Short Thoughts: I miss the old Internet

Maybe it’s nostalgia talking and looking at the past with rose colored glasses, but I miss the old, unmonetized, Internet.

At home, we got our first modem around 1996. I remember going online as something that was slow and expensive yet exciting. I would do it every now and then to find information for school, or to read about video games that I liked playing back then. I remember at the time using Yahoo and Altavista to search for pages related to whatever it was I wanted to read, later on it was Google.

At first I remember going online as something fun where I could learn new things, but I think what really made me start to appreciate what was in front of my eyes, was finding the world of (video game) emulation, and later, Napster. I was always interested in computers, but I think these were the two main things that really made me want to know more about how they worked, and what eventually made me want to become an engineer.

At the time, search results were not particularly great (at least until Google came along), and connections were slow, we couldn’t watch video (or realistically, even listen to decent audio), and even images could take a while to load.

Eventually, in 2002, we got a DSL connection at home. I’ve been terminally online ever since.

What do I miss then?

I miss how the web was fun and unique, everyone’s site was different! How a page looked was only really bound by their creator’s technical skills and what browsers could display. People would put pages online showing off whatever they found interesting and sharing the knowledge they had. Websites felt personal (because they were!) and like a labor of love. Looking at somebody’s site was a bit like peeking (consensually) into their bedroom, seeing what objects they had and what was hanging on their walls.

I hate what the internet has slowly become. Almost every website looks sterile and impersonal (even this blog is guilty of that, I should probably re-design it to not look like a boring white wall, even if probably nobody reads it). Are there any sites left that do not come bundled with a horrific bloat of Javascript and tracking cookies? It seems like search results, at least on Google, have been getting consistently worse and worse, filled with SEO optimized blogspam, stolen content, “AI” garbage, and useless clutter like links to Pinterest and similar sites.

Ads have always been a thing (and we cannot ignore all the ads that used Flash that were common for several years), but it seems things have been getting worse and worse. Pages devoid of any content, just filled with paragraphs of empty words just so they can serve you more and more ads (and probably video ads that scroll alongside you). Ad-blocking software nowadays is a necessity.

Tracking and privacy have also taken a turn for the worse with every corporation trying to collect and sell as much data they can squeeze out of you without any type of consent or knowledge about it.

AI threatens to drown the little quality content that gets put out there in a hellscape of even more meaningless crap.

It seems social media has made us all even dumber, and even amplified the reach of scum like the far right.

I doubt anybody would have imagined we’d end up like this, even just a couple of years ago. I want the old internet back.

Epilogue

I originally wrote this in early February but never posted it as I felt it was incredibly pessimistic. Things have gotten worse since then unfortunately.

Every company under the sun is selling as much data as they can for training purposes, while the rest are scrambling to shove some unwanted and useless “AI” into all of their existing products. Google results have gotten even worse while its new AI built into search results is telling people to eat glue and jump off bridges. Places like Reddit, where discussions used to take place are now overrun by bots having conversations among themselves.

I cling to some hope this will bring back smaller and more focused communities like what phpBB/vBulletin forums used to provide 20-15 years ago.