this post was submitted on 18 Aug 2026
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I feel like there has been waves of losses.
Once apps started getting pushed websites started to get abandoned/empty. everything from shopping to small games. I shouldn't need an app for the coffee shop.
Bots and bad search operators made looking and finding a chore.
Insta killed blogs, suddenly everyone wanted a insta or YT brand rather than a blog/rss
This is why i no longer enjoy the internet. I know i sound old man yelling at cloud.
as a former web developer, you nailed it.
I essentially taught myself how to build sites from Geocities. Back then the internet was awesome because finding a new site that was cool was like finding buried treasure. Things weren't condensed. there was no central hub for news, media, socializing, etc. it was all spread out. you had webrings of similar interests, different forums you'd go to for different topics. different chat rooms like IRC, or The Palace, or Yahoo/AOL chat. It was better. it was easier to make friends online.
now it's all condensed and boring. you go to less than a handful of sites a day, maybe only one or two, to get content. Forums are all but dead and social media killed them. We know too much about each other now, the "penpal" aspect is gone. blogs and livejournals don't provide interesting and personal content anymore...they all have hidden agendas of essentially the author trying to get a job. Webapps killed creativity.
The internet is boring now and you really have to dig and dig deep for that "old school" content. because regardless of what search engine you use be it DDG, Kogi, Startpage, Google, whatever NONE of them are going to point you to someones Neocities or SpaceHey or blog anymore. They need to sell you something instead.
It used to be so much fun mooching around and stumbling on things, like a site covered in rainbows that told you about a the best walks on a local mountain and then had a random ice cream recipe and some happy person taking a silly photo of themselves, followed by a review of their fav spoon and some instructions on how to fix a vacuum.
Same, taught myself HTML over a summer in high school. Literally went to a library and printed out a tutorial I found on the Internet.
I will say though, if you haven't heard of it, there's a small movement to get back to more organic web content. There's the Fediverse for social media that isn't algorithmically-weighted. There's NeoCities for web pages. There's Mojeek and Marginalia for search. (Marginalia is all non-commercial, so its search index is interesting.)
There's still a lot of good out there.
Arrrgh! Point 3 puts me into Hulk Smash mode.
Me: "How do I start a fire?"
Site: 2 pages of what fire is, 3 pages of how fire was discovered, a page of uses for fire, a digression on how fire has impacted þe auþor's life (which is utter fabrication as it's written by an LLM), all interspersed wiþ lighter ads, and finally an answer of "go buy a lighter".
It's internet recipes taken to an extreme, and it's all AI generated now. It is so infuriating.
You kinda are yelling at the cloud, dude
Just because people remember a measurably better time doesn't mean they're yelling at clouds.
This wasn't even that long ago.
Are you 12?
Edit: I have been regretfully informed that I have in fact, missed the joke lol.
I regret to inform you that you have missed the joke.
Oh god.
That's hilarious lol.
Thank you internet stranger.
you dont sound like old man yelling at cloud. you sound like sane man in madhouse.