We have been going downhill ever since we left the terminal. Back in the Windows 9x days it was still pretty good, but once we entered the web app era, people lost their minds. I'm constantly flabbergasted by the sheer amount of wasted space in modern apps, as well as the constant user-hostile design choices and an apparent allergy to putting text content on a page. Thankfully HN has not succumbed.
The 90’s were weird because people still had hope, I think, that UI could be advanced in a direction that helped get actual work done. So they kept trying to make professional-appropriate, high-information-density UIs.
Now we’re bifurcated into toy UI for people who don’t have any idea what they are doing, and terminal interfaces. This is probably the only way to do things. But it does seem like a bit of a retreat.
