I am definitely not the only person who thinks that. There are many people who share similar sentiments, maybe even including you, dear reader.
Nostalgia is a very common feeling, just look at how many Russians want the USSR back! Having been born in 2005, I pretty much grew up with the internet going mainstream, with YouTube being created the same year I was born.
Back when it was new, it was mainly used by hobbyists that wanted to show off pirated anime episodes cool and/or funny things they made for fun. (Forgive me if this just sounds like a rose-tinted petty bourgeois fantasy.)
Then you know what happened next. Like so many fun stuff under capitalism, like JoeMarx has mentioned recently with video games, the internet was commodified and made into a dumbed-down addictive tool for instant gratification, all for profit.
EDIT: I am referring specifically to web culture, not the actual technology of the internet.
Nostalgia is partly an indicator that current environment is so shit that it can’t just be reformed or tweaked to get to a better place. Instead the best solution that people want is to time travel back to before it all took a nosedive and restart from there.
Exactly, people don’t get nostalgic for the times when their life sucked.
That’s not entirely true. My childhood was completely shit and I still feel nostalgia towards it. I think fondly of the poverty meals we got fed, even though I know they tasted fucking terrible.
I guess it would be more correct to say that it’s perception of life sucking that really matters. As kids we don’t really have a lot of expectations for the world, but as we grow up we start being able to contextualize things more.