"Finding interesting stuff" maybe. But finding a lot of the things I used to find some years ago is just not possible anymore.
Somehow searching changed as well as the ecosystem of the web itself. The big global players dominate nearly every inch of the web and many sites look like clones of each other.
There is a lot more effort being put into censorship and also more threats to ordinary users in my opinion.
When I loved to use the web it was like a big playground and it seemed that the most people there where extremely curious and open-minded.
Today there is so much hate - no real discussion (this community is a rare anomaly considering this argument) and I think it's not about discussions for these people who spread hate. Also it's all about the money. In the earlier days people used to write blogs and create sites just for fun but today everyone wants to get some money or measurable attention (likes, views, followers etc.).
Constantly you are being bothered by advertisement which gets more invasive from time to time, cryptominers and other malicious software that creeps into your system if you just click on the wrong link.
Don't remember that from the beginnings and I'd love to experience that again some day.
All you have to do is be the change you want to see in the world. There's plenty of us out there still living the dream of the 90s. Your descriptions sound like you're still stuck on the big platforms where money rules everything. Just stop. Start hosting your website from home. Code it by hand. Don't care if anyone but you likes or sees it. It's the best you can do.
For my own services it's okay to host them from home but "the web" just doesn't work like this anymore.
Do something big and you'll want to get things like DDoS protection - talk to customers about projects and just realize that they won't scale on your mini server at home while the internet connection is much too slow and unreliable.
I have started like you describe it and I learned some things on the way but the industry and the web have changed. Of course there is tiny companies who can still get their static website from a freelancer guy but this guy has a lot more responsibility and tasks to fulfill nowadays.
In my opinion back in the 90ies you could play around in a naive way without getting hurt or hurting anyone seriously. Today it's about a lot of cash, there is more laws, censorship and other malicious entities (go back in time and tell the people about bitcoin-mining in their browser and DDoS attacks against centralized services like CDNs that bring down half of the WWW).
Put a server on the web that isn't hardened properly and have a look at the logs - this is some new level in comparison.
>Put a server on the web that isn't hardened properly
It's easy. Just don't do/enable dynamic things. There's no need for anything more than a static webserver in 99% of cases with personal websites. And static webservers ship very secure by default. There's not a lot of remote exploits in nginx or the like. It's much more risky to use a web browser with javascript enabled.
I'm wondering how far back you're going, because when I think of "the old web" I think of being intentionally misdirected to a worthless website that had temporarily won the SEO fight and "Punch The Monkey And Win A Prize" flashing ads. Not to mention popups, pop-unders, and all manner of ad-spread malware taking advantage of under-policed ad networks coupled with near monoculture of OS.
My particular need is finding particular stuff. Information.
The Google used to be very very helpful. Now I have to McGuyver it into giving me what I am looking for. Now, my Google-fu is ok, and I can do it - but it used to be trivial.
Maybe this is an artifact of the "web is too damn big!", but I suspect that Google itself is going through both organizational (not necessarily algorithmic) growing-pains, but learning what to censor and what to promote in this complex world, and we are the crash test dummies.
Which is sad - to me - because I used to like it when they just gave me what I asked for.
was when the web was for hobbyists and companies that could afford a substantial investment. Before the web was 99% professional profit-driven spammers (both automated and human).
Sadly it become a common occurrence for me lately to be working on researching problems and google giving me tons of results that only match a single word of my queries
