Things that used to be hard and are now easy
Would be interested in also seeing a "things that used to be easy but are now hard list". Feels like basic stuff is harder now:* Privacy online* Google search for niche or exact matches* Browsing without captchas and blockers, especially if you don't adhere to big tech's rules for the internet* Sending emails without worrying about spam filters being way too aggressive* SEO before it got hacked to hell* Barrier to entry for creatives to build things on the web (for all the flaws flash had, it bridged the gap)* Finding real discussion and information. The growth of bots posting, misinformation, blogspam, and toxic echo chamber partisan discussion online (maybe it was always like this, i.e, eternal September?)* MacBooks being easier to upgrade before when things weren't soldered on* In general anti right to repair hardware* Not having to worry about dongles, i.e. connecting USB devices to your machine* Ransomware wasn't a thing. Nothing like a non-technical user needing to learn BTC or XMR to maybe get their data back* Being able to buy software once vs a subscription, e.g., photoshop* Work was easier to disambiguate from life before chat apps like Slack made employees always reachable* CGNAT not being as common* OAuth is still annoying to implement* Blocking ads was easier* Getting a job was easier for a lot of people prior to whiteboarding, leetcode tests, assignments, multi-day interviews and trials, etc. becoming more common* GDPR making infra+dev work harder because big tech companies don't understand consent and couldn't behave, also leading to performative/annoying cookie banners we see everywhere* Needing an internet connection for software+tools that used to be able to run locally on your OS* Website responsiveness was easier before all the devices and monitors with different viewports* Archival (or scraping) was easier before the majority of human generated content was placed behind login walls (fb) and rendered content needing headless browsersEdit: Call me cynical if you want—yeah some of those programmer things listed are easier now, but improvements on the core regressions I listed would help programmers (and non-programmers!) all across the world and in developing countries more than some niche highly paid SV engineers using terraform to orchestrate infra on GCP.