posted in Technology
I don't enjoy the Internet any more
btao.org/posts/2026-08-17-i-dont-enjoy-the-internet/
I feel like there has been waves of losses.
- Web 2.0 upgrades made everyone feel like they had to have a shiny polished site. We lost a lot of fun amateurs.
Once apps started getting pushed websites started to get abandoned/empty. everything from shopping to small games. I shouldn’t need an app for the coffee shop.
Bots and bad search operators made looking and finding a chore.
Insta killed blogs, suddenly everyone wanted a insta or YT brand rather than a blog/rss
Everything became sponsored =- say i wanted to find out how to polish my boots, the first 3 pages and everything everywhere suddenly tries to sell me boots.
This is why i no longer enjoy the internet.
as a former web developer, you nailed it.
I essentially taught myself how to build sites from Geocities. Back then the internet was awesome because finding a new site that was cool was like finding buried treasure. Things weren’t condensed. there was no central hub for news, media, socializing, etc. it was all spread out. you had webrings of similar interests, different forums you’d go to for different topics. different chat rooms like IRC, or The Palace, or Yahoo/AOL chat. It was better. it was easier to make friends online.
now it’s all condensed and boring. you go to less than a handful of sites a day, maybe only one or two, to get content. Forums are all but dead and social media killed them. We know too much about each other now, the “penpal” aspect is gone. blogs and livejournals don’t provide interesting and personal content anymore…they all have hidden agendas of essentially the author trying to get a job. Webapps killed creativity.
The internet is boring now and you really have to dig and dig deep for that “old school” content. because regardless of what search engine you use be it DDG, Kogi, Startpage, Google, whatever NONE of them are going to point you to someones Neocities or SpaceHey or blog anymore. They need to sell you something instead.
it’s like sites like this: https://www.manuelsweb.com/ THIS is what the internet used to be like. personal sites that just had links and posts about whatever was special in someones life.
It used to be so much fun mooching around and stumbling on things, like a site covered in rainbows that told you about a the best walks on a local mountain and then had a random ice cream recipe and some happy person taking a silly photo of themselves, followed by a review of their fav spoon and some instructions on how to fix a vacuum.
Same, taught myself HTML over a summer in high school. Literally went to a library and printed out a tutorial I found on the Internet.
I will say though, if you haven’t heard of it, there’s a small movement to get back to more organic web content. There’s the Fediverse for social media that isn’t algorithmically-weighted. There’s NeoCities for web pages. There’s Mojeek and Marginalia for search. (Marginalia is all non-commercial, so its search index is interesting.)
There’s still a lot of good out there.
Check out wiby.me for old-school stuff too. Clicking on ‘surprise me…’ is my favorite way to “surf the web” in modern times.
wow thank you! I absolutely LOVE wiby.me and I had no idea it existed. I’ve just been clicking on surprise me over and over all day. it’s great. reminds me of old webrings. easily my new favourite site/search engine.
wow thanks for these sites! I knew of neocities but never really spent time looking at the various sites, i’m actually starting to build one now. also Marginalia is great. saved all three to my startpage.
Hey, you’re welcome. If you’re interested I also did a full breakdown of the Fediverse on my YT channel earlier this year.
Neocities I just checked it out and omg it feels like 2005 in the best way. Thank you.
OMG Love it. Thanks
Both the neocities and https://marginalia-search.com/ were very helpful.
I would love to hear more about this organic movement. If you ever want to do a regular post on it, i feel a lot here might respond.
It would be really good if we could have our neocities attached to our name or something….remember when everyone had a sig with 15 useful links. i forgot that
Replying to @Cherry@piefed.social
A good place to start is free and open source software. I made a video on it in April on my YT channel, and really spent that whole month talking about free alternatives to popular subscription services like Spotify and Netflix.
Here’s one of those videos. If you learn something new, I’d appreciate a like to help with the algorithm, but that’s totally up to you.
Have a great day!
YouTubeStop Paying for Windows 11 and More in 2026: Best Free & Open Source Apps (Linux, LibreOffice, VLC)I think we should bring back individual websites and blogs as well as web rings. Fuck the current state of search engines!
Love the link, i so miss this kinda stuff. I actually want to click each page.