Interesting. My frame of reference for the internet started in 1998, after "eternal september" and the earlier culture. Which makes me curious about baseline expectations.
I agree many aspects are growing... overtly bad. I think LLMs are well on their way to rendering the mainstream internet, search, and social media effectively worthless. The signal to noise ratio is unfixable.
I still get value from my habits, which haven't changed for decades: niche forums, personal websites, blogs, podcasts, youtube. I would be satisfied as long as those remained more or less intact, the rest can go. Requires a lot of curation though.
More hostile as in... you open some random webpage, you get 3 popup windows with porn ads playing at full volume? And when you close them, infinitely more open, like a hydra, until it locks up and you have to reboot.
Or you drop into a public game of CS, and a dozen teens start screaming at you over low bitrate compressed audio streams, to logoff and kill yourself because you sound like an n-word.
This was my internet experience in 1999. I think the derangement has been a constant over time.