I’ve been using the Internet since the mid 1990s. It peaked around 1998-2002. It took me awhile to realize what crap it had become. These days, I stick to native apps for Maps, FB, mail, etc., plus websites that look like they’re out of the 1990s (e.g. HN, Westlaw, Google). To the extent I read the news, I get it from subscriptions on my iPad. (Mostly I just wait for my wife to fill me in based on pod casts she listens to.)
Every now and then I’ll wander into the regular Internet for something (e.g. HN links some article). Usually it’s a jarring and deeply unpleasant experience.
Consuming written content on the Internet got materially worse (I might dispute how much worse, but it's a material difference).
Consuming any other kind of content on the Internet has gotten so much better it's hard for me to imagine, in the late 1990s, predicting how good it is. I had a laptop hanging 1 hop off a default-free peering core router and never would expected this network to replace all of radio and television.
Similarly, creating any kind of content is drastically better than it has been at any other point in the history of the Internet. For 90% of what I need a word processor or spreadsheet for, free Google Apps is more convenient than MS Office on my laptop; I'll use them simply to avoid launching the app. I'm still in native apps to draw diagrams, but I bet I won't be in 5-10 years.
Finally, with respect to written content, I think you take the good with the bad, too. Specifically: in the 1990s, every news source in the world wasn't crudded up with 100mB of Javascript grinding your machine to a halt, but there was much less news on the Internet. Add the Kindle Reader back into the mix and I think we're out ahead even on this axis.
And don't forget: Flash is dead.
On balance, I think we're much better off than we used to be.
Text is really important to me. Video is nice, but I kinda was okay with cable. If I could go back to cable in exchange for JS-less everything else, I’d do it. And really, I guess I should clarify I mean the “web,” not the Internet. Obviously having 100 mbps on your phone is better than 256 kbps into your house. And I know the apps I use (including Apple TV apps) leverage those improvements. But I don’t think video is an appropriate medium for the web, because it’s usually an impoverished way to communicate information. For example, I see lots of product reviews these days are posted as videos. I hit the back button soon as I see that.
As to content creation, I guess I don’t see the point. If you told me in 1998 that two decades from now I’d be using a word processor that wasn’t any more capable than Word 97, simply more resource intensive, I would’ve thought that to be a pretty bleak prognostication.
If you’d told me that “crap for cheap” would’ve migrated from processed food and Chinese imports to the software industry, I would’ve thought that to be pretty bleak. “In the future, you’ll be using the software equivalent of a Twinkie.”
Having a fully syncs writing environment that “just works” on all of my various devices & places I write is pretty impressive to me. I’d pay a fair bit of cash for it. But it’s free! It’s easy to be cynical about that but the licenses I paid for in the 90s got me no where near that.
We're still trying to do that with the Haiku project, though we don't have time to write nearly as comprehensive engineering notes as BeOS did, though every now and again for major feature merges we get a writeup (e.g. https://www.haiku-os.org/blog/axeld/2015-07-17_introducing_l...).
The quality of most content is so poor it’s almost physically painful though. Clickbait is pervasive, divisive trolling is ubiquitous and it infects everything. Look at how hard this site has to work day in, day out, just to keep the rot at bay.
There’s an ocean of content, but most of what’s actually born online is an aggressive waste time, designed to maximize engagement and nothing else. There are 10 minute+ YouTube videos on topics that could be better encapsulated in a paragraph of the written word, but of course it’s easier to monetize the video. The pervasive online business model is industrial scale invasion of privacy, news media is teetering, blogging is suffering, forums are mostly dead.
A majority of the population visits a handful of sites like Facebook and Google, the latter of which wants to subvert email. Brandolini’s law rules, and has been turbocharged with the power of a thousand retweets and a million echo chambers. White supremacists and all other manner of kooky fucks finally have the global audience they’ve always dreamed of. Twitter and other platforms have fueled an outrage culture with the soul of a jackal and the attention span of a gnat.
I do like streaming content, but it seems like a bad trade off.
Oh yeah, and we have the security disaster that is the IoT and resulting bothers.
It's hard for me to take seriously the idea that we're in the midst of a security disaster today; I got started professionally in the mid-1990s, during an era when virtually every computer system on the entire Internet was riddled with stack overflows. It was so easy to exploit memory corruption in 1995 that you could sometimes write a code execution exploit blind.
Having politicians and lawyers micromanage technology decisions for the entire Internet? What could possibly go wrong.