitability" is at the core of the Enshittification movement that actively pushes all online services toward being both too expensive and also horrible to use.
- We've been through enough cycles of web sites, services, and image hosts, that any link or image more than 10 or so years old is probably dead by now.
- Search engines are no longer engines that show you what you asked for, they are additional revenue streams that sacrifice usability in favor of increased profitability. So the basic function of the internet (find information) is hidden behind a layer of ad impressions, clicks, and more engagement begging.
- The popularity of social media and the subsequent decline in forum participation is a huge blow to grassroots information generation, retention, and user-to-user community. Even forums are being heavily monetized now with a company camping out urls and hoarding info (see: Mustang6G.com, Mustang7G.com, etc.), then once a userbase is built up, start the enshittification process by bloating the site with ads and requiring vendors to pay up before mentioning anything for sale. All the while they offer nothing that an existing Mustang forum didn't already offer, so now you have a fractured userbase and information is split, lost, or not shared. Bad for the community, good for the guy who runs the forum.
- The explosion in AI-created content means an increase in content, but a decline in quality, accuracy, and the ability to assume any content you're reading or persona you're interacting with was created in good faith.

I'd also posit that the glory days weren't the first 10-15 years.

- Waiting several minutes for a single page to load was excruciating, so the widespread availability of >56K internet was a huge improvement.
- PC hardware that can load sites and content in a Snappy™ fashion is a huge usability improvement.
- "This site best viewed in Internet Explorer" - Fun fact, I got no federal college student aid because we filled out the form in Netscape Navigator and it did not submit, though we could not tell that it did not submit. We're not totally out from under different browsers viewing the web differently, but for the past 10+ years everyone but Microsoft has been fine.
- Adoption of HTML5 made web appearance more standardized and reduced processing load (and finally killed Flash).
- Pop-ups. Ohhhh the pop-ups. Combine that with hardware struggling to load a few pages simultaneously and you could find yourself stuck for several minutes with a series of...unsavory windows that refuse to close. I seriously have a recurring nightmare of a bunch of compromising pop-ups on a screen that I can't close and someone is looking at my screen. It's like...a core trauma for me.

So maybe...2012ish? What do you think? When was the internet really good? When did it take a turn? Was it September 1993? The decline of Usenet? The advent of Facebook? Are we there now? Are things only getting better?

[Spheric Harlot]

The early 2000's I guess.

Catscan, everybody discovering this fantastic new resource, (re-)connecting with people, building networks across continents.

Before clickbait made it impossible to discern actual information from deliberate infuriation, and when Google was still useful and showed information that reflected what was actually available, not what Google thought they could most easily sell me or their paying clients.

And long before automated content farms began polluting the results into complete uselessness.

[subego]

Maybe around the iPhone 5. As in, the point where mobile stopped being a parlor trick, but before we knew the phenomenon was to become the eternal September final boss.

[Laminar]

I suppose another inflection point I'd add is the transition to portrait-based content. As monetization drives content creation, and the primary source of monetization is either VC startups or the Chinese government, content is going to follow the money. I can view portrait or landscape content on my phone with no change in experience quality. Portrait content on my computer or TV is significantly worse than landscape.

[Thorzdad]

The 90s. It was like a nice little neighborhood where everyone was interesting, friendly, and polite. It was so much fun. I met so many cool people online back then, in various little communities. My main one was called Firefly.

[ghporter]

I’d put the “sweet spot” somewhere between near-universal 56k modems and ISP that worked with them, and the complete bottoming out of the dot com scams bubble.

ISPs made it easy to connect to the whole ‘Net, and when they stopped charging extra (as a few had done) for “high speed” dialup access, (many/most) pages were already tweaked for decent download experiences, so things ran “well.” As far as we knew, anyway.

Then the dot com “thing” happened. Money people who had no idea what the pitch meant threw money at convincing schmucks who either had great dreams with crappy business acumen, or dreams of the greatest scam ever. The latter were rare, but audacious. There were a number of “back office net businesses” that were entirely bogus, but most public-facing business ideas (almost all of which tanked no matter how hard the idea folks worked) were nearly always genuine. Except nobody had a clue how to do market research for a product that didn’t exist AND broke entirely new tech ground.

So there were some amazing - and sadly, short-lived - Internet businesses and services. And a bunch were not-so amazing…remember Cue:cat? (I actually have a bunch of those, since they are real barcode readers, but with hardware hijinks that one has to overcome before they have a useful USB (or PS2!!!) barcode reader.)

The result is what we have today: I want all of it free, but if you convince me that I’m really getting it free despite the actual charges to my card, you have me.

[MacNNFamous]

I think it was gradually improving overall, but I know at what point it started declining:

September 2006.

Why? Because facebook dropped the .edu requirement to join. The internet was cool before facebook, but it was not really 'local'. Myspace was a thing for a brief moment, but their lack of control and customization of people's pages was a bad idea, as dropouts and druggies would add so many gifs and bullshit to their pages they barely loaded. Facebook was clean, and VERY local in the beginning, it was pretty much only used by college students, and we used it to share house party information, candid photos from canon quickshot cameras since nobody had camera phones that were worth anything yet, and occasionally to collaborate on group projects.

But for some reason, they dropped the .edu requirements and started letting in the unwashed masses. From that point forward, everything got worse as more and more boomers and mouth breathers/walking dunning kruger effects joined, and started sharing their fucking retarded ignorant mildly racist memes with each other. Obviously fox news was fanning the flames, but giving all these dipshits 'easy' online access, and 'easy' ways to share their stupid fucking ideas and like and support each other and create/join groups for their dumb bullshit will be marked down in human history of the beginning of the great decline.

[Thorzdad]

Originally Posted by ghporter 

...pages were already tweaked for decent download experiences, so things ran “well.” As far as we knew, anyway.

Those days when pretty much anyone could bolt-together their own webpage using simple html? Man, I miss that so much. ISPs (including a then-nascent Comcast) provided hosting as part of their internet access. Surfing the web was like strolling through a very fun, eclectic neighborhood.

Now it’s like you’re trapped in some kind of post-apocalyptic shopping mall, and even the most rudimentary, basic webpage now has miles of code under the hood for some unfathomable reason.