And in totality, it's not a bad thing - people that would probably have a boring job all their lives otherwise have built their wealth and connections, and the audience has been entertained. But money sucked the fun out of it.

Maybe I was a special case even then, but I wanted a place of my own. A place running a Unix type operating system and permanently connected to the internet with a fixed IP address, like those places of old. I've actually had this for 25+ years.

Accces to those "places" from a device in your pocket didn't change any of that.

Nowadays it's become the anonymous "cloud". Nobody knows how it works, or where the server is or who runs it.

Nowadays the vBulletin forums have been replaced by subreddits, the IRC servers by Discord channels etc.

It's concentrated the people all in these few platforms which then gives the platform owners (and subreddit/channel moderators) an incredible amount of power and just made everything feel more homogenous and corporate.

There's benefits to this, but the main con is that now everyone wants everything to look the same and the fun of the internet disappeared. Everything's a product, nothing's an experience.

Do you think this might also be related to recent people’s estrangement from housing?

Housing seems to become a commodity as other things…

The Internet was just another network, albeit one that worked more reliably (most of the time) and with less configuration effort (most of the time) than UUCP. I didn't "go to the Internet", it was just another path to the computer on my desk, the most convenient way to get USENET. If I "went anywhere", it was deliberate, using Gopher or WAIS to find things then "visiting" a place with ftp. Or telnet.

The only "other place" I had then was the VT220 (? It's been a while) in the basement with the Gandalf (? ditto) modem, eventually replaced with a PC and a Hayes (? ditto bis). I had to physically go somewhere to access work, but then again, I had to physically go somewhere to access work even without remote/home access.

My then-me would say that the author confuses the Internet with "the world wide web as accessed from a personal device".

Perhaps if one was just the right age at just the right time, the Internet Was a Place, but for anyone before and anyone after it was just was and just is.

As much as I think Google, Facebook etc... should be removed - that view shown in the article is also strange. It assumes that we all had "intentions", all of the time; and now that we don't have those intentions. That's not true.

For instance, searching for news was always one big thing with the old internet too. How old is the BBC website? I am sure it is old. Same with many other websites.

I remember when Wikipedia was founded in 2001: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Wikipedia

That is not necessarily the "old" internet as I would call it, since I refer there more to the 1990s, but still it was at the tail-end. Clearly people had a requirement or need to find articles and read up on staff, already before 2001. But you did not always necessarily have "intentions" all the time. Browser games were quite popular in the late 1990s. Also Java Applet games too. And of course commerce as well, though possibly not as convenient as amazon initially was (before succumbing to the prime slop). Amazon was launched in 1995.

Today's internet has various problems, largely created by, say, youtube owned by Google trying to get people "connected" on the platform 24/7. But we should not have nostalgia kick in too much when looking back at the old internet. There was no "embodied experience" - I would not even know what that should be. It may have been slower but you had broadband connection in the 1990s too, as I had that. I never used model dial-up (though, perhaps very early on ... but for the most part no, just broadband).