> 90's versions, like mbasic, of almost every website is better.
I mostly disagree and assume this is slightly hyperbolic, but I take your point. The web used to be documents, even for things that needed to be apps (like email). Now, the web is apps, even for things that should be documents.
Beyond that, the web was not the capitalist/SEO/marketer battleground that it is today, where many sites have so many costs behind them (devs, videos, etc.) that they need a boatload of ads just to try to stay in the black.
In the 90s, you could have a very popular message board with millions of pageviews a month for $30/mo.
> In the 90s, you could have a very popular message board with millions of pageviews a month for $30/mo.
You can still do that. A bare-metal dedicated server with an 4-core CPU, 32 GBs of RAM and SSDs can be rented for that price with unmetered bandwidth and it'll be more than enough to sustain that level of traffic.
