Have you notice how corporations took over the internet ?
I am a web dev and designer from 2008 ...i remember the internet being more human / person to person even chatting was fun back in '00 ...now the internet ...it's like a giant platform to do propaganda / advertise / spam and for narcissists to showoff on social networks like insta and fbook ...in my opinion we need to do something to get the vibe and freedom back ... else small businesses will have 0 chance against corporations and people will be continue to be programmed in to thinking the internet should be like it is now.
I feel you and I very much miss the haphazard internet of the early 2000s as well. The consolidation of a lot of small websites into giant platforms, while probably more user friendly, came at a great loss of personality and freedom.
It's similar to bitcoin when the movement started ... it was fun ,now di.ks with suits (fund managers ) started to hoard it...sure it is 50k now ,but you can't use it for the reason it was created... to be a currency...
Hoarding is not the problem; not even the involvement of fund managers and banks in itself is. The danger we are facing is the cryptocurrency ecosystem itself turning into walled gardens. There's three fronts from which this can affect us and unfortunately there's activity on all three of them: (1) overregulation by governments and financial institutions, possibly followed by them trying to enforce their own centralized digital currencies, (2) consolidation into a small handful of exchanges and services that integrate themselves vertically into the ecosystem, possibly also followed by them trying to enforce their own centralized digital currencies (looking at you, Binance) and (3) end user complacency leading to a market focus on aforementioned centralized digital currencies or those that are pretty close to being centralized.
Right now the ecosystem still looks largely healthy, albeit arguably overvalued in some parts (the latter being nothing new for crypto). Some developments look rather worrying, then again Bitcoin has mastered worse. Overall all we can really do as a community is uphold our values, let our wallets speak accordingly and hopefully the rest will follow. Be the change we want to be, so to speak.
Fortunately, Bitcoin was built to make such takeover hard. To make it even harder, we need to stick to its good ideals and make sure the potential hijackers can only develop things along the ideals
Bitcoin yes, the cryptocurrency market as a whole not so much. As long as Bitcoin remains king I'm not worried, but beyond that consolidation and platformization is just around the corner.
The shift has definitely happened, from where the Internet was used as an educational and productive platform ....
Wait, are we talking about the same internet?
In terms of being a time waster and spreading questionable information the internet was always bad; it's just that in some respects the mass consumed content got worse. However I believe that's largely due to the internet's audience having become larger and more diverse over the years, leading to a lower common denominator (e.g. cat memes and sexy selfies) which is further amplified by the consolidation of platforms.