I miss the early internet.
Back then, the web felt smaller. Not literally, of course, but emotionally. You could spend an evening hopping from one person’s blog to another, following links that had nothing to do with algorithms and everything to do with curiosity. Someone would recommend another site because they genuinely liked it. You’d click through, read someone’s thoughts on photography, computers, movies, or life, and before long you’d find yourself leaving a comment.
A few days later they’d reply, and before you knew it, you had a new friend.
Some of the closest friends I’ve ever had came from those days. The funny thing is that many of them are still just as much a part of my life today, despite the fact that we’ve still never met. Over the years, we’ve shared birthdays, relationships, career changes, triumphs, disappointments, and ordinary Tuesday afternoons, all without ever shaking hands.
People sometimes raise an eyebrow when I say that. “You’ve never met them?” No. And that’s okay. It was okay then, and it’s okay now. Though, I won’t pretend I don’t hope to fix that one day. I’d like to sit across a table from some of these people, buy them a coffee, and finally see the faces that have existed behind usernames and profile pictures for nearly three decades.
The internet also used to be… fun. Memes spread because they were genuinely funny. A video going viral usually meant someone had stumbled across something clever, weird, or unexpectedly brilliant. Nobody sat around trying to manufacture virality because there wasn’t nearly as much money attached to it. Going viral was something that just happened.
People built websites because they wanted a website. People wrote because they wanted to write. You weren’t expected to optimize everything for engagement, subscriptions, affiliate links, sponsorships, or an algorithm that changed every other Tuesday. You just made something and hoped someone else would enjoy it.
Then social media happened.
I’m not one of those people who believes everything changed overnight. There were always angry people online. Trolls existed before Facebook. Flame wars existed before Twitter/X. Every generation thinks they invented arguing on the internet, but we’ve been doing that since the days of dial-up. The difference is that those voices used to occupy little corners of the web.
Now they own the loudspeakers.
Modern platforms reward outrage because outrage keeps people engaged, and engagement sells advertisements. News headlines are carefully written to make us angry before we’ve even clicked. Comment sections have become spectator sports where everyone arrives expecting a fight. The business model isn’t to inform us. It’s to keep us scrolling.
Somewhere along the way, personal websites quietly disappeared.
Why spend an afternoon writing a thoughtful blog post when every platform encourages you to compress your thoughts into something short enough to survive an attention span measured in seconds? Why own your own little piece of the web when someone else offers you a free account in exchange for your attention? The old blogs slowly faded away.
I miss them.
Not because they were perfect. They certainly weren’t. Half of them were held together with questionable HTML, animated GIFs, visitor counters, and color schemes that should probably be investigated by the authorities. But they were personal. They belonged to someone.
They felt human.
I know I’m not saying anything particularly original here. Thousands of people have already written about how the internet has changed. I’m certainly not going to change it by writing one more blog post. That’s not really the point. The point is that this little website exists.
It isn’t trying to sell you anything. It isn’t chasing an algorithm. It isn’t carefully engineered to maximize engagement. It’s just my little corner of the internet.
Maybe the web doesn’t become interesting again because one giant platform decides to make it interesting. Maybe it happens because thousands of people quietly carve out their own little spaces again. Their own blogs. Their own photographs. Their own stories. Their own strange hobbies that nobody asked them to monetize. And maybe that’s how we remember what made the internet special in the first place. I’m not trying to recreate the past. Those days are gone, and that’s okay. But I can still reclaim a tiny piece of what made them wonderful.
Welcome to my little corner of the internet.
I hope you’ll come back.
Maybe I can do my strange little part to make the web feel fun again.
I recommend perusing Safiya Umoja Noble’s Algorithms of Oppression for more about this very topic.
Algorithms really were the big tipping point, I think. The very early days of Twitter and even Facebook weren’t so bad when all that you saw was exactly what you *chose* to see, what you opted-in for — not inherently that different from when RSS readers (RIP Google Reader… and RIP Google itself, for that matter) were the primary way of keeping up with the blogosphere. But once the corporations *told* us what we were going to see and how we were going to see it, that became the irreparable fracture between the old and the new, I think.
And in a way, all those of us who’re conscious of what was lost are faced with coming back full circle now. The pre-social-media internet was a bunch of unregulated self-owned homes that got replaced in the mainstream by curated leased apartments. But just as books and other physical media didn’t cease to exist when digital media came along, and just as humans haven’t ceased to exist in the wake of AI (yet?), the ability to “own our own home” never went away, either. On the early internet, “home ownership” was the only option. But now it’s something that isn’t “offered” by default and has to be chosen again… and I can only hope that the fact that it *is* a choice — when making our own choices has always been the most important fundamental right we all *have* as humans, and has arguably never been more necessary to exercise and to defend than it is now — will make it more valuable and vital than ever in the end.
Welcome home. <3