Not really. It was doomed the moment it stopped being a place for mere exchange of information and messages and turned into a marketplace. It is the profit motive that has given rise, directly or indirectly, to every good and bad thing about the modern web. Unfortunately profit motive is completely amoral. And it isn't going away. So what we need are more restrictions and regulations. And a paradigm shift back to doing more things more enjoyably in meat-space.

Yes, it really has been downhill since then. I wish js apps just had their own protocol and port. js://js.server.tld could open up your js browser and you could use that when it was something you needed. Then you could just trust browsing around the normal web, knowing its just documents.

it's part of it, but to me the issue is when society started to reimplement itself on top of www.

now we get loads of bad news websites, shallow overgrown aesthetic trends pushed as social advances, perpetual ads ..

I'm old enough to remember when our pre-bubble, pre-amazon "web"team found about javascript via the web monkey website with it's animated moving arms! Prior, all interaction was via CGI or SSI. I still remember a web teacher at a university teaching a side course, telling us never to use javascript, and showed the NBA site and others. Then a student raised his hand: NBA uses javascript. And the prof, said, "Oh, I have javascript turned off, so I didn't know".

I kind of think it has more to do with organizations like Facebook vs. some particular technology itself. It's the way corporatists want to control everything in order to create money rivers that flow only to them.