I think there are certain aspects of the modern internet that make it a worse place, even for all of the massive benefit and improvement from the early days. I’m mostly going to stick with social media, because initially it was a really interesting thing that quickly turned toxic and tbh I think when historians look back at this period, they’ll probably be able to point to a significant amount of societal damaged caused by it.
Like in the early days of myspace and even Facebook, it was a legit helpful way to connect with friends and catch up with people. Where I think it goes off of the rails is when you get to algorithmic timelines. Facebook in particular I think is very nearly directly responsible for a lot of the political divide we see today because of this. If you poll just about any issue, you’ll find that the US is trends about 70% left/progressive. Most people want universal healthcare, reasonable gun legislation, etc. But on Facebook, which probably has more of a representative sample of Americans than anyone else, you would frequently find that 7-10 out of the top posts were conservative wack jobs. One of the things that drove me to stop using the site entirely around 15-16 was that my friend group of mostly lefties somehow led to half or more of my TL being the small fraction of family or work acquaintances with right wing fringe nonsense takes.
You can kind of see this happening with reddit in real time right now. In 2010, you stared with the subs you wanted to see, things were democratically upvoted, and there was no algo outside of the users to speak of. Reddit has slowly been moving away from that, often surfacing things that you have no interest in because “engagement.” I have a pretty strong suspicion this was one of the driving factors in killing third party clients - they still mostly presented content the old way without shoving a bunch of crap in your face. Twitter went through the same. People used to complain about twitter being a cesspool, and I never had that because I always used a third party client and just followed people who’s stuff I wanted to see. And if they ventured too far into the sort of lunatic fringe, pruning them was easy and I could continue seeing the type of content I wanted. Now with no third party clients, there is just no way to not see this kind of nonsense on twitter, hence I haven’t for many months now.
Now, this is just not the way most people are going to engage with things on the internet. Like, just look at most people’s phones for fuck’s sake. A zillion notifications and badges for things that no one should care about. It doesn’t occur to most people that you can even avoid this kind of thing.
Anyway, lots of cool things about the modern internet, the type of social media most are using ain’t it though.