Probably asking for people to be educated on the difference as to what they’ve missed out from the internet back then compared to today. I think I have a good perspective since I’m one of the few out there who’ve been around the internet for three of its decades and have seen it develop into what it became.
For one thing, the internet wasn’t reliant on Cloudflare and it was fine. Try to imagine an internet, where you weren’t prompted by a stupid Cloudflare verification check that has a 50/50 chance of it failing. Captcha did exist back then but was no where near as annoying as it’s been designed to now. The only thing between you and getting into your account was a password. Nothing else. No stupid verification codes having to be sent to your phone or whatever else.
And it was fine.
Social Media was tamed. If we could only go back to where it was just Reddit, Facebook and MySpace, then things would be fine. Because that was all that we needed. Now we just have too many and it’s all saturated. Plus the versions of all of those platforms were at their best back then, no where near their broken malformed selves now.
It’s not used as a way to maximize profit i.e., the most income out of the least spending.
For example, a reasonable amount of ads were tolerated to keep the website running. Now, you have streaming services who want you to spend to watch a show for ads. Not only they get the price of admission from you, but they also get paid by ad providers for the same viewers to look at product placements.
If I try to be more concise, it’s the extent of an ordinary user able to be an autonomous actor, able to make their own decisions, while they are in the internet.