Hey again!

I know wild title, but it’s true. The modern internet is absolutely atrocious and continues to become worse and worse.

But why do you say that? Why is the internet getting worse? Download speeds are going up, more people are online than ever. Surely the internet isn’t getting worse, but better.

No, the internet is already next to dead, and the problem is centralization and the destruction of your own unique identity online. Just back in the early 2000s, it felt like the internet was primarily user driven, the content was made by us, the people, and shared with other people. Sites were custom, and personal to any one person. People hosted things on their own, you had your own webpage and homepage.

Remember Angelfire and Geocities? Anyone could make their own homepage. If you could think of it, or create it, you could share it to the world, and it would grow!

However, over the years, we’ve been on a rapid trend towards the homogenization of everything. Every profile is the same copy-pasted template, every post and video uploaded to youtube is made purely to attract the largest audience possible while offending the least number of people. Nothing is really unique online anymore. You used to have to surf or scour the internet looking for things. Now there’s so few places you can actually go to find things, it’s basically searching a few large places.

The internet has become smaller, not in number of users, but in identity. It’s just another corporate monotony. Every page is designed to be as stale and un-offensive as possible. It’s all become a minimalist copy paste design that serves no reason for existing other than to be the most generic as possible.

What happened? It wasn’t that long ago that people wanted to customize things and be their own person, now it’s all the same. Pick your social media app you use most, and go to your profile. How much can you change? I’d be willing to bet you have the option to change profile picture and maybe a banner and that’s it. You can’t change the background, or the color scheme or how it looks. You get a profile and a banner and everything else is the same.

Services we use have gotten to be like that also. I’d place a safe bet you probably use Gmail or Outlook. Or maybe Yahoo or AOL if you’re older. There’s two companies hosting the vast majority of email in the world. And this is a trend with social media companies, search and websites. Search? You realistically probably use Google or Bing. Social media? Facebook or Instagram, which are really both just Facebook. Reddit? Tiktok? It’s all owned by giant mega-corporations that want nothing more than to eat your data and sell it to the highest bidder.

Speaking of which, ads on the internet have become a scourge on the average user. Seeing one or two banner ads every now and again was ok, but it’s gotten to the point where ads aren’t even just basic posts to sell things, but have become actively hostile in favor of gaining as many false clicks on the premise of clickbait (really just lying) mobile and desktop ads. Some of them even contain actual malware. But if you open up your favorite social media app, how far can you get in it without seeing an ad? If you’re actively scrolling, I would bet it takes less than 10 seconds to see a sponsored or ad post.

You don’t even really get to search anymore, Think about how bad Youtube and Google search have gotten over the years. How hard is it to find something because the search input you give the program isn’t even the primary source of weight for what to query? Everything is fed to you by an algorithm that isn’t even designed to show you what you want to see, but what is most likely to keep you on the platform and generating them money.

And somehow, most people are just un-bothered by this, and it’s just accepted. “Ah yea selling everything that makes me who I am is ok, I get this mediocre platform for it”. This isn’t ok.

So what’s the solution here? Panic? No, don’t panic that isn’t the solution. The solution is start working your way back to the ways of the older internet, bring up a new era of the internet that’s based on what we the people want, what we think is funny, what we think is cool. And what feels most like us. Not what companies feel will be accepted by most people. Go be yourself, set up a webserver of your own! Run your own website. Host things by yourself, don’t depend on companies to do it for you, because that’s what they want.

People will ask, what about the risks of it going down? The risks of it going down aren’t gone by using a company for it. Take the Cloudstrike outage that took down hundreds of critical internet services run by companies. Nothing is truly 100% safe and immune to downtime. Trust yourself with your data more than some large company.

Sure, your stuff can go down, but so can anything else. the cloud is really just some companies computer as opposed to your own. Gmail is just an email server, but run by google instead of you. Amazon Web Services is just a server hosted by Amazon instead of you.

The internet used to be made and run by people. It’s now made and run by companies.

Together, lets change that. Go create something of your own! Bring upon the world a newer, better form of the internet that we all can love.