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There’s part of me that thinks this is pure nostalgia bait - we grew up on the internet, we’re middle-aged now, everything was better when we were young, shake fist at cloud.
OTOH, author isn’t wrong. The mainstream net genuinely ain’t what she used to be. The exact blame for that I don’t know and it doesn’t matter - we’re in the shit now.
That’s why niche sites like Lemmy, small web, RSS feeds etc are still so valuable. They’re messy and human, like things used to be ™. The trouble is finding them.
What I notice most is that I don’t really search anymore; I use the internet like an appliance. “Want info about A, go to X. Want info about B, go to Y”.
It’s all horribly efficient. In fact, in a recent !privacy comment (on best search engines) I basically said “I don’t really search any more. Search is shit. I use these tools instead”
https://aussie.zone/comment/24223554
So the author’s point about use of AI tools is worth chewing on (what with Lemmy being famously anti-AI). I think we’re now at the point where AI-assisted tools - self-hosted for me, thanks - are the best way to find those rabbit holes worth exploring. Even a small llm (Gemma-4-e4b) tied into good MCP tools can produce a really good “super Google, without the spam, find me X”.
In fact, one of the main reasons I self host (yes, mine’s solar powered) is that specifically.
https://aussie.zone/comment/24336560
OTOH, you could always mirror your own internet. With black jack. And hookers.
https://aussie.zone/comment/24257247
Ultimately though, I think smaller, more curated space (yes, like Lemmy and yes, please stop trying to turn it into the next Reddit) are going to be the last bastions of the old 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. I know i sound old man yelling at cloud.
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 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.
You kinda are yelling at the cloud, dude
Just because people remember a measurably better time doesn’t mean they’re yelling at clouds.
This wasn’t even that long ago.
Are you 12?
Edit: I have been regretfully informed that I have in fact, missed the joke lol.
I regret to inform you that you have missed the joke.
Oh god.
That’s hilarious lol.
Thank you internet stranger.
Arrrgh! Point 3 puts me into Hulk Smash mode.
Me: “How do I start a fire?”
Site: 2 pages of what fire is, 3 pages of how fire was discovered, a page of uses for fire, a digression on how fire has impacted þe auþor’s life (which is utter fabrication as it’s written by an LLM), all interspersed wiþ lighter ads, and finally an answer of “go buy a lighter”.It’s internet recipes taken to an extreme, and it’s all AI generated now. It is so infuriating.
you dont sound like old man yelling at cloud. you sound like sane man in madhouse.
2nd to last paragraph:
And this isn’t some anti-AI screed — I’m all-in on agentic software engineering!
To be fair the internet was already shit before 2023
Not to the extent it is now courtesy of AI.
I dunno man, in 20-23 all the ravings about Covid being fake or crafted by china and released on purpose and vaccines being a conspiracy to track you by bill gates were by almost all real people, it was pretty shitty even before ai built all the websites, all the posts, all the comments.
IMHO using ai to automate tasks is not the same as using ai to generate sloppy content
Using AI to automate tasks that could be automated with a script is awful. And if the endpoints are there for AI to trigger actions, then a simple script could use those same endpoints to do the same thing.
Using AI to help write the script? (Strong emphasis on “help”) Ok, maybe in some scenarios.
But just constantly running AI to do shit is like firing up your big diesel pickup to go down the block to visit your neighbors, except in this case the diesel truck can’t even be trusted to reliably take you to your neighbors every time you want to go there. There’s always the chance it’s going to decide to go somewhere else.
That emdash tho
Emdash is useful punctuation — I use it all the fucking time.
On the other hand, “it’s not foo; it’s bar,” once a quirky rhetorical flourish, now scans lazy and sloppy as shit.
Also, swearing like a motherfucking sailor helps establish one’s humanity. So fuck off. No offense. Have a lovely day!
let’s make them enjoy it less
The internet is in small communities we shitpost in along the way
Me either. Feels weird to be complaining about it on the internet though. It’s almost like the solution is self-evident. Oh, well. It’ll come to me.
The only thing that feels akin to early internet to me is the chat in video games. I miss being able to moderate things with my own brain thx.
I only enjoy very specific hobby subs\forums. Beyond that you can’t find anything because all the search engines rank to by ads. Looking for a real review is a joke, its all AI\bogus.
YT is getting worse w/ all the AI slop. I just stick to my channels that again are hobby/interests I have that haven’t gone AI (yet).
I haven’t been on FB for over 10 years, no IG, no tic flop, or other social media because its a nightmare.
I’m not encouraging you to use YouTube, but if you do, marking stuff you aren’t interested in and removing every slop video from your watch history can help a lot. The YouTube algorithm very rarely recommends slop to me
Lately, YT has been serving me sort of schizo-slop. On the one hand, it’s content I’m interested in, the base stories are good, the presentation isn’t bad - but it’s low effort and long running for no reason. A story that could be related in 15 seconds, well told in depth in 3-5 minutes is dragged out, repetitively repeating its few points for 20 minutes or more.
It’s a vast improvement over the teaser text stories that used to promise you’d read something interesting if you just scrolled past 500 ads and click forward 50 pages - those became rather instantly recognizable as time-waste abuse 15+ years ago, low cost low quality writing from low paid humans. The new schizo-slop has a core of seemingly verifiable interest (if it’s not actually verifiable it’s a core of a well written believable fiction), and seems to be filling in around that core with verifiable interesting context, it’s just taking 5-10x longer to present than is needed, or interesting, and I’m wondering what they think they’re gaining by sucking people’s attention in for so little in return?
I do this at least 5-10x a day, and they keep showing me the same shit from a different “account” same fucking stick man, same fucking asian guy with glasses, same old white fucker with white hair and glasses. I’m tired boss
Never tried that or considered it, thank you!
yw, also subscribing to the people providing good content should help too. Most of my feed is from subscriptions, with related content inbetween
This I have seen in action, one sub I like is Mount Baker Mining, which lead me to Dan Herd, then to Mine Operator, and others.
there’s a typo at the end,
“These isolas are now much harder to find in the [pail] of slop, and I don’t see a way back.”
I’d expect nothing less from an evergreen guru gasp
Happy to show the way, as always. ;)
Why is this on the internet?
Why are you?
Why shouldn’t it be?
