But that's how it's presented, not content. Look I dislike 5mb pages with 2 paragraphs of text content as much as the next guy, but if I had to choose between that and 1000 shitty Geocities 'personal homepages' and the vast wealth of information that can be found on the internet today, I'd choose today in a heartbeat.

How can someone claim with a straight face "but the web really was a lot more fun pre-dotcom-bubble" ? Good luck trying to find anything outside of nerd subculture and physics/math/CS content (exaggeration of course, but the core is true). (of course it could be 'true' if all one cares about is nerd subculture and physics/math/CS content...)

There is little actual content in present day Internet relative to its size. Look, what is produced on those websites that also tend to carry heavy presentation is not content. Real content is Wikipedia, or Hacker News, or various people and their various topical subpages, personal blogs, up and including stuff hosted at Geocities and Tripod Lycos. What is not content is most of the stuff that's created for money, including majority of today's "journalism". Information that is shallow, false and/or useless, and that exists only to make you click or buy.

90% of for-profit content could disappear just like that, and humanity would be much better off. Every information that is valuable, you can almost always find for free, posted by people who don't try to use you.

I don't care about content/download size ratio, I care about content (quantity and quality) in absolute size. Download speeds have progressed faster than page bloat.

Wikipedia didn't exist in 1999 (not for years, and even Slashdot was barely more than a gossip site. Good quality discussion back then was on usenet or irc. The concept of a 'mooc' was just a wet dream of some 'cypherpunks' and 'technoanarchists'. Download a manual for your microwave or car, do online banking, email anyone but your hardcore nerd friends? Forget it. Price comparison shopping, ordering something from another continent? Lol. I remember riding my bike to a local bank branch to pick up foreign currency, which I stuffed into an envelope and snailmailed. Had to ask at the counter of the post office how much the postage was, because there was no way to look that up online.

Mp3? Sort of existed, you could download song by song from geocities pages; that was before the crackdown that led to Napster even. But the "selection" was minuscule, compared to today.

Oh and back then, when you wrote a site, you chose between supporting ie or netscape, or browser sniffing and serving two versions, or sticking to yhe lowest common denominator which wasn't much, to put it mildly. Ffs people won 'best of the web' awards for html that worked on two browsers and didn't look like crap! Like obscure competitions today where you build a file that is both a pdf and a jpg! My first job, back around that time, was to 'port' a website from ie to netscape.

The more I think about, the more convinced I get - any claim that it was better in those days is just rose-colored glasses.

I didn't make any claims about the things you are talking about, only that it was more fun. Which it was. It's boring now. I used to go poke around, following random links just to see what was out there, encountering all kinds of oddball pages which represented nothing more than some person's individual gift to the world, and it was fascinating. It was fun to watch it all grow. I felt motivated to contribute, to share my own pages full of whatever information or opinions I happened to have. Photos of interesting places, stories about cities I'd visited, didn't matter; it all seemed like it was worth sharing, because that's what the web basically was.

I don't find that anymore. Homepages came and went, blogs came and went, and if there's still a thriving web out there beyond the big commercial sites, I don't know where to look to find it.

I still have my personal site, and I still post on my blog occasionally, but it increasingly feels like calling into the wind. I'm not going to just switch over and post all the same stuff on some big commercial site; fuck that. The web was awesome when it looked like it was going to be a new way for humanity to talk to itself; now it seems like little more than another way for rich people to make money. It does that very impressively, but who cares? Rich people always had ways to make money and will always find more; it's not very exciting when they turn yet another collaborative community project into a profit center.

Remember Usenet? Ah the good old days.

Bandwidth was more scarce too. If not for the commercial explosion the Qwests and Level 3s of the world would not have spent billions laying fiberoptics.