Holy crapballs, yeah it was! I remember when I learned HTML in 1996 and put up one of those blinkety animated GIF homepages on the hosting space given (for free!) by my local dial-up ISP. They had a local chatroom and I spent hours and hours chatting with locals from the same city--even met some of them! I read the hacker's manifesto and about phreaking and all of that stuff, found Usenet, played Quake over 33.6kbps dialup with a 300ms ping and still wiped the floor with people. I remember when mp3's came out. It took me 5 mins to download my first one. C&C music factory--everybody dance now!
But that's just nostalgia part. The reality is that nowadays the internet is ad-laden crapware/spyware that is scheming every second of every day to get you to do something--sign up for something, buy something, like something, rate something. Your eyeballs, your likes, your hates, your friends, your vices and quirks, are worth billions to multi-national corps who hope to never have to give you customer service, who keep you at AI-defended arms-length, but will happily sell your attention (won through their latest crack-like invention) to the highest bidder.
It feels like the internet is infested with the worst of human carnival barkers and con-artists these days.