Spoiler (I apologize for what I said when I was 11)
old enough to bang your mum, hahaha
No, seriously. I think many would agree that the internet user experience peaked some time after Google entered the scene (yes, officer, right down this sub) but before YouTube left every serious competitor behind. There was a lot of “small web” content with no clear commercial intent (not blasting you with two affiliate links and one video ad per paragraph). Many of the big platforms were controlled by the techies who set them up and not yet by the venture capital who would eventually buy them out. Yet, venture capital already kept these firms afloat, so a lot of genuinely good services were genuinely free for the user and not paywalled or privacy-paywalled (just give us your email address and IP, bro, trust us bro, just one more captcha, bro, maybe one more 2FA using your phone number, bro, really, we might even let you visit our site then). Of course, someone had to pay up eventually: Enshittification ensued.
A second aspect: For the past decade at least, democratic-presenting governments have used all our web data fed into clandestine technology to win elections, either to stay in power or get into power and pull up the ladder behind them. I guess it’s like that old saying: A small time criminal robs a bank, a big time criminal owns a bank. Sure, we had all sorts of amateur criminals on the web in the predotcom and dotcom era and that might’ve cooled down a bit since. But now all the big players are adversarial, instead.
Edit: Typo in spoiler tag




That’s a completely fair opinion, even though I would argue that Google pagerank is a genuinely revolutionary piece of code that has, taken on its own, made the internet a better place.