An alternate framing for these types of "the old web was better" articles is: "I really liked the web better when only privileged, highly educated people could put up content". The reality is that there was a lot of implicit gatekeeping going on in the early web because of the technical hurdles.

The early web that many people are nostalgic for stretches to the early millennium, by which time it was pretty straightforward for ordinary people to set up a blog on a number of platforms. That era of the web was still characterized by longform text that could actually express nuance, and there was either only gentle or no monetization (as opposed to the SEO and attention economy), and that is what people are usually contrasting the later web to.

Won't it still be useful to have access to content posted by educated and well-meaning people without a direct commercial intent? The ancient original filter (access from universities) is long gone, and both low-content posts (a minor problem), and intentionally intrusive, addictive, and deceptive content (the major problem) abound.

Hence the longing for the times when this was not yet the case, and the quest for places that still maintain these qualities. (These places are often intentionally hard to find from outside; see the dead forest hypothesis.)

The era of MSN, MySpace and self/ISP-hosted pages didn't feel like gatekeeping at all; sure, there was some privilege involved (internet access still is a privilege in 2026), but there was less shame about attempting stuff.

It took less effort to setup a geocities page than a myspace account.