The post by Jeff Minter regarding developers who have to write the dark-patterns and other features which exist more to frustrate than help users also strikes a chord.
I have found myself reflecting on how I was born at a great time to live through fantastic changes in technology, from the first BBC Model B I played on in the store, the Model A that arrived at home and which my dad also grew quickly frustrated with prompting an upgrade, and then increasingly more powerful and capable machines which were fun to use for both work and recreation. The early web was delightful, despite my access to it was heavily censored in Dubai. When I returned to the UK for University I had more scope to explore, but it was my exchange trip to Canada in 1997-98 that really showed the promise of the web to a young closeted queer person.

First of there were two revelations I was introduced to early on in the co-ed residence in Canada.

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The first was this downright magical new audio compression format called MP3 - suddenly you could get an ENTIRE SONG in a couple of megabytes of storage, versus the 10MB per minute of WAV. Of course we had original Napster back then too, which demonstrated the usefulness of a searchable catalogue of songs and albums. Sure it was entirely pirated content, but I wonder whether artists "lost" more back then to folks trading songs than the much more ubiquitous music streaming services we see today which pay a pittance? I loved how easy it was to discover new music and artists - or indeed, for finding any song with wolves or moon or similar in the title so I could collect them into a Werewolf mixtape 😉

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The second thing was friends talking about this exciting new search engine called Google - it had a super clean interface, just a search field and two buttons: "Search" and "I'm feeling lucky". It was so much better than the other engines like Webcrawler or Yahoo and it quickly replaced them.

One shout out to Yahoo directories - sort of a Yellow Pages for the web - where I discovered delights, like how they had a "humour - duct tape" category of sites. These had such gems as "Duct Tape Cam" - mimicking the popular "0.3mp webcam pushing static images every half a minute" style but of an aquarium with a piece of duct tape inside (also a link to "feeding")

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Then there were the werewolf pages I discovered online! Naturally I quickly tried werewolves[dot]org and - oh look, there's an artist who goes by @TheWerewolf "I bet they have cool werewolf art." 😉

And that's how I discovered gay Were/Furry Erotica... 😅

(Okay, I should be getting breakfast and that feels a delightful cliffhanger to leave you lot on. Why don't I talk about how so very important THAT and discovering Furry in the mid-90s was later to helping me develop, also to give an easy out, because darn if we haven't seen the Livejournal ability to group followers by levels of sharing/over-sharing we are happy with - Google+ had "Circles" later which seemed similar, except no one I knew used the platform)