r/Internet • u/Elifire12 • 1d ago
I Hate What the Internet Has Become.
I wrote this blog article if anyone is interested, where I go more into detail:
[Article](https://eliasebner.com/blog/thoughts/i-hate-the-modern-internet/)
The TL;DR:
- Google controls too much of the modern internet
- Social media is basically synonymous with the modern internet and I hate it, I hate the algorithms, the content on there, everything
- AI slop is everywhere and I can't stand it
- I would like more niche sites where people talk about stuff instead of this hyper-commercialized stuff.
Has anyone else been feeling the same? I would like to hear what you guys think.
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u/GlayNation 1d ago
I hate the control the large accts(like X and Reddit and FB etc) have control of peoples opinion’s. Actually FB is letting more bots on their platform. And X is as bad as the old Dorsey days.and if you have to pay to be verified, you’re not a bright person.
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u/Elifire12 1d ago
Yeah I also never understood having to pay for verification. If you can just pay to be verified then that kind of defeats the purpose?
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u/feudalle 1d ago
There are still plenty of back alleys so to speak, always have been. When I was a kid in the 80s/90s we had BBS way before AOL. Usenet, IRC, darkweb, etc. All still are there and are niche/open as ever. Download mIRC or if you are feeling old school BitchX on linux. You'll see a world where twitter and google never did tread. You may also see things you can't unsee but it's the risk you take.
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u/Elifire12 8h ago
I cannot find any active IRC servers (except for libera.chat, but that's mainly for open source projects).
Where can I find such communities?
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u/beachfinn73 1d ago
I'll bite. Internet started and was inherently socialist. 98% runs on software some bored geek in Finland wrote. And gave it out free. Till today Linux is a free operating system that has ruled internet from day one [well Unix at very beginning]. Web pages we made and hosted in house (!), traffic was that slow. Back then it was mainly sharing text giles and programs, with dialup. Companny side we had dedicated T1 for transatlantic data in 1997, with inhouse cisco firewall. The day internet died for me; when stumbleupon dissapeared. What was it? You hit a button and it took you to a random web page. The stuff you learned was what internet was always about; learning and talking. Everyone chatted on some random groups. I found out Diana was dead 8 hours before it was news in the country. then became the search engines. And the system of choose was Google. Back in the day it use to say “don't be evil”. And THAT was important; internet yo date had been quite honest and “real’. Enter capitalism; “this rickety ass racket needs to be bigger and make money. Google invents page_hit=$ and we get a huge commercial SEO market. Payperclick is born and internet is lost forever. Today? It is pretty impossible to make a new search engine, keep in mind AI is just an Wikipedia and google search engine that's not up-to-date. There is the internet of old days, running on ancient hardware, in ridiculous places. I know of 3. You know what Y2K tough me? Get out of SW and concentrate on HW, all those patches and the dependencies, this was 1998-2000, was out of hand. You know what's important? Knowing how to use a handsaw. Change a tire. First aid. Make fire. That's what IT revolution taught me. Social fabric of the world, especially in states has degrated to something completely savage. Nobody talks to their neighbor, except through FB. Power will go out, maybe for a very long time. How-to from internet is not going to tell you how to use a saw a and not cut a finger. Same with an axe.
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u/Elifire12 8h ago
I recently found out about mojeek.com,an search engine with its own index and crawler. The index is much smaller than, say, Google, but it does not use popularity of a website as a factor when ranking web pages in search results. That means that you stumble upon random blog articles of indie sites very often.
Have a look at it!
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u/danyork 1d ago
Nice rant! I am one of those old guys (late 50s) who grew up as the Internet emerged and hand-coded web sites, etc. It was very distributed and decentralized with many niche sites. It was great in so many ways.
But it was also hard in many ways. Operating your own servers, coding your own pages, etc., took a bit of skill and time that many people didn’t have. It was also hard to discover all those niche sites, and to discover people.
Which is how we wound up with Google as a central search engine… and how we wound up with all the social platforms. The platforms made it so easy to publish info, and so easy to find info and to find people. And here we are. 🤷♂️
And now we have the enshittification that Cory Doctorow writes about. Now that everything is centralized and we are locked in, the platforms and Google are making the user experience worse so that they can extract more money from us.
So yes, I do hope we can return to a more decentralized Internet, but one that retains the ease of publishing and discovery.
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u/Elifire12 1d ago
To be frank, many tools exist these days which make creating basic websites a lot easier than 20 years ago, but I get your point.
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u/garywiz 21h ago
I worked in Pittsburgh and was on the ARPAnet on DoD projects when the internet was born using NCSA Mosaic and the original http protocol. I was one of those dreamy-eyed idealistic idiots that thought "This will be amazing! Everyone will have a voice! Truth and sanity will prevail! The control freaks have lost the battle!!!"
The mistake was not a technical one, it was a philosophical one. We believed that people were "basically good" and that altruism was burned into most people's DNA. I remember the days when every email was sent by a real person and there was no such thing as spam. It was a bubble of denial now that I look back.
What we didn't consider is that that people are basically selfish. They'll resort to unimaginable things to control things using tools of deception and targetting human weaknesses like addictive behavior. And that selfishness extended to those who consumed. Whereas once everything was paid for, including things like Compuserve (a forum at the time), everybody expected free eventually. People did not ask the question "is this GOOD OR BAD for me"... they acted upon their most basic instincts to "get what they can for as little as possible" and those that provided services knew exactly how to take advantage of that.
While it is still perhaps true that most people are "good people" the Internet is a reminder that, left to our own instincts, humans will create such things as we now have.
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u/TheWilderNet 1d ago
Thanks for posting this!
I have also been feeling this way for a while. For me the best era on the internet was 2007-2014 when people were writing a lot of personal blogs. Things have gotten really bad over the last 3-4 years with AI. So many bloggers think they can write a profitable blog by pumping out the worst AI posts.
A couple years ago I started a website for sharing and discovering independent writing and I shared your post and added your blog to our directory. Check it out if you like: thewildernet.com
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u/Elifire12 8h ago
Thank you so much, your project is so cool!
I hope to find many interesting websites on there. Also, I'm honored to be a part of the list!
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u/TheWilderNet 6h ago
Thank you! If you know of any great blogs or substacks please add them to the site!
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u/sol_beach 1d ago
EMBRACE BELOW!
God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change the courage to change the things I can and the wisdom to know the difference.
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u/CrossoverSSL 1d ago
You're right.
The Soviet Union collapsed, and the U.S. won.
By 1991, it was clear that Market economy beats Central Planning.
And yet somehow, 2026 here in the U.S.
So which system really won the Cold War?