This decentralized, open, neutral, and permissionless platform was very powerful and has unlocked a lot of innovation and content, but not without its own limitations.
The 3 main problems were:
1. difficulty in publishing content,
2. lack of discoverability, and
3. no built-in finance feature.
1. As you can imagine, setting up a web server in the 90s, and creating and sharing content was hard. It was needed to buy a server, write program code, and do a lot of nerd stuff. There was no WordPress or AWS. So, yes, the Internet reduced the ‘political’ barrier of entry to content publishing, but there was yet a technical barrier. If you weren’t a computer scientist or at least tech-savvy, all you could do was read content over the Web.
2. In the early days, there was no discoverability, i.e algorithmic timeline suggesting new content, which increased drastically the difficulty of content distribution.
You had to discover new sites by asking directly to your friends or searching on Google-like Web-search tools, limiting the potential of this open platform.
3. The last limitation was the absence of financial features built into the Internet. There was no way to transfer money natively on the Web.
These technological flaws led to an explosion of solutions that ushered in what we call Web 2: centralized platforms focused on good UX, seamless content creation, convenience, network effect, scale, and content discoverability.