Simpler? Most Assuredly!
Before WWW, the newsgroups, chat rooms, and messaging like FIDONET had short, clear coherent exchanges of ideas. But with access by the masses, half the stuff is pure dreck! FR not excluded.
Without being too sarcastic, nowadays if I said a had a truly enjoyable fart, twenty people would let me know it was God's will, fifty would let me know I'm a crude SOB,another twenty would blame it on Clinton, five would give me the history of the most memorable farts and two would remind me of my constitutional right to fart.
Things change, not improve.
yeah .. between straying/digressing off topic to outright highjacking a thread things have changed. I do enjoy all the new features the net has to offer but filtering through the flotsam is a royal pain. Do you remember going from Unix to early web surfing with lynx ? Took me forever to let go of my unix shell account. The thought of using that experimental "Mosaic" graphical browser seemed soo odd then. But it beats the multiple steps I use to have to go through to re-assemble an asci file back to binary so I could enjoy a picture of a barely covered lovely lady !