Even the fun things “on the internet” are mostly still possible, it’s just the bulk of things we do now are not fun and main companies aren’t quirky risk takers but the oil/train/steel barons of our day.
In the past few years I’ve done serveral of the things on your list in earnest and they are all easier to do today (specifically technical things) than they were 25 years ago (except maybe writing with a pen).
Edit to add: if I have to join another messaging platform for a single, specific group I’m going to move to the woods and require written correspondence. It’s automated phone service level of frustration.
How do you balance that with the need for money to afford things in life though? There's a lot of things I could go do if I didn't have to think about bills to pay.
Well in the 90s and early 2000s you really could make money as a small local artist in a niche genre. Think of the people who could cut 500 white labels of their new UK Garage tune and reasonably expect to sell them from the back of their car and turn a decent profit on it.
The ability to be a small time artist, musician, etc and live in the 90s depended on the combined effects of technology and local organisations. You could play on pirate radio, you could go on benefits without too much hassle, you could stay at a squat, you could make your own physical products cheaply, there were lots of venues to play at, you could sell your products for cash and keep it.
The internet makes the distribution of music files cheap and easy, but combined with the increased technologising of society, the rest of the infrastructure that made the 90s a time where culture felt like it was on an e-rush with everyone else have fallen apart.
That and also people weren't paying for Netflix, Disney+, PlayStation online, ChatGPT+, etc
Also people were having more kids back then and earlier in life, so they had less time for hobbies and "finding one's self", they'd be busy with their kids.
Nobody needs to own a Ford F-250 Super Duty, a MacBook Pro M5, an RTX 5090 etc if your goal is just daily survival, and yet people buy them anyway, because they want to, not because they need them.
“You want to play house, you got to have a job. You want to play very nice house, very sweet house, then you got to have a job you don't like. Great. This is the way ninety-eight-point-nine per cent of the people work things out, so believe me, buddy, you've got nothing to apologize for.”
- An older neighbor counseling the has-things-relatively-great-but-unhappy-anyway protagonist in Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road
You do one thing you don't particularly enjoy too much for 8h/day as your job to earn money, then you do your hobby you can afford and enjoy for <8h/day, then you sleep for ~8h/day.
Retired with substantial savings, refitting my 40 year old Hobie Cat 18, heading to the beach to spend more time with the dolphins and seagulls. ... and any interesting humans that I meet walking the beach.
Everything you said is good, but I think it misses the point of the blog post.
The internet was special because it was a place to share those weird, human endeavors.
I can do all I want in the solitude of my home but I want to share it! The internet is where you can find people with common interests that you can't find in people you know IRL. That was the escape. Finally you feel less alone, a stranger on the other side of the world feels the same way!
That's what was optimized. We were herded into centralized algorithmic bubbles, optimized for creation and consumption but not for sharing. Sharing has some care in it, a common need for something, a connection between two or more people. The internet has been optimized for consumption. Everyone is consuming in the same place, repeating the same jokes, and it all moves too fast to even recognize the same usernames you might see.
It all moves too fast, there's little incentive for platform owners to make a place where people actually connect at the speed of human socializing because if you're busy connecting, you're not seeing the next ad.
Also I'd just like to add, reddit killed the classic forum. Many are gone, some are holding on by a thread. You can't just "avoid the bad parts" because the bad parts consumed the good parts.
I concur! Explore the big, bold world outside the internet.
Or, on the internet, stop spending your valuable time on bottom-feeder content like medium articles, facebook, twitter/bluesky, rant blogs, news websites etc.
Over the last few years my wife and I have grown into a community of awesome people. It makes all the difference. Do literally anything you can offline. Go to some meet up. Volunteer. Go to a con or an event. Learn an instrument. Literally anything. Do as if your long term mental health depends on it, because it just might. Be silly. Be cringe. Dress up. Get far far away from the internet with actual people.
I think the issue is that while you can (and perhaps should) do at least one such thing, it's going to be a pretty lonely pursuit, unless you have a pre-existing group of people to connect over this.
The Internet used to be really good at random, unscripted collaboration. But the winner-takes-all nature of modern social media means that if you do not optimize your presentation for maximum engagement, you will not even be noticed.
Even people who would've greatly enjoyed what you have to tell them will instead be fed a mix of generic engagement slop, sort-of relevant influencer videos, vaguely targeted ads and political propaganda.
Old, pre-internet AOL is also in the same category.
These are what I refer to as "walled garden" services, that existed up to and (for a short time) through the commericialization of the net in the early 1990's. They offered built-in private services for chat, news, forums, games, etc. As direct competitors, they had an interest in keeping their userbase coming back to just what they were offering, and how they offered it. They also fell by the wayside for cost-competitive (free) online services that offered broader and more interesting stuff.
Anyway, we're circling back to this. Big companies like Meta have a vested interest in locking folks in and keeping them blind to alternatives.
Bringing the fun back simply means offering something better by providing an unmet need. It worked before. Last time it was the humble web browser that broke their near-monopoly on computer-gazing eyeballs. Perhaps we need something new that's just as potent?
The internet is just a 'means'; the medium through which an 'end' is reached.
The internet has, to some, become a place. But what these people don't realise is that this place is just the medium, so it's not going to 'do anything' for you passively, you have use it to find an 'ends', rather than just sitting there waiting for the phone to ring or the art to draw itself.
I'm doing the same right now. I should be sleeping but I'm sitting in the medium of HN waiting for distraction to come to me, rather than pursuing my own active goals.
Good night, go and find your 'ends' stop waiting for false ones to come to you.
I have a pet theory that much of what we're seeing culturally is that the 90s and early 2000s (at least in the US) was a window of time that offered a sense of safety and surplus. 9/11 was extremely culturally disruptive, but aside from that, for many in the US, it felt like there was "enough to go around". That environment breeds a lot of creativity, innovation, whimsy, and doing things for their own sake.
But that time has clearly ended. With climate change, the erosion of the social safety net, decay of faith in institutions, economic inequality, politics, etc., we are in an extremely tense time with a pervasive sense of scarcity. In some fundamental ways, it feels like there isn't enough to go around and people are scrabbling to get what they can while they can.
That psychological environment is not conducive to art and fun. It sucks.
The whole structure has changed. We are not even in the web 2.0 anymore and regressed to a client-server model where what we see is dictated from central platforms with little interaction between actual users.
This was not a natural evolution of the web but the consequence of low-tech people accessing the web passively via a tiny touchscreen.
I too have felt the same around me. There is this lack of faith in the institutions now, feeling of distrust. Someone on HN called this the era of shamelessness and I kind of agree to it. The top has gotten shameless and the people at the bottom are trying to scrabble whatever they can to become one of them so that they can escape this hellhole that has been created.
Realizing that the average CS graduate can't expect to make 100k on a career of centering divs has been more disruptive to the the American psyche than 9/11.
It's not that the average CS grad can't expect to make 100k, it's that when that was the case 100k was a meaningful amount, now the same purchasing power requires 235k and almost nobody is making 235k in any job role, career pursuit, or field of study. Those that are making 235k aren't experiencing the same lifestyle because they don't exist in the same context, they exist in a context where they're surrounded by depression, scarcity, scrounging, and know that their time could be up at any moment.
The world is in a different place, and while it's funny to joke about how privileged tech people are, the net effect is that we've lost one of the most accessible refuges into a decent career for people. Many of us in tech, including myself, got into this without even a CS degree using free resources online and through libraries to learn about computers and build skills. It's basically inconceivable for anyone who is ambitious and a self-starter to build a career outside of extremely competitive, hierarchical, formal lines in 2026 except maybe as a social media influencer, which is probably why most people under 25 say their dream/goal is to become an influencer. It's their only shot at not being stuck in a state of permanent grinding misery to uphold wealthy elites.
> I’ve been mourning the old Internet over the past year or two... As a kid on the Web from the early 2000s through the mid-2010s, we knew we were living through something special.
It's funny because I knew lots of people in the early 2000s who were mourning the loss of the "old Internet" then. Kind of like how everyone thinks the music they listened to as a teenager is the best and it's all been downhill since.
It’s not like music. The [internet is becoming more commercial and more sloppy over time. It makes sense that people will miss the time they experienced where it was less shitty.
This trend has been happening since at least the 80s.
I as a Gen-Zer mourn the "old internet" of the 2010s. I agree and feel like nostalgia is kind of a lie.
In my own generation for example, I've seen a transition from "no good music has come out since 2000, we missed the GB/N64 era of gaming" to deep nostalgia for PS3/Xbox and Linkin Park era metal as the golden era.
Reminds me of how every single person you meet here in Austin also mourns the Austin they loved from 10 years ago. This could be someone mourning 2015, 2005, 1995, or 1985…
Hahaha this hits home too hard, back in early 2000s people would moan all the time whenever they spotted a hint of autotune, in 2026 its the industry standard.
I think its really speaks on the incredible ability of people to be able to be stuck in the past rather than new technology being "bad".
This also happens to people commenting about the vibes some cities used to have and how some places that no longer exists were so good. While some of that could be true I’m leaning more towards people actually nostalgic of when they were younger.
You could also just ask current young people how they feel about the internet and compare it to how young people described the internet in ~2005-2010.
I guess my feeling is that no one really "likes" the internet in its currnet form. Gen X got to see the birth of the web, millenials got the birth of social media, Gen Z got tiktok and addictive recommendation algorithms, now Gen Alpha gets AI slop. Idk just seems like there is less to be excited about for young people on the internet these days.
As Ia genz I can say that the internet help me learn english, programming and before that I got an advertisement freelance business that took me out of poverty. What got me into these were videos recommended by youtube or something.
It was still an extremely exciting period of time that everyone was enjoying at the time. Mostly because it was augmenting existing friendships rather than replacing them with algorithmic content.
I think there is a difference between "Eternal Summer" (when everyone got full-time internet in their homes which meant more people around), and "corporate capture" (everything on the internet is corporate interest first, end stage capitalism).
Being old enough now to have lived through several golden ages of this or that, you have to understand there's always another golden age around the corner. Don't spend so much time wishing for the past that you miss what's happening now.
I understand the sentiment. However, I would also suggest that people cultivate the culture/scene that they want to see.
In my case, I really enjoy games. So I built a gaming platform where I can find fun, independent games. I find it to contribute to the "best of the internet" mentality.
It's really up to the people around who discover and can award the people contributing to the culture that they want to see.
So I love watching 50s-70s television shows: honeymooners, I love lucy, twilight zone, alfred hitchcock, Mission Impossible, Columbo. (recent MeTV lineup).
I'm a millennial. It occurred to just the other day, the language they use, they say "dough" a lot. They need dough. Where's the dough. Any criminal is always involved with gambling and gangs and they need dough! And the normal working people storylines are pinned to their lack-of-dough situations.
I remember the internet very fondly too. There's always an age of innocence but it just takes time to realize everyone just really needs and wants dough. And that's what happens.
This take is always bizarre to me. You're not talking about the internet, you're talking about the websites you choose to use. There are alternatives for every single website/service that you don't like. They're often exactly like the Internet of yore in that they're not as streamlined, niche and have less people using it (these are aspects of the "fun" internet that people forget). The internet is a bunch of networked servers, not the handful of sites you feel like you're stuck using for some reason.
> This take is always bizarre to me. You're not talking about the internet, you're talking about the websites you choose to use. There are alternatives for every single website/service that you don't like.
Yeah, the problem is that a lot of those are effectively dead, subsumed by Reddit and Facebook.
I've sometimes dug up still existing sites from the 2000s I used to visit, and the results are typically depressing. Such as:
* Site still exists, but is terribly broken. Doesn't render, uses now incompatible SSL, or something. It's a forgotten server in somebody's closet, still chugging, but not being maintained, so whatever remains will probably vanish whenever the disk/PSU/etc fails.
* Last posts from 2015, mostly with "gee, it's kind of dead in here, anyone still around?" comments at the end of threads.
* Discussion is down to 5 people that post once a month, and there's also a thread with obituaries for past well known members.
the handful of sites you feel like you're stuck using for some reason
Billions have been spent building walls around niche and small sites to funnel people into major platforms. Pretending this ad/discoverability infrastructure doesn't exist is very naive.
I actually realized last night that everything that got me excited about the internet circa 2013 is actually way easier now, fun little one-off websites are far more doable, but we've lost the zeitgeist perhaps. It makes me wanna move back to NYC and go to BrooklynJS again.
The music was new, black polished chrome
And came over the summer like liquid night
The DJ's took pills to stay awake and play for seven days
There's something special to the loss of promise. That's the thing most often mourned, the potential.
There was a period when information wanted to be free and the web wanted to be something that makes people better... one way or another. Maybe it would make democracy better, or bring down bad regimes. Maybe make people smarter. Maybe it would democratize education or commerce or something in some way... "heals the world."
That period is a different period for everyone... maybe overlapping with one's optimistic youth. The promise was also a different promise, for different people. Early social media. Wikipedia. FOSS.
i think discovery is the real thing all these “back in my day…” blog posts are about. they want the quirk delivered to them, but they’re fallen out of the zeitgeist and conclude that the old days are completely gone.
The blandest-common-deonominator audience here on HN doesn't help, either. A modern-day equivalent of zombo.com or "Bert is Evil" or other quirkiness would have a hard time ranking highly here. Possible, but unlikely. Whereas the usual "I built My Generic SAS in Elixir!" and "My Musings On AI" posts shoot to the top.
Most of those got absorbed by reddit for me. Reddit has some awesome characteristics. But over the past two years it's becoming more and more bots. You used to be able to make a reddit account without an email, now you can't for obvious reasons.
Teenagers having a blast on TikTok to the detriment of their academics isn’t the same as literate teenagers having a blast on mIRC.
Pedagogically, the kinds of kids who were online “then” were broadly not at risk and arguably learning computing skills. At risk youth today are on porn sites before their first kiss, being radicalized on TikTok, and developing ADHD-adjacent disordered behaviour to their absolute detriment.
And the whole “6-7” thing is cute, I guess, but having a Chinese whatever-platform instruct and generate mass social movements down to kindergarten aged kids across the world is not at all like the Usenet trolls of old.
I disagree that it’s age. These things are not commensurate.
Screen-addled fascination isn’t a net good per se, and the implications of those developmental interactions at a social level fly in the face of shared wisdom and research around development. The corporate and political manipulations of those platforms is beyond any level of propaganda we used to accept, and we’re decades away from having the consequences become pronounced. Its a different beast.
I don’t think it’s accurate to say Roblox replaced Gary’s Mod. They both released in 2006, and they’ve always targeted different audiences. Roblox has always targeted younger kids while Gary’s Mod has targeted older kids, teenagers, and adults. Roblox has had a weird resurgence in the past few years, but it didn’t replace Gary’s Mod. Heck, I’d reckon it was always more popular than Gary’s Mod among younger kids (I know I had friends who were obsessed with Roblox circa ~2009, but I didn’t hear about Gary’s Mod until I was a teenager).
Garry's Mod didn't get replaced. It's still alive and well. The new generation grew straight into it and now are slowly moving to s&box (i.e. gmod2). It's just as lively as ever but other games have blown up by an order of magnitude larger.
Minecraft and gmod are still definitely staples of the young internet.
People just aren’t seeing it because they aren’t going to the fun places. Of course the major social platforms and search engines will never point the way to fun. Fun is made without any financial motivation.
The fun places are out there aplenty. People just have to go out and find it because no algorithm or advertisement is going to point the way. I get tons of fun in all sorts of small and specialized ultra-nerdy communities.
Yeah definitely feeling it. There are still some nice corners left though.
Fair bit of quality yt channels, some corners of reddit, hn, some niche forums.
Reddit is coming to the end of it's shelf life though. AI creeping in, people peddling things covertly dressed up as organic content...the signal/noise ratio is dropping.
yt still seems ok, though I'm getting a lot of doom & gloom videos lately. Unsure whether that's just my feed that shifted or the platform as a whole. e.g. I watch a lot of economics/geopolitics so lately seeing videos like "why norway/belgium/germany is in trouble"
How many of these will we get on a daily basis? Ten million nerds—7 million of which work for Meta—writing ten million blog posts about how nothing is fun anymore, and about 4 of them are doing anything fun.
I really long for a new kind of web browser with a search that only links to pages that are built for the browser. Static pages, which can hyperlink to other sites but must be self-resourced in the media they show, and which are if not highly banal at least banalisable by turning on a ‘reader’ function. Maybe that internet would be hosted on a limited platform, akin to the infrastructure used by private torrent trackers.
It would be great if I could read the news like this, but it is heavily disincentivised for media and publishing companies to provide plain information unfiltered of ad-bloat. I don't say this so as to float a viable idea, but more as an expression of what I would really like in the web and in my web browser.
I won't go down the route of ‘CSS was a mistake’ or something like that. I don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater. But sometimes you need to clip branches so the old tree can keep growing.
The internet is what we make of it. Of course there has to be some realism about it (most services algorithmic by default etc), but I don't think it's enough to declare it's all over. Generally, yes, the internet has become worse, but some corners are growing, the 'small internet' especially-- if only in these small circles. Where you spend your time in really determines how you feel about this matter.
It's to be seen whether any remnants of the "old" internet come back to the mainstream though. I wouldn't know though, wasn't alive then. For anyone that was, what was it like?
In some sense, the fun pockets still exist of course.
On the other hand, the algorithmic schelling points starve weird-ish corners of scale. The network effects + psychological draw of the single stream feeds is a powerful force.
The algorithmic spaces still have lots of weird. Maybe more weird than ever. But they also feel more bled of community (or even iterated contact with the same people).
It's a strange combination of facts. Maybe OPs post is not true in the literal sense, but it feels correct in the spiritual sense.
Newgrounds was creative and transgressive; YouTube was goofy and unrehearsed; early Facebook was a fun way to connect with people you knew and forge bonds of common interest with people you didn’t.
I think early Facebook was the writing on the wall for the demise of fun on the internet. It was like a prison, or private school forcing everyone into a uniform layout. Especially compared to the wonderfully chaotic mess that was Myspace, livejournal, geocities, and hundreds of others.
I remember the day I gave in and started using facebook, hundreds of people I knew in real life learned my real name for the first time. I feel like a part of me died then, but that could have also just been growing up.
same can be said for a lot of things tho. e.g. nature used to be fun but then we discovered it all :’( I miss when ships literally sailed into the unknown and found surprising and novel things like hot peppers and pineapples
Dead internet theory seems mostly proven by blog posts gesticulating about it. Digital creation is easier, more collaborative, and just as fun as it has ever been if you stop thinking in terms of mass audience and following the herd.
I'll grant you: Flash is a hole that never fully healed back. Search engines might not be especially great for discovery now either. They weren't especially great for Geocities shrines either, though.
I've taken up gardening, I hike more, I go birdwatching every weekend, I practice pen and pencil drawing and sketching on paper, and I read more paper books these days since there's not much that's very compelling about the current web for me - at this point I'd rather be weeding than surfing the current web, it's great.
disagree... get claude code and start writing your own apps. its incredibly liberating. im back in the early 00s actually enjoying my computer again not just using it as a terminal to bullshit corp websites. when you start making your own stuff, you end up on the best parts of the internet discussing with people who you miss from when you enjoyed the web.
I don't agree entirely with the cleansing being done on behalf of AI. Sure the Internet was slowly descending into influence bot nets and sim card farms. But it couldn't scale to all corners of the internet. AI is the tool that destroyed that. Soon the amount of human content on the Internet will be so small it will be a place mostly for bots.
Maybe on the surface this is true but you try to look for it you can have a lot more fun. Looking for communities that are harder to find but with common interests and you can find it but you have to work for it.
Lots of agreement and think there has been a lot written about the sterilization of something that was once beautiful and creative. Sad but inevitable when your best kept secret club isn't so best-kept anymore.
Left off, and what we really want to know, is... ok, so what now?
The eternal September began long before any of the things this post is eulogizing came into existence, things which I also remember fondly. There's still room for creation.
The old internet was a more homogenous society, social outcasts and technically capable people who liked interacting with computers. The content was more relatable because it was created by similar types of people. Now the internet is for everyone so the content is for everybody.
It's too easy to blame the algorithms when the algorithms are a necessary evil. TikTok has millions of videos uploaded per day. You are not going to sort through all of those on your own. The algorithm is designed to show you more of what you interact with. If you're not finding joy in what you're seeing, it's because you're not interacting with content that gives you joy. Stop watching the slop, search for the things you like and follow good creators. There are a lot of them out there, depending on what you like. That applies to any social media, not just TikTok.
> It's too easy to blame the algorithms when the algorithms are a necessary evil. TikTok has millions of videos uploaded per day. You are not going to sort through all of those on your own.
I don't necessarily think that people have an issue with the algorithms themselves, more so that all of the platforms that implement them will manipulate and alter it so that you constantly stay engaged. And that boils down to pushing ragebait, low effort clickbait, and shock content over everything else.
Now it is possible to avoid falling into this, but its not the default. If I have to actively fight to not see people dying, asinine political and cultural takes, or ai slop, then its a bad experience and I will yearn for the days when gaming let's plays and video essays were the default. Its easy to say "just don't watch it", but is it really "just" that easy when the whole platform is constantly being tweaked and optimized against the content that someone would prefer to see?
The fun has been optimized out of large corporate sites thanks to enshittification. However the spirit of the internet is still alive if you know where to look, in places like neocities, nekoweb, and other indie web hosts. People are still putting things on the internet for the fun of it and not to primiarily get ad revenue.
I’m in my 20s but I’ve felt the same way for years. If I were growing up now, I’m not sure I would still make it into my career.
I just updated my iPhone and now it’s demanding I scan a credit card to “prove” my age. Everything is so sanitised now supposedly for the sake of the children, but we know that’s not the real reason. Surveillance is becoming more and more overbearing that I think everyone is self censoring at some level.
Every site I linger on is riddled with bots trying to manipulate me into getting angry about something, into buying something, or just otherwise feeding the numbers engine. YouTube especially has become ultra-corporate, so many channels are just ruthlessly chasing money and stamping out the grassroots passionate creators.
I hate the internet now. It doesn’t feel like home anymore, it’s just a distraction.
Shows over, go outside. Hang with your friends. Or be really rebellious and do nothing for a while but watch the clouds (and never tell a soul you did it!)
The best part about the best is over is that it can be a turning point to drive us back to what is better than online -- offline. Go live real life, touch grass, and give real monetary value to things which give meaning back in return. For most people this involves people or animals, maybe dirt, and often involves giving more than you take.
I was just thinking the other day that I wish someone had told me that "golden ages" are always coming and going. As an adolescent and young adult in the 90s, I thought that simply was how things were, and that they would continue to improve in the same way indefinitely.
I would say that we're in a golden age of AI, in that LLMs seem to be heavily subsidized. We're in a golden age of porn (sort-of-democratization via OnlyFans and similar), gambling (DraftKings), insider trading (PolyMarket), and private equity. We're probably at the end of the Golden age of social media influencers and crypto(scams), as most of the juice has been squeezed.
I think our recent golden ages have just kind of sucked compared to those of the past, by most people's subjective preferences and ethics.
My theory is that basically everything is controlled by income inequality and interest rates. AI should not, in theory, lead to a loss of creativity. If anything, we should see a creative explosion because it’s easier to create more and better things. If nothing else, generative AI is a great tool for brainstorming and prototyping ideas.
What we’re seeing is the over capitalization of everything, everyone is stressed out about making money due to rising inequality and rising costs of core needs like housing and healthcare.
The Renaissance happened because there were enough people with wealth that they felt free to explore art or give their money to artists without expecting a return on their investment. No one does things today as an expression of their soul, they do it to make money. Like the article suggests, people made things because they were happy, sad, horny, or mad. Now they do it for money.
We need to loosen up society’s obsession with accruing wealth, it ruins everything. What we’re witnessing is well described by the term Late Stage Capitalism, or what I like to call The Great Enshittification. It’ll only change when we decide to create something like a social safety net that lets people feel more free to create art that doesn’t need to provide an income.
Enshittification is just how platforms try to adapt to new users, and it actually works very well. It's just old users have grown to be ... classy, which are less profitable for platforms.
I don't think the fun is gone from the internet, you just have to look much, much harder to find it. It's the needle in the haystack of attention and profit-seeking content. And the platforms aren't as neutral as the might have been in the past in helping you search.
Sometimes I swear the algorithm has learned it keeps me more engaged with incredulously dissatisfactory search and discovery rather than anything actually stimulating.
That's not what this article is about. It's really about algorithmic social media. There is one short paragraph near the end that mentions AI: "AI did not kill the Internet; it inherited an Internet with the fun already optimized out of it."
But of course, people are also nihilist, shallow and shit; and those same people are hopeful, complex, patient, kind and loving - but the internet rarely brings those stories to you.
It's not just the internet, it's digital everything. No more wonder left. Everything that is profitable has been sucked up by oligarchs. Everything that is fun has been done to death. Everything communal gets flooded by assholes or gate-kept by insufferable control freaks.
The juice may not be worth the squeeze when there isn't much reward for finding the single golden kernel that has somehow survived the enshittification.
Maybe it is time for an internet divorce. Permanently cut it in half between those who are ok with AI and those who are not. If it were up to me, I'd never want to hear from the latter group again.
Every new generation thinks things were better when they were young. Personally I liked the internet of the mid to late 90s, just as the web was overtaking AOL. By the mid 2010s, which this article calls the golden age, the internet was already very commercial; personal sites barely existed, most activity took place in walled social media gardens.
I bet people older than me disliked the 90s web and preferred the days of gopher and newsgroups. No one is wrong and everyone is wrong.
Part of the reason things felt better when you were young is because it was; for you. Fewer responsibilities. Less understanding of the nuances and intricacies of the world. More room for idealism. Another part of the reason is that time tends to fade away the bad parts of life while retaining the things you enjoyed. This is good.
Nostalgia is great for reconnecting yourself to a simpler time in your life. Nothing wrong with that. But when you start making comparisons you're only fooling yourself.
I agree, but it's been said by all...
make homebrew software for an old Nintendo console
pick up cross stitching or weaving
make an independent film with a friend; use stuff from your kitchen as props
find a borderline functional instrument at your local thrift store
write a 1 page short story in pen
it's not enough anymore to merely criticize this bad time we're having
Even the fun things “on the internet” are mostly still possible, it’s just the bulk of things we do now are not fun and main companies aren’t quirky risk takers but the oil/train/steel barons of our day.
In the past few years I’ve done serveral of the things on your list in earnest and they are all easier to do today (specifically technical things) than they were 25 years ago (except maybe writing with a pen).
Edit to add: if I have to join another messaging platform for a single, specific group I’m going to move to the woods and require written correspondence. It’s automated phone service level of frustration.
Don’t try to make money from it and you can still do fun things in life
How do you balance that with the need for money to afford things in life though? There's a lot of things I could go do if I didn't have to think about bills to pay.
How did they in the 1990s/2000s/2010s?
Well in the 90s and early 2000s you really could make money as a small local artist in a niche genre. Think of the people who could cut 500 white labels of their new UK Garage tune and reasonably expect to sell them from the back of their car and turn a decent profit on it.
The ability to be a small time artist, musician, etc and live in the 90s depended on the combined effects of technology and local organisations. You could play on pirate radio, you could go on benefits without too much hassle, you could stay at a squat, you could make your own physical products cheaply, there were lots of venues to play at, you could sell your products for cash and keep it.
The internet makes the distribution of music files cheap and easy, but combined with the increased technologising of society, the rest of the infrastructure that made the 90s a time where culture felt like it was on an e-rush with everyone else have fallen apart.
Lower cost of living and higher incomes when compared to purchasing power of a dollar.
That and also people weren't paying for Netflix, Disney+, PlayStation online, ChatGPT+, etc
Also people were having more kids back then and earlier in life, so they had less time for hobbies and "finding one's self", they'd be busy with their kids.
Nobody needs to pay for any of that
Nobody needs to own a Ford F-250 Super Duty, a MacBook Pro M5, an RTX 5090 etc if your goal is just daily survival, and yet people buy them anyway, because they want to, not because they need them.
Flea markets.
Lol but I went to a flea market the other day with $100 thinking that was going to go far — I managed to buy one jacket for $80. So… I dunno.
Thrift and vintage stores have been pivoting to the premium consumer as well.
“You want to play house, you got to have a job. You want to play very nice house, very sweet house, then you got to have a job you don't like. Great. This is the way ninety-eight-point-nine per cent of the people work things out, so believe me, buddy, you've got nothing to apologize for.”
- An older neighbor counseling the has-things-relatively-great-but-unhappy-anyway protagonist in Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road
You do one thing you don't particularly enjoy too much for 8h/day as your job to earn money, then you do your hobby you can afford and enjoy for <8h/day, then you sleep for ~8h/day.
Rinse and repeat.
Retired with substantial savings, refitting my 40 year old Hobie Cat 18, heading to the beach to spend more time with the dolphins and seagulls. ... and any interesting humans that I meet walking the beach.
Everything you said is good, but I think it misses the point of the blog post.
The internet was special because it was a place to share those weird, human endeavors.
I can do all I want in the solitude of my home but I want to share it! The internet is where you can find people with common interests that you can't find in people you know IRL. That was the escape. Finally you feel less alone, a stranger on the other side of the world feels the same way!
That's what was optimized. We were herded into centralized algorithmic bubbles, optimized for creation and consumption but not for sharing. Sharing has some care in it, a common need for something, a connection between two or more people. The internet has been optimized for consumption. Everyone is consuming in the same place, repeating the same jokes, and it all moves too fast to even recognize the same usernames you might see.
It all moves too fast, there's little incentive for platform owners to make a place where people actually connect at the speed of human socializing because if you're busy connecting, you're not seeing the next ad.
Also I'd just like to add, reddit killed the classic forum. Many are gone, some are holding on by a thread. You can't just "avoid the bad parts" because the bad parts consumed the good parts.
A: "The vibe at my favorite bar has changed"
B: "You are still perfectly capable of having fun in life"
I don't really get how B follows from A.
I concur! Explore the big, bold world outside the internet.
Or, on the internet, stop spending your valuable time on bottom-feeder content like medium articles, facebook, twitter/bluesky, rant blogs, news websites etc.
Or just make homebrew.
It’s amazing how good just fermenting juice from the supermarket with a bit of added sugar can be.
It teaches patience and the blip blop of an airlock is a terrifically calming way to mark the passage of time.
Over the last few years my wife and I have grown into a community of awesome people. It makes all the difference. Do literally anything you can offline. Go to some meet up. Volunteer. Go to a con or an event. Learn an instrument. Literally anything. Do as if your long term mental health depends on it, because it just might. Be silly. Be cringe. Dress up. Get far far away from the internet with actual people.
I think the issue is that while you can (and perhaps should) do at least one such thing, it's going to be a pretty lonely pursuit, unless you have a pre-existing group of people to connect over this.
The Internet used to be really good at random, unscripted collaboration. But the winner-takes-all nature of modern social media means that if you do not optimize your presentation for maximum engagement, you will not even be noticed.
Even people who would've greatly enjoyed what you have to tell them will instead be fed a mix of generic engagement slop, sort-of relevant influencer videos, vaguely targeted ads and political propaganda.
Why do they have to be pre-exisiting? Release the whatever to the world, make a Discord for it, and find people that way.
A vantage point from a very long time ago: The big social media services are pining for the days of CompuServe and Prodigy.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CompuServe - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prodigy_(online_service)
Old, pre-internet AOL is also in the same category.
These are what I refer to as "walled garden" services, that existed up to and (for a short time) through the commericialization of the net in the early 1990's. They offered built-in private services for chat, news, forums, games, etc. As direct competitors, they had an interest in keeping their userbase coming back to just what they were offering, and how they offered it. They also fell by the wayside for cost-competitive (free) online services that offered broader and more interesting stuff.
Anyway, we're circling back to this. Big companies like Meta have a vested interest in locking folks in and keeping them blind to alternatives.
Bringing the fun back simply means offering something better by providing an unmet need. It worked before. Last time it was the humble web browser that broke their near-monopoly on computer-gazing eyeballs. Perhaps we need something new that's just as potent?
The internet is just a 'means'; the medium through which an 'end' is reached.
The internet has, to some, become a place. But what these people don't realise is that this place is just the medium, so it's not going to 'do anything' for you passively, you have use it to find an 'ends', rather than just sitting there waiting for the phone to ring or the art to draw itself.
I'm doing the same right now. I should be sleeping but I'm sitting in the medium of HN waiting for distraction to come to me, rather than pursuing my own active goals.
Good night, go and find your 'ends' stop waiting for false ones to come to you.
I have a pet theory that much of what we're seeing culturally is that the 90s and early 2000s (at least in the US) was a window of time that offered a sense of safety and surplus. 9/11 was extremely culturally disruptive, but aside from that, for many in the US, it felt like there was "enough to go around". That environment breeds a lot of creativity, innovation, whimsy, and doing things for their own sake.
But that time has clearly ended. With climate change, the erosion of the social safety net, decay of faith in institutions, economic inequality, politics, etc., we are in an extremely tense time with a pervasive sense of scarcity. In some fundamental ways, it feels like there isn't enough to go around and people are scrabbling to get what they can while they can.
That psychological environment is not conducive to art and fun. It sucks.
The whole structure has changed. We are not even in the web 2.0 anymore and regressed to a client-server model where what we see is dictated from central platforms with little interaction between actual users.
This was not a natural evolution of the web but the consequence of low-tech people accessing the web passively via a tiny touchscreen.
I too have felt the same around me. There is this lack of faith in the institutions now, feeling of distrust. Someone on HN called this the era of shamelessness and I kind of agree to it. The top has gotten shameless and the people at the bottom are trying to scrabble whatever they can to become one of them so that they can escape this hellhole that has been created.
Realizing that the average CS graduate can't expect to make 100k on a career of centering divs has been more disruptive to the the American psyche than 9/11.
Not everyone has to be a CS graduate. There's other professions out there.
It's not that the average CS grad can't expect to make 100k, it's that when that was the case 100k was a meaningful amount, now the same purchasing power requires 235k and almost nobody is making 235k in any job role, career pursuit, or field of study. Those that are making 235k aren't experiencing the same lifestyle because they don't exist in the same context, they exist in a context where they're surrounded by depression, scarcity, scrounging, and know that their time could be up at any moment.
The world is in a different place, and while it's funny to joke about how privileged tech people are, the net effect is that we've lost one of the most accessible refuges into a decent career for people. Many of us in tech, including myself, got into this without even a CS degree using free resources online and through libraries to learn about computers and build skills. It's basically inconceivable for anyone who is ambitious and a self-starter to build a career outside of extremely competitive, hierarchical, formal lines in 2026 except maybe as a social media influencer, which is probably why most people under 25 say their dream/goal is to become an influencer. It's their only shot at not being stuck in a state of permanent grinding misery to uphold wealthy elites.
> I’ve been mourning the old Internet over the past year or two... As a kid on the Web from the early 2000s through the mid-2010s, we knew we were living through something special.
It's funny because I knew lots of people in the early 2000s who were mourning the loss of the "old Internet" then. Kind of like how everyone thinks the music they listened to as a teenager is the best and it's all been downhill since.
It’s not like music. The [internet is becoming more commercial and more sloppy over time. It makes sense that people will miss the time they experienced where it was less shitty.
This trend has been happening since at least the 80s.
Music becoming more commercial is a widely held complaint. It’s also mostly all the same chord progression so you could say sloppy as well
Music being too AI generated is the new "pop music is formulaic".
I as a Gen-Zer mourn the "old internet" of the 2010s. I agree and feel like nostalgia is kind of a lie.
In my own generation for example, I've seen a transition from "no good music has come out since 2000, we missed the GB/N64 era of gaming" to deep nostalgia for PS3/Xbox and Linkin Park era metal as the golden era.
I've heard people describe this phenomenon in basically two ways:
- It's all relative to your teenage years, which splits up generations as a result.
- The past is another country.
The good news is: taste and disgust are also learned. So anyone can pick up and move to another worldview, if they're willing to do new things.
Reminds me of how every single person you meet here in Austin also mourns the Austin they loved from 10 years ago. This could be someone mourning 2015, 2005, 1995, or 1985…
Are they wrong though? Are there any metrics people today can look at and see things were indeed better in the past?
Hahaha this hits home too hard, back in early 2000s people would moan all the time whenever they spotted a hint of autotune, in 2026 its the industry standard.
I think its really speaks on the incredible ability of people to be able to be stuck in the past rather than new technology being "bad".
This also happens to people commenting about the vibes some cities used to have and how some places that no longer exists were so good. While some of that could be true I’m leaning more towards people actually nostalgic of when they were younger.
That's when you ask what exactly was better and then you can tell whether it's just typical nostalgia or if there are genuinely things to miss.
You could also just ask current young people how they feel about the internet and compare it to how young people described the internet in ~2005-2010.
I guess my feeling is that no one really "likes" the internet in its currnet form. Gen X got to see the birth of the web, millenials got the birth of social media, Gen Z got tiktok and addictive recommendation algorithms, now Gen Alpha gets AI slop. Idk just seems like there is less to be excited about for young people on the internet these days.
As Ia genz I can say that the internet help me learn english, programming and before that I got an advertisement freelance business that took me out of poverty. What got me into these were videos recommended by youtube or something.
The monetization of every platform has killed the internet. It's hard to find genuine posts anymore. It's all engagement bait.
> millenials got the birth of social media
..and a lot of us weren't thrilled about it.
It was still an extremely exciting period of time that everyone was enjoying at the time. Mostly because it was augmenting existing friendships rather than replacing them with algorithmic content.
I think there is a difference between "Eternal Summer" (when everyone got full-time internet in their homes which meant more people around), and "corporate capture" (everything on the internet is corporate interest first, end stage capitalism).
I believe it was “Eternal September”.
Being old enough now to have lived through several golden ages of this or that, you have to understand there's always another golden age around the corner. Don't spend so much time wishing for the past that you miss what's happening now.
I understand the sentiment. However, I would also suggest that people cultivate the culture/scene that they want to see.
In my case, I really enjoy games. So I built a gaming platform where I can find fun, independent games. I find it to contribute to the "best of the internet" mentality.
It's really up to the people around who discover and can award the people contributing to the culture that they want to see.
No, it's not! If you don't like the super-monetized over-optimized AI-generated walled garden we've-got-you-hooked experience —
just don't participate in it and do your own thing.
Start your own blog. Without ads, not to be "monetized", just for the fun of it.
Write for yourself, not for "engagement".
Do your thing.
So I love watching 50s-70s television shows: honeymooners, I love lucy, twilight zone, alfred hitchcock, Mission Impossible, Columbo. (recent MeTV lineup).
I'm a millennial. It occurred to just the other day, the language they use, they say "dough" a lot. They need dough. Where's the dough. Any criminal is always involved with gambling and gangs and they need dough! And the normal working people storylines are pinned to their lack-of-dough situations.
I remember the internet very fondly too. There's always an age of innocence but it just takes time to realize everyone just really needs and wants dough. And that's what happens.
This take is always bizarre to me. You're not talking about the internet, you're talking about the websites you choose to use. There are alternatives for every single website/service that you don't like. They're often exactly like the Internet of yore in that they're not as streamlined, niche and have less people using it (these are aspects of the "fun" internet that people forget). The internet is a bunch of networked servers, not the handful of sites you feel like you're stuck using for some reason.
> This take is always bizarre to me. You're not talking about the internet, you're talking about the websites you choose to use. There are alternatives for every single website/service that you don't like.
Yeah, the problem is that a lot of those are effectively dead, subsumed by Reddit and Facebook.
I've sometimes dug up still existing sites from the 2000s I used to visit, and the results are typically depressing. Such as:
* Site still exists, but is terribly broken. Doesn't render, uses now incompatible SSL, or something. It's a forgotten server in somebody's closet, still chugging, but not being maintained, so whatever remains will probably vanish whenever the disk/PSU/etc fails.
* Last posts from 2015, mostly with "gee, it's kind of dead in here, anyone still around?" comments at the end of threads.
* Discussion is down to 5 people that post once a month, and there's also a thread with obituaries for past well known members.
Care to provide some examples?
I actually realized last night that everything that got me excited about the internet circa 2013 is actually way easier now, fun little one-off websites are far more doable, but we've lost the zeitgeist perhaps. It makes me wanna move back to NYC and go to BrooklynJS again.
Sure they exist. But nobody knows they exist because everyone just uses apps and SEO punishes actual good websites.
Things being too easy takes the joy away from the process. All you are left with is the result and not the journey.
The music was new, black polished chrome And came over the summer like liquid night The DJ's took pills to stay awake and play for seven days
There's something special to the loss of promise. That's the thing most often mourned, the potential.
There was a period when information wanted to be free and the web wanted to be something that makes people better... one way or another. Maybe it would make democracy better, or bring down bad regimes. Maybe make people smarter. Maybe it would democratize education or commerce or something in some way... "heals the world."
That period is a different period for everyone... maybe overlapping with one's optimistic youth. The promise was also a different promise, for different people. Early social media. Wikipedia. FOSS.
Wasted potential is a mournful thing.
I run an entire site and newsletter dedicated to showing fun things from across the web.
I promise you this is not true. It's just all buried under a mountain of crap now.
https://randomdailyurls.com
A domain + compute has never been cheaper. That said, I think the signal-to-noise ratio on the modern internet makes discovery difficult.
i think discovery is the real thing all these “back in my day…” blog posts are about. they want the quirk delivered to them, but they’re fallen out of the zeitgeist and conclude that the old days are completely gone.
It's approaching near impossible. The amount of articles posted to hn that are near AI slop is so high it's almost not worth using anymore.
The blandest-common-deonominator audience here on HN doesn't help, either. A modern-day equivalent of zombo.com or "Bert is Evil" or other quirkiness would have a hard time ranking highly here. Possible, but unlikely. Whereas the usual "I built My Generic SAS in Elixir!" and "My Musings On AI" posts shoot to the top.
I mostly hang out in small online communities that essentially become tightly curated by people I am interested in interacting with.
Most of those got absorbed by reddit for me. Reddit has some awesome characteristics. But over the past two years it's becoming more and more bots. You used to be able to make a reddit account without an email, now you can't for obvious reasons.
I think we just got older.
People are still having a blast online, but they’re mostly kids or teenagers.
Garrys Mod got replaced by Roblox, forums got replaced by Discord, blogs got replaced by vlogs.
There’s still lots of fun and community still to be found online, people wouldn’t spend so much time on it if there wasn’t.
Teenagers having a blast on TikTok to the detriment of their academics isn’t the same as literate teenagers having a blast on mIRC.
Pedagogically, the kinds of kids who were online “then” were broadly not at risk and arguably learning computing skills. At risk youth today are on porn sites before their first kiss, being radicalized on TikTok, and developing ADHD-adjacent disordered behaviour to their absolute detriment.
And the whole “6-7” thing is cute, I guess, but having a Chinese whatever-platform instruct and generate mass social movements down to kindergarten aged kids across the world is not at all like the Usenet trolls of old.
I disagree that it’s age. These things are not commensurate.
Screen-addled fascination isn’t a net good per se, and the implications of those developmental interactions at a social level fly in the face of shared wisdom and research around development. The corporate and political manipulations of those platforms is beyond any level of propaganda we used to accept, and we’re decades away from having the consequences become pronounced. Its a different beast.
I don’t think it’s accurate to say Roblox replaced Gary’s Mod. They both released in 2006, and they’ve always targeted different audiences. Roblox has always targeted younger kids while Gary’s Mod has targeted older kids, teenagers, and adults. Roblox has had a weird resurgence in the past few years, but it didn’t replace Gary’s Mod. Heck, I’d reckon it was always more popular than Gary’s Mod among younger kids (I know I had friends who were obsessed with Roblox circa ~2009, but I didn’t hear about Gary’s Mod until I was a teenager).
Garry's Mod didn't get replaced. It's still alive and well. The new generation grew straight into it and now are slowly moving to s&box (i.e. gmod2). It's just as lively as ever but other games have blown up by an order of magnitude larger.
Minecraft and gmod are still definitely staples of the young internet.
If you think the 2000s were special, try going back to the 90s when you could finish browsing the web! :P
People just aren’t seeing it because they aren’t going to the fun places. Of course the major social platforms and search engines will never point the way to fun. Fun is made without any financial motivation.
The fun places are out there aplenty. People just have to go out and find it because no algorithm or advertisement is going to point the way. I get tons of fun in all sorts of small and specialized ultra-nerdy communities.
All other things aside, there definitely is some profound void which demise of Flash created and has never been filled again.
Getting the "nothing new to be discovered in physics now" (Lord Kelvin) vibe.
Yeah definitely feeling it. There are still some nice corners left though.
Fair bit of quality yt channels, some corners of reddit, hn, some niche forums.
Reddit is coming to the end of it's shelf life though. AI creeping in, people peddling things covertly dressed up as organic content...the signal/noise ratio is dropping.
yt still seems ok, though I'm getting a lot of doom & gloom videos lately. Unsure whether that's just my feed that shifted or the platform as a whole. e.g. I watch a lot of economics/geopolitics so lately seeing videos like "why norway/belgium/germany is in trouble"
How many of these will we get on a daily basis? Ten million nerds—7 million of which work for Meta—writing ten million blog posts about how nothing is fun anymore, and about 4 of them are doing anything fun.
I really long for a new kind of web browser with a search that only links to pages that are built for the browser. Static pages, which can hyperlink to other sites but must be self-resourced in the media they show, and which are if not highly banal at least banalisable by turning on a ‘reader’ function. Maybe that internet would be hosted on a limited platform, akin to the infrastructure used by private torrent trackers.
It would be great if I could read the news like this, but it is heavily disincentivised for media and publishing companies to provide plain information unfiltered of ad-bloat. I don't say this so as to float a viable idea, but more as an expression of what I would really like in the web and in my web browser.
I won't go down the route of ‘CSS was a mistake’ or something like that. I don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater. But sometimes you need to clip branches so the old tree can keep growing.
Gemini? Gopher, if you're old school? I also vaguely recall something called flask
there's options for this. she's trick is getting people to write the pages
The internet is what we make of it. Of course there has to be some realism about it (most services algorithmic by default etc), but I don't think it's enough to declare it's all over. Generally, yes, the internet has become worse, but some corners are growing, the 'small internet' especially-- if only in these small circles. Where you spend your time in really determines how you feel about this matter.
It's to be seen whether any remnants of the "old" internet come back to the mainstream though. I wouldn't know though, wasn't alive then. For anyone that was, what was it like?
OP, the Badger Badger link is leading to a wiki page about the dead Internet theory.
Here's the correct link for all to enjoy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EIyixC9NsLI
Used to be just a Flash animation on Weebl's stuff, but preserved on YouTube by the OG :)
In some sense, the fun pockets still exist of course.
On the other hand, the algorithmic schelling points starve weird-ish corners of scale. The network effects + psychological draw of the single stream feeds is a powerful force.
The algorithmic spaces still have lots of weird. Maybe more weird than ever. But they also feel more bled of community (or even iterated contact with the same people).
It's a strange combination of facts. Maybe OPs post is not true in the literal sense, but it feels correct in the spiritual sense.
Newgrounds was creative and transgressive; YouTube was goofy and unrehearsed; early Facebook was a fun way to connect with people you knew and forge bonds of common interest with people you didn’t.
I think early Facebook was the writing on the wall for the demise of fun on the internet. It was like a prison, or private school forcing everyone into a uniform layout. Especially compared to the wonderfully chaotic mess that was Myspace, livejournal, geocities, and hundreds of others.
I remember the day I gave in and started using facebook, hundreds of people I knew in real life learned my real name for the first time. I feel like a part of me died then, but that could have also just been growing up.
The Internet Is Not Yours - and - You Can Do What You Want.
All the little niches can be your personal Web.
There are innumerable thoughtful, cute, interesting bits out there, probably more than ever before.
Craigslist is alive and well.
PayPay is weird but who cares.
The 'Grotesque Skyscrapers' of the web actually don't impair your view.
That's the beauty of it. Go where you want.
I would argue that's the darn point of the web, it's not for Curators it's literally for 'Whatever'.
2026 and we still conflate the Internet with the WWW. As obscene as conflating culture and pop culture.
It's not just the internet -- it's everything in western society, as far as the eye can see.
This is what happens when you extract value -- anything of value is extracted, leaving behind things devoid of value.
You can hoard "wealth" all you want, but the consequence is that there is nothing left that is worth buying.
This is the intended end result of capitalism, maybe its time we all gave socialism another chance?
same can be said for a lot of things tho. e.g. nature used to be fun but then we discovered it all :’( I miss when ships literally sailed into the unknown and found surprising and novel things like hot peppers and pineapples
Dead internet theory seems mostly proven by blog posts gesticulating about it. Digital creation is easier, more collaborative, and just as fun as it has ever been if you stop thinking in terms of mass audience and following the herd.
I'll grant you: Flash is a hole that never fully healed back. Search engines might not be especially great for discovery now either. They weren't especially great for Geocities shrines either, though.
I've taken up gardening, I hike more, I go birdwatching every weekend, I practice pen and pencil drawing and sketching on paper, and I read more paper books these days since there's not much that's very compelling about the current web for me - at this point I'd rather be weeding than surfing the current web, it's great.
Before internet existed, people went to clubs and malls, I wonder if they still do it now?
We have entered the Eternal October.
disagree... get claude code and start writing your own apps. its incredibly liberating. im back in the early 00s actually enjoying my computer again not just using it as a terminal to bullshit corp websites. when you start making your own stuff, you end up on the best parts of the internet discussing with people who you miss from when you enjoyed the web.
Maybe this is just a personal thing for me, but I have difficulty saying that anything that Claude creates as "my own stuff".
Do we really need one of these articles every month for decades?
I don't agree entirely with the cleansing being done on behalf of AI. Sure the Internet was slowly descending into influence bot nets and sim card farms. But it couldn't scale to all corners of the internet. AI is the tool that destroyed that. Soon the amount of human content on the Internet will be so small it will be a place mostly for bots.
Maybe on the surface this is true but you try to look for it you can have a lot more fun. Looking for communities that are harder to find but with common interests and you can find it but you have to work for it.
Lots of agreement and think there has been a lot written about the sterilization of something that was once beautiful and creative. Sad but inevitable when your best kept secret club isn't so best-kept anymore.
Left off, and what we really want to know, is... ok, so what now?
The eternal September began long before any of the things this post is eulogizing came into existence, things which I also remember fondly. There's still room for creation.
i don’t think it has to be like this. make dumb or silly stuff, share it.
it feels like the folks who lament about the good ole days grew up, got a corporate job, and forgot how to have fun.
The old internet was a more homogenous society, social outcasts and technically capable people who liked interacting with computers. The content was more relatable because it was created by similar types of people. Now the internet is for everyone so the content is for everybody.
It's too easy to blame the algorithms when the algorithms are a necessary evil. TikTok has millions of videos uploaded per day. You are not going to sort through all of those on your own. The algorithm is designed to show you more of what you interact with. If you're not finding joy in what you're seeing, it's because you're not interacting with content that gives you joy. Stop watching the slop, search for the things you like and follow good creators. There are a lot of them out there, depending on what you like. That applies to any social media, not just TikTok.
> It's too easy to blame the algorithms when the algorithms are a necessary evil. TikTok has millions of videos uploaded per day. You are not going to sort through all of those on your own.
I don't necessarily think that people have an issue with the algorithms themselves, more so that all of the platforms that implement them will manipulate and alter it so that you constantly stay engaged. And that boils down to pushing ragebait, low effort clickbait, and shock content over everything else.
Now it is possible to avoid falling into this, but its not the default. If I have to actively fight to not see people dying, asinine political and cultural takes, or ai slop, then its a bad experience and I will yearn for the days when gaming let's plays and video essays were the default. Its easy to say "just don't watch it", but is it really "just" that easy when the whole platform is constantly being tweaked and optimized against the content that someone would prefer to see?
I think this is more a consumption problem.
Step 1: Avoid algorithmic feeds of content.
Step 2: Avoid services that tend to collect, highlight, or exhibit AI slop.
Step 3: Read more books.
Step 4: Create more things and then share them on the Internet. This step directly addresses your concerns.
Rephrased: If you're not creating things and sharing it on the Internet, you are part of the problem.
PS: There are a small but healthy collections of RSS feeds with actual humans writing. Discover them at places like:
https://pinboard.in/popular
https://minifeed.net/
The problem is discoverability.
Google controls the search engine and they heavily modify the results.
The fun has been optimized out of large corporate sites thanks to enshittification. However the spirit of the internet is still alive if you know where to look, in places like neocities, nekoweb, and other indie web hosts. People are still putting things on the internet for the fun of it and not to primiarily get ad revenue.
I’m in my 20s but I’ve felt the same way for years. If I were growing up now, I’m not sure I would still make it into my career.
I just updated my iPhone and now it’s demanding I scan a credit card to “prove” my age. Everything is so sanitised now supposedly for the sake of the children, but we know that’s not the real reason. Surveillance is becoming more and more overbearing that I think everyone is self censoring at some level.
Every site I linger on is riddled with bots trying to manipulate me into getting angry about something, into buying something, or just otherwise feeding the numbers engine. YouTube especially has become ultra-corporate, so many channels are just ruthlessly chasing money and stamping out the grassroots passionate creators.
I hate the internet now. It doesn’t feel like home anymore, it’s just a distraction.
It’s true. AI slop is not what will kill the fun Internet. It’s just the mechanisation of the forces that already killed it.
Well, time to enjoy other things then, no?
Shows over, go outside. Hang with your friends. Or be really rebellious and do nothing for a while but watch the clouds (and never tell a soul you did it!)
The best part about the best is over is that it can be a turning point to drive us back to what is better than online -- offline. Go live real life, touch grass, and give real monetary value to things which give meaning back in return. For most people this involves people or animals, maybe dirt, and often involves giving more than you take.
I now understand that writing like this is lamenting over a dearth of things to consume.
All fun is on discord now.
Golden ages are usually defined in retrospect.
I was just thinking the other day that I wish someone had told me that "golden ages" are always coming and going. As an adolescent and young adult in the 90s, I thought that simply was how things were, and that they would continue to improve in the same way indefinitely.
I would say that we're in a golden age of AI, in that LLMs seem to be heavily subsidized. We're in a golden age of porn (sort-of-democratization via OnlyFans and similar), gambling (DraftKings), insider trading (PolyMarket), and private equity. We're probably at the end of the Golden age of social media influencers and crypto(scams), as most of the juice has been squeezed.
I think our recent golden ages have just kind of sucked compared to those of the past, by most people's subjective preferences and ethics.
My theory is that basically everything is controlled by income inequality and interest rates. AI should not, in theory, lead to a loss of creativity. If anything, we should see a creative explosion because it’s easier to create more and better things. If nothing else, generative AI is a great tool for brainstorming and prototyping ideas.
What we’re seeing is the over capitalization of everything, everyone is stressed out about making money due to rising inequality and rising costs of core needs like housing and healthcare.
The Renaissance happened because there were enough people with wealth that they felt free to explore art or give their money to artists without expecting a return on their investment. No one does things today as an expression of their soul, they do it to make money. Like the article suggests, people made things because they were happy, sad, horny, or mad. Now they do it for money.
We need to loosen up society’s obsession with accruing wealth, it ruins everything. What we’re witnessing is well described by the term Late Stage Capitalism, or what I like to call The Great Enshittification. It’ll only change when we decide to create something like a social safety net that lets people feel more free to create art that doesn’t need to provide an income.
Enshittification is just how platforms try to adapt to new users, and it actually works very well. It's just old users have grown to be ... classy, which are less profitable for platforms.
I think a lot about this post along these lines:
https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths
I don't think the fun is gone from the internet, you just have to look much, much harder to find it. It's the needle in the haystack of attention and profit-seeking content. And the platforms aren't as neutral as the might have been in the past in helping you search.
Sometimes I swear the algorithm has learned it keeps me more engaged with incredulously dissatisfactory search and discovery rather than anything actually stimulating.
Skill issue.
Been doing this for 20 years.
I have less dev energy as an adult and dad, but I know what I want and how to make it.
All of my ideas I'm able to make not only a proof of concept but an entirely polished app, all thanks to AI.
I wouldn't say it's more or less fun than coding manual, apples to oranges, but it's certainly entertaining.
That's not what this article is about. It's really about algorithmic social media. There is one short paragraph near the end that mentions AI: "AI did not kill the Internet; it inherited an Internet with the fun already optimized out of it."
"The Medium Is The Message" - Marshall McLuhan
People aren't nihilist - social media is.
People aren't shallow - dating apps are.
The world isn't shit - late capital is.
But of course, people are also nihilist, shallow and shit; and those same people are hopeful, complex, patient, kind and loving - but the internet rarely brings those stories to you.
It's not just the internet, it's digital everything. No more wonder left. Everything that is profitable has been sucked up by oligarchs. Everything that is fun has been done to death. Everything communal gets flooded by assholes or gate-kept by insufferable control freaks.
the fun is still there, it's just harder to find because of all the shit burying it
The juice may not be worth the squeeze when there isn't much reward for finding the single golden kernel that has somehow survived the enshittification.
true, but always people around who just squeeze for the fun of it
Another predictable anti-AI rant.
Maybe it is time for an internet divorce. Permanently cut it in half between those who are ok with AI and those who are not. If it were up to me, I'd never want to hear from the latter group again.
Every new generation thinks things were better when they were young. Personally I liked the internet of the mid to late 90s, just as the web was overtaking AOL. By the mid 2010s, which this article calls the golden age, the internet was already very commercial; personal sites barely existed, most activity took place in walled social media gardens.
I bet people older than me disliked the 90s web and preferred the days of gopher and newsgroups. No one is wrong and everyone is wrong.
Part of the reason things felt better when you were young is because it was; for you. Fewer responsibilities. Less understanding of the nuances and intricacies of the world. More room for idealism. Another part of the reason is that time tends to fade away the bad parts of life while retaining the things you enjoyed. This is good.
Nostalgia is great for reconnecting yourself to a simpler time in your life. Nothing wrong with that. But when you start making comparisons you're only fooling yourself.