I don't know how many people here play WoW, and have since the beginning or close to the beginning. I never made this comparison before but reading through the comments on this topic has really shown me how similar my experiences through WoW are to the transition from pre-internet era to internet era.
I started playing WoW in 2007, during The Burning Crusade. That was the first expansion of WoW, and while there were a lot of cool features in it that vanilla WoW didn't, it was still very basic compared to what WoW is today. A lot of players often look back at vanilla and TBC with fond memories, and I can see why now. It's a lot like how life was before cell phones, Google, etc.
Vanilla WoW didn't have flying. Flying was introduced in TBC. Before flying, in order to get anywhere in the world you had to use your ground mount or talk to an NPC that would fly you to where you wanted. This resulted in a low of epic world PvP skirmishes and battles. We never see any of that anymore because people now simply fly from point A to B, avoiding everything in between.
Vanilla WoW and TBC were really amazing from a community point of view. We didn't have a player finder feature then so in order to group with other players for group content, you either had to have friends or you had to find players on your server. Which could sometimes take a long time. But that allowed you to get to know your server. It really built a community because players had to interact with players on their own server. So people knew each other. Now, with the player finder feature, you can find all the players you need for your group content without ever having to leave the city or post anything in the chat channels. There is simply zero reason to interact with non-guildmate players on your server.
There are other examples but I'm keeping this short because I think I've already written enough and I don't think anyone's even going to read this. Plus, these are two of the biggest examples. The changes made to WoW over the years are really amazing quality of life changes, don't get me wrong. It wasn't always fun crossing the continent on your ground mount because you hadn't discovered the flying checkpoint in your destination. Nor was it always fun wasting two hours looking for a tank. Just like how we look back fondly at using encyclopedias and Encarta 95 to do our research, we knowledge that Google is far superior. Recently Blizzard mentioned something about a pristine server and I'm really excited about the concept.