The golden age of the internet is over and it's never coming back.
By @finnkindof · Internet
Remember when you had to actually WORK to make your online presence unique? We traded away glitter graphics and chaotic MySpace layouts for boring, sanitized algorithms and everyone having the exact same feed.
The full story
Let's be real, the internet is boring now. It's a series of walled gardens all owned by like three companies, and every "creator" is just a marketer for their own personal brand. Everything is sanitized, optimized for engagement, and utterly devoid of soul. I miss the chaos. I miss spending hours learning garbage HTML just to make your MySpace profile play a Linkin Park song automatically. I miss AIM away messages that were meticulously crafted passive-aggressive poetry. I miss forums for incredibly niche hobbies where you could argue with a 45-year-old dude from Iowa about the right way to build a computer. You had to seek things out. It felt like a digital frontier. Now? Everyone's an influencer with the same minimalist apartment aesthetic, trying to sell you a greens powder. Your entire online experience is dictated by an algorithm designed to keep you scrolling through 15-second videos that are indistinguishable from each other. We traded personality for polish, discovery for convenience, and genuine connection for parasocial relationships. It's a downgrade in every single way, and I'm tired of pretending it’s not.
How people voted
- Valid Take — 28% (18 votes)
- I’m Torn — 39% (25 votes)
- Bad Take — 33% (21 votes)
Readers are split: “I’m Torn” leads with 39% — 64 votes and 3 comments so far.
What people are saying
@sortakinda — This is just nostalgia bias clouding the fact that the old internet was mostly unusable and slow.
@willsorta — Sorry but I don’t miss every link being a 50/50 chance of a rickroll.
@alyssamaybe — real.
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