Written in late March, sat in drafts for a while. Publishing it now mostly as it was.
There was a version of the internet that felt like stumbling into the zine section of a weird independent bookstore. Personal homepages with hit counters at the bottom. Forums where you'd recognize the same handful of people for years and actually develop opinions about them. Someone's grocery list showing up in search results because they happened to put it online. Hobbyist pages about obscure topics that clearly had one author who cared about exactly one thing and wanted to tell you everything about it. Weird little Flash games, half-finished fan sites, hand-coded pages with terrible color schemes and animated gifs that someone thought looked cool. Just people putting stuff on the internet because they wanted to.
I don't think most people notice, because the replacement arrived so gradually and also because most people using the internet now never experienced the other version. But if you were around for both, the difference is hard to overstate. It doesn't just feel different, it is fundamentally different, in the same way that a shopping mall is fundamentally different from a street market, even if you can technically get similar things at both. The shopping mall is cleaner, more convenient, more accessible. It's also a completely sterile experience with no surprises and nothing you didn't already know you were looking for.
When the internet was mostly enthusiasts and hobbyists and weirdos, there was no real money in it, so nobody with money paid attention. That was the whole situation. No advertisers to appease, no editorial guidelines, no brand safety concerns, no legal department reviewing your posts. People put stuff online because they wanted to, full stop, and the result was genuinely strange and interesting because there was no filter between the person and the thing they made.
Then broadband made it accessible. And at a certain point, it crossed some threshold where the attention of billions of people was just sitting there and corporations noticed. The ad economy figured out that attention is money. Every platform started competing for as much of your time as possible. YouTube went from random people uploading whatever to a full media industry. Search engines started optimizing for traffic rather than quality because traffic is what you can sell ads against.
The money is really the whole story, if you think about it. Every specific thing that went wrong traces back to the same root. Why is search full of SEO garbage? Because there's money in ranking well. Why did platforms push real names? Because real identities are more valuable to advertisers. Why are feeds full of outrage content? Because outrage drives engagement and engagement drives ad revenue. Why is everything behind an account creation wall? Because logged in users can be profiled and profiled users can be targeted. The internet isn't broken by accident. It's operating exactly as designed, and it was designed to make money, and making money turned out to be incompatible with being a good place to be.
The old internet was anonymous by default. Not because anyone was hiding anything in particular, just because that's how it worked. You had a username. It wasn't connected to your real identity. And that anonymity created this environment where taking risks was actually possible. You could try things. Say weird stuff. Have strange opinions. Post half formed ideas. Be genuinely experimental. Because the worst realistic outcome was that some stranger on a forum thought you were an idiot, and you'd never see them anyway.
Facebook is probably where this definitively ended. Making your real identity the whole basis of your presence online wasn't an accident, rather it was the product. Your real name, your real relationships, your real employer, your real city. All of it attached to everything you posted. And once that became the norm across platforms, the self-editing started. People began calculating what they shared online in relation to who might see it and what the consequences might be. Not consciously, necessarily. Just that ambient awareness that your coworker might see this, your family might see this, a future employer might search your name and find this.
The fear of "cringe" attached to your real identity is not a small thing. It quietly killed an entire category of creative risk online. Nobody's writing weird experimental fiction under their real name. Nobody's posting half-baked theories they're not sure about. Nobody's letting themselves be genuinely embarrassed on the internet anymore because embarrassment is now permanent and searchable. Old posts get screenshotted and recirculated years later. Things you wrote at twenty show up when you're thirty and the context is completely gone and nobody cares. The permanence of everything combined with the searchability of everything created this climate where the rational move is to say as little of actual substance as possible and keep everything vague enough that it can't be used against you.
The result is that everything online got more cautious, more polished, more performance. People present a version of themselves rather than actually being themselves, and you can feel it everywhere. Opinions get softened into "I'm not sure but maybe..." because having a strong opinion is a liability. Humor gets sanitised because someone might not find it funny. Art gets safe because weird art invites weird reactions. The whole culture of experimentation and weirdness that made the early internet interesting was downstream of the fact that nothing had real consequences. Take away that safety net and people stop taking risks, and you end up with the extremely curated, extremely careful, extremely boring version of self-expression that dominates social media now.
And even if you try to be anonymous, you're not really. Not in any meaningful sense. Your IP, your device fingerprint, your writing patterns, your behavioral data across platforms, your typing cadence in some cases; there are enough data points floating around to identify most people who think they're anonymous. The surveillance infrastructure is baked into everything, and everyone knows it's there even if they don't consciously think about it. It changes how you behave regardless.
Peak internet was niche. There were forums for every conceivable interest, and each one was its own little world with its own culture, its own language, its own long-running arguments and in-jokes and cast of regulars. You didn't belong to "the internet." You belonged to specific corners of it. And those corners felt genuinely different from each other in ways that mattered.
A forum for people obsessed with a specific genre of music had a completely different feel from a forum for amateur astronomers, which felt nothing like a forum where people discussed obscure hardware, which felt nothing like a small community built around a niche video game from 2001. Each one was shaped by its people, its history, its specific culture. The weirdness of each community was inseparable from what made it good. You'd spend years in these places, watching the same people argue about the same things, watching newcomers get initiated, watching dramas unfold and resolve. It was genuinely a community in a way that a feed of content you're served by an algorithm is not.
What made it work was that these were bounded spaces. You knew who the regulars were. You had a history with them. When someone new showed up and acted like an idiot, the existing culture absorbed or rejected them. The community had enough continuity and density to have an actual character. The mods were usually just enthusiastic members who'd been there long enough to care about the place. Everything scaled to human size.
Then Facebook (again) ate everyone. The consolidation happened gradually and then all at once, and suddenly everyone was in the same place, under real names, visible to everyone in their actual life. And the thing about "putting everyone in one place" is that when the audience is everyone, the content has to be acceptable to everyone, which means nothing interesting can happen. You can't have a weird, specific, niche culture in a space that also contains your grandmother, your boss, your ex from high school, and three billion other people with completely different sensibilities and real names attached to their accounts.
And the communities that survived often moved to Discord, which is its own problem. Discord is better than nothing, but it's also a closed platform that doesn't show up in search, has no persistent public memory, and can be shut down or abandoned overnight. The conversations that happen there are invisible to anyone who isn't already in the server, which means the discovery mechanism is completely broken. You can't find those communities unless you already know they exist (I know server discovery exists, by the way).
YouTube in 2008 was people pointing cameras at things they found interesting. Shaky camera, bad audio, completely genuine. Someone had a thing they wanted to show you. That was the whole pitch. And it was great, because the bar was low and the motivation was pure and you could feel it.
Now every video is a production. Thumbnail designed to look like someone just witnessed a nuclear explosion. Hook in the first three seconds or you lose the algorithm. Intro with motion graphics. Segment sponsor. Mid-roll ad placed at the most inconvenient moment. Merch shelf. Call to subscribe and hit the bell. And the content itself is shaped around all of this, around what retains viewers, what gets shares, what the algorithm rewards this week, what other people in the space are doing that's working.
And this happened because it had to. When your livelihood depends on the numbers, you optimise for the numbers. Not because creators are cynical or sellouts, but because that's what the incentive structure produces. The people who kept doing it purely for the love of it got outcompeted by people who treated it like a business, because treating it like a business works better at scale. The system selected against the thing that made it interesting and selected for the thing that monetises well.
The influencer economy made this universal. Being an "influencer" is now an actual job category with agents and brand deals and content calendars and whatever, which means the people who would have previously just been interesting people online are now professionals managing their online presence as a business, with all the sanitization and calculation that implies. You can't just say a weird half formed thing when you have a hundred thousand followers and a brand partnership you're trying to maintain. The interesting, unguarded version of you is a liability. The polished, consistent, on-brand version is what pays rent.
You used to just go to a website. Now you dismiss a cookie banner, close a newsletter popup, fail a captcha, complete a second captcha to prove the first one was real, create an account, verify your email, add a phone number for security, click through a privacy settings page with forty-seven toggles all set to "yes please surveil me" by default, read a notice about how their terms changed, and then maybe get to see the thing.
None of this stops bots. Bots are everywhere, more sophisticated than ever, they just route around the friction automatically. What the friction does is make the experience worse for actual humans, specifically humans who'd prefer to browse without leaving a trail of identity data everywhere they go. It's not really about security. If it were about security it would work. It's about de-anonymizing users, because anonymous users can't be profiled and profiling is how the ad economy works.
And the people most burdened by this friction are the people who care most about their privacy, which are disproportionately the people with the most to lose from surveillance; activists, journalists, people in countries with bad governments, people with stalkers, people who just don't want their employer knowing their politics. The casual user clicks through everything without thinking about it. The people who actually need anonymity get punished hardest by systems that nominally exist to protect everyone.
At some point, everything became potential content. You go to a concert and half the crowd is filming it. You see something interesting happen on the street and the first instinct is to get your phone out. Someone says something funny at dinner and you think about whether it would work as a tweet. This isn't entirely the internet's fault though. It's the intersection of smartphones, social media, and the influencer economy creating a culture where your experiences only fully count if they're documented and shared and get a reaction. Going somewhere amazing and not posting about it feels, to a lot of people, like it half-didn't happen. Which is insane if you think about it. You were there, you experienced it. But the loop of sharing it and seeing people respond to it has become so normal that the experience without the sharing feels incomplete.
And nobody dances anymore. Not metaphorically. At parties, at concerts, at clubs, people stand around with their phones out filming. Recording a thing they're supposedly there to experience. The content of the experience gets replaced with documentation of the experience, which is a completely different thing. You're not at the concert; you're producing a record of having been at the concert. What you come home with is footage, not a memory in the full sense. The memory is mediated by whether you captured it.
There are still corners. Neocities has real humans building personal websites because they want to, and it's genuinely one of the best things on the internet right now. Small forums still exist if you know where to look. IRC is still there if you want it. Some Discord servers have actual community. The weird human internet isn't completely dead; it's just no longer the default, and finding it takes effort, and the search engines that used to surface it no longer work well enough to help you find it in the first place.
The internet became the thing every other medium became when it got big enough. Television had an experimental phase where people were figuring out what it could be, then it got commercial and safe and format-driven. Radio had a moment of genuine chaos and creativity, then it got consolidated into a handful of formats that work for advertisers. The internet had its moment, longer than most because it was harder to control and slower to monetize, but the same forces got to it eventually. Scale plus money equals corporate plus boring. Every time.
I don't think there's a way back. The infrastructure that made the old internet what it was is gone and the culture that produced it was a product of a specific moment that passed. You can build small things in corners, and people do, and those things matter. But the default internet, the place most people live online, is not going to revert to something interesting and human and weird. The money is on the other side of that, and the money always wins eventually.
It was genuinely something. And sitting here in whatever this is now, you can feel the shape of what's missing even if you can't fully describe it. Something that doesn't exist anymore that used to make the world feel a bit bigger and stranger and more full of people doing unexpected things for no reason other than that they wanted to.
That was worth something.
