It’s a hard call. Kind of chicken/egg. Without WWW/Mosaic in 1991, and a few years of UI improvements and a free labor force at universities building out the available content, AOL would have been throwing money away on its gigantic CD campaign to get internet access. The biggest draw was email and listserve back then. The rest of the internet was considered a gimmick. But since there was something to show people with a web browser, it was an easier sell.
This is some rose colored glasses IMHO.
The 90s were dominated by television, but DVRs didn’t exist so you had to sit through them. Billboards were plentiful. Print media like newspapers and magazines were absolutely jam packed with ads. Letters to the editor were full of wingnuts and assholes.
However, there were a lot of things we just didn’t talk about, which meant society was more polite, but also people swept a lot of problems under the rug. Your average white suburbanite had zero idea why black people seemed to be so angry at the police for example. The glass ceiling was just a fact of life that you didn’t talk about. The church was covering up sexual abuse but since the victims were dispersed across the country they couldn’t get their voices heard.
My comments were focused nearly solely on the internet versus then and now. Not society’s ills at large.
The idea that everything was always worse can’t hold true, simply because things have to be able to progress to worse from something.
The only thing that most people will probably agree on that sucked about the internet in the 90s were the start of pop up ads and dial up speeds.
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Mid 90s Internet was a better place except for how slow everything was. All in all we gave up too much when we let everything become centralized.
The slow speed may have helped since anything more than a banner would take too many bits so advertisers were limited in what they could do. Also, browsers were too primitive to support the obnoxious interstitials and stuff like that.
However, it was pretty damn hard to find stuff. Search engines were primitive and had relatively pitiful indexes. People who didn’t live through it don’t realize just how much of an improvement Google was when it first debuted. Plus search engine webpages had morphed into “portals” where every inch was covered into a link or ad or picture or something. One of the killer features of Google was how clean the front page was. Your bookmarks file was a precious resource because you’d never be able to find half of the stuff in it again. Having everything spread across thousands of different pages was a blessing and a curse. It wasn’t a walled garden like Facebook, but there was no good central repository for knowledge like StackExchange. Two sides of the same coin, it’s important to remember that there were issues with the old system.
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