I feel like the reason I hate the modern internet and long for the “old” is more than generational

The modern internet is “imitative”. You find something you like (or think others will like), you hide it, and you do it yourself. Everything is a copy of a copy. TikTok, Instagram, etc are literal tools for cheap, low effort reproduction. You won’t discover anything, and if you do, no one will care

Vine will never exist again, because it was the final social network before everything became imitation

The internet I grew up with was “curatorial”. You found things, you saved them, you were excited to show them to people. Delicious, StumbleUpon, Digg, etc were places to share things that had been discovered. Your clout was weird things you knew about and could find. The internet felt like adventure