What's something that has improved with age?

Education and the state of knowledge.

Wikipedia. Stack Exchange. Sci-Hub. Khan Academy. All the various history and science channels on YouTube. Search engines, even. Just about the sum of humanity's knowledge is indexed, searchable, and at the fingertips of anyone with a connection to the Internet (an increasingly lower barrier).

I have never not known a time where I cannot learn anything, at almost any time, from almost anywhere. And even if pure knowledge along isn't enough to understand a complex topic, very often, you can count on being able to find a high-quality explanation via YouTube, a blog post from someone in a relevant field, or what have you.

It's not just knowledge that is more accessible - formal education is getting a bump up, too. Substantial amounts of college courses put together and taught by the best professors in the world have been released to the public for free. High school, similarly, has been supplemented by online teachers and curriculums, who again, are nothing short of the best (looking at you, Sal Khan and Grant Sanderson).

Also, any movie starring Nicolas Cage.

Inclusiveness.

When I was younger, homophobia and sexism were the languages of masculinity. Any expression of acceptance was met with violent accusations. The things my colleagues said were so bad I don't even want to reproduce here.

I'm not going to say that remains entirely in the past, but things are visibly better. It is more common for young teenagers to express their sexuality with less fear of reprisal. And the young people around me are always giving me valuable lessons on how it is possible for us to evolve, love, and accept.

My generation was taught to be violent and fear the difference. Our cartoons were all about violence. Our whole culture was about solving things with fists, guns, whatever. It is sometimes heartwarming to see how that is frequently not the case anymore.

I'm not saying things are perfect and there is nothing to be improved. I'm saying things are better, at least in my social groups.

YouTube.

For all the shit a lot of social media is getting, YouTube is the main one I can think of that has massively improved since its birth. Google actually succeeded with a product / acquisition.

The content on youtube, and the quality and wealth of content especially, rivals wikipedia. Of course there's a lot of bad shit on it as well but YouTube makes curation easy.

I hear a lot of flak from people who don't actively curate and i get it, but I really wish I could invite people to a well-curated youtube homepage so you can see how much is out there.

In the mean time I'm doing the next best thing and posting the best videos i come across here on Tildes :)

https://tildes.net/user/Adys/search?type=topic&q=Videos

In the same vein as your "The Network" reference, I draw upon Thomas Carlyle's essay "Sign of the Times" from 1829.

Especially this section,

Were we required to characterise this age of ours by any single epithet, we should be tempted to call it, not an Heroical, Devotional, Philosophical, or Moral Age, but, above all others, the Mechanical Age. It is the Age of Machinery, in every outward and inward sense of that word; the age which, with its whole undivided might, forwards, teaches and practises the great art of adapting means to ends. Nothing is now done directly, or by hand; all is by rule and calculated contrivance. For the simplest operation, some helps and accompaniments, some cunning abbreviating process is in readiness. Our old modes of exertion are all discredited, and thrown aside. On every hand, the living artisan is driven from his workshop, to make room for a speedier, inanimate one. The shuttle drops from the fingers of the weaver, and falls into iron fingers that ply it faster. The sailor furls his sail, and lays down his oar; and bids a strong, unwearied servant, on vaporous wings, bear him through the waters. Men have crossed oceans by steam; the Birmingham Fire-king has visited the fabulous East; and the genius of the Cape were there any Camoens now to sing it, has again been alarmed, and with far stranger thunders than Gamas. There is no end to machinery. Even the horse is stripped of his harness, and finds a fleet fire-horse invoked in his stead. Nay, we have an artist that hatches chickens by steam; the very brood-hen is to be superseded! For all earthly, and for some unearthly purposes, we have machines and mechanic furtherances; for mincing our cabbages; for casting us into magnetic sleep. We remove mountains, and make seas our smooth highways; nothing can resist us. We war with rude Nature; and, by our resistless engines, come off always victorious, and loaded with spoils.

He also goes on to write about how the rich are getting richer, and the poor are getting even poorer!

What wonderful accessions have thus been made, and are still making, to the physical power of mankind; how much better fed, clothed, lodged and, in all outward respects, accommodated men now are, or might be, by a given quantity of labour, is a grateful reflection which forces itself on every one. What changes, too, this addition of power is introducing into the Social System; how wealth has more and more increased, and at the same time gathered itself more and more into masses, strangely altering the old relations, and increasing the distance between the rich and the poor, will be a question for Political Economists, and a much more complex and important one than any they have yet engaged with.

I'll cherry pick a few more statements that are quite succinct with our current sign of the times:

No individual now hopes to accomplish the poorest enterprise single-handed and without mechanical aids; he must make interest with some existing corporation, ".." Philosophy, Science, Art, Literature, all depend on machinery. No Newton, by silent meditation, now discovers the system of the world from the falling of an apple;

When we can drain the Ocean into mill-ponds, and bottle-up the Force of Gravity, to be sold by retail, in gas jars; then may we hope to comprehend the infinitudes of man's soul under formulas of Profit and Loss; and rule over this too, as over a patent engine, by checks, and valves, and balances.

While there are moments in this essay that drag and get quite religious and metaphorical (for quite a long time) almost everything written can be applied to today, more so than ever and when looking back you can see how minuscule it really was in his time compared to ours.

This is somewhat debatable because it was already so good at release, but I’m going to say Super Mario 64.

First and foremost, a lot of early 3D games have aged really poorly. Bad cameras, bad level design, poor graphics and draw distance, and just a sort of overall clumsiness defined so many of the 3D games of that time as developers were first grappling with how to incorporate that extra dimension in their games. It was a time of growing pains for the medium, many of which have gotten far worse with age, but Mario 64 is still relatively painless even by modern standards.

It’s not just that the game didn’t age badly though, but that so much more has been done with it. It is a centerpole of speedrunning. Twenty five years after its release, people are still setting new world records. People have made an astounding amount of insightful content about the game’s functionality. People are beating it blindfolded. People have made romhacks with entirely new campaigns and even multiplayer. People have ported Super Mario Sunshine into 64’s engine. People have added raytracing to the game.

This is all but a tiny scratch of the surface of Super Mario 64. There is so much more out there that has arisen since its release. It’s not fair to say that this sort of thing applies to Mario 64 alone, since there are other retro games that have been given comparable love, but I feel that Super Mario 64 is probably the one with the most noteworthy and persistent presence.

The internet makes publishing most things from games to animations to music (now you can make music without needing to learn instruments!) to old music to your thoughts on things (in the social media sense) to your thoughts on things (on an independent journalism/blogging sense) that today we have the problem of competition and verifiability of information rather than accessibility (at least in the major languages.)

Also processing power and internet bandwidth. Videos from 10 or more years ago look far worse than videos today. Games look much better now and those that don't go for resolution still look much better because they do it for aesthetics rather than technical limitations.