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I think the internet as it was, was objectively better. Even with viruses and hackers, and a higher bar to entry. Since people are forced together onto a few large platforms, they don't have any investment in them. Can you think of one person who would willfully give Reddit or Facebook money to keep existing? People did that for sites that look a lot like Moriya today, because it was made by a fan for a fan. Now, most people invested in something find it as a channel or a submenu in some massive network like Youtube or Twitter. Money has also made many things online a lot more cynical. Even hobby channels on Youtube or Instagram use terms like 'engagement' and 'retention' when discussing their channels. Though I can respect a guy who pursues his passion as his career, those are very sterile terms to describe someone. That's actually one reason I decided to get into Touhou. I followed a couple meme pages. The meme pages linked to a couple small lore channels. And none of them had any ads. They were all made because the creator just loved Remilia and Suwako, or Perfect Cherry Blossom and Subterranean Animism. There's also what @KorosKoros mentioned. There is a lot more censorship online these days, especially since the internet went from an American controlled institution to a global one. Corporations and governments have realized with the centralization of the net, its easier to manipulate and influence people. Its not really working anymore, but instead of building their own sites, most people seem to just be checking out. Fortunately, it looks like the current era of the internet is dying off. Meta, owner of Facebook and Instagram, has been constantly losing money and users, while Reddit appears to be imploding. Twitter is either evolving into its final form or is in its death throes. With their death, that hopefully means more communities will spring up in the wild, not beholden to these massive corporations which are so easily pressured.

It could be about speed, content, "feeling", everything.

reading perfect memento in strict sense, big fan of this image

I'd say 2008 - 2016 were the TRUE "Golden Years" of the internet. Now an days everyone is anti social. Both in online gaming and on forums. Its honestly kinda sad. Also back then there was a lot less censorship and internet laws.

The biggest thing that has changed is centralization, and the attitude of the people using the net. During the 90s and 00s, you needed a level of expertise to use the internet safely. Computers were expensive and could be very technical. It was the only way to keep your hardware safe from malware, viruses, hackers. As an example, one forum I adored was hacked by a person pretending to be an edgy version of the administrator. A beloved figure in early Zelda fan fiction. This person terrorized the site with ramblings, images of gore and hardcore pornography. Modern software is so complex and updated so regularly that that is not usually an issue. I can't tell you how much more varied and vibrant websites were back then. Today, there is usually one or two websites you think of for a given service or fandom. A Youtube for videos, a Facebook or Twitter for messaging, Discord or Skype for chat. It was different back then. There wasn't just shrinemaiden.com and moriyashrine.org. If a fandom was large, you could find dozens of moriyas or shrinemaidens. There were forty Zelda forums at one time, each with their own style and appearance. Some would compete with their legacy, how old they were and how many memes, compositions or fanfics they had. Others did so with a novel design, or unique features like a news feed with inside connections. All of these were fan made and maintained. There was no worries about appeasing advertisers or funders, because everything was paid for by the owner or fans. This gave fan sites an authenticity back then. Today, everything is commodified, thanks to Google adsense. Mind you, just because there were so many didn't mean all or even most were good. Some were very inactive. Months without a new post or user. Some were overcrowded. Some just had trash mods or users they'd let bully other people. Some were just old and barely worked. But if you looked, there was a site out there that fit you perfectly. People were also much more guarded over who they interacted with online. As kids, my family and friends were told you should never give your real name, appearance, ethnicity, your birthday, age, the state you lived in. Even on well regulated forums (most members of which were preteens and teens), there was always some older guy there who was from your state and thought you should totally meet up. All that changed when Facebook became a thing. Suddenly, posting your real name, address and age were not only permissible, but encouraged. The old rules of guarding your identity on forums were lost as a wave of new users were encouraged to join the site. This in turn kickstarted the era of data collection, where companies harvested user data in order to sell to advertisers and government entities. Its to the point some people don't bother hiding their identity. 'Why bother, they know all this already'. There isn't really any sense of privacy or ownership of your information, and this is not going into government data-collecting...