Main thing i miss is not having corporate media dominate online spaces. In the 90s it was still mostly hobbyists only.
Also the barrier to entry. It would take you 10 mins just to log on and post. Nowadays it’s so convenient to just brain dump. You didn’t have every jackass in the world unthinkingly sounding off 24/7.
It’s all about the Smart Phone, the ubiquity of which wasn’t a sure thing until the 2000s. That was the final straw, allowing for near instantaneous posting right from a device you had 24/7. With that the last barrier to entry was gone, all it needed was the MSM to start posting Tweets as news, validating it to the normies, then all bets were off.
It wasn't the smartphone itself those already existed,
What cause Smartphones to eventually take off was BB low cost drive and push for contracts with certain features that weren't common back then which created a wide opening for iphone an android that would be realized in just under 3 years by 2009. BB and Windows Mobile were thinking mans phones, and while WM was feature rich, the popular thing at the time were MP3 players and MP3 players that had video capabilities. The iphone and early android devices basically brought these in a low prices and affordable contracts and BB had no interest in that part of the market so those two were on fire by 2009 bringing in all those people from the mainstream consumer market in, while BB was for business users, and Windows Mobile was for Business users and tech savvy consumers, not mainstream consumers.
Once the stores opened up, the casual games started coming in, and Twitter, Facebook, and other media started reaching new heights by 2009, it was set in stone. by 2013 the market was like 800x more than it was in 2005.
