The internet is just stuck in stagnation. If it were dying, we would've broken free from the dopamine slot machine by now, yet we remain since technology is considered to be apart of the future. It doesn't help that social media AI is engineered to lock people into a vulnerable, manipulable state where logging off doesn't sound so simple nowadays.

Anyways, the nostalgia for old internet mostly stems from how content was new and stayed fresh longer since people would actually log off and phones didn't exist to lure people back in, not the part where it was a chaotic "wild west" of edgy, sheltered assholes that would link you to shock sites, as if it were some kind of competition, or attempt to make your computer explode somehow.

Compare this to now, where content is just endlessly recycled and regurgitated to the point where it just becomes dead to you, then the corpse lingers around because social media AI is showing it to people who haven't seen it yet. It just feels so homogenized now. I mean, it used to bewilder me when a week-old YTPMV fad was suddenly a "dead fad" for arbitrary reasons in 2012.