The Internet used to be better and then Social & LLMs happened

Such an edgy and fresh take wow

Like the one of you reading this, I’ve been on the Internet for quite some time. By my recollection, that would’ve been somewhere around 1997.

Now if you were not yet born in 1997, that might as well be ancient history, like the Second World War or affordable housing. Here’s the thing, the Internet changed quickly and slowly from the perspective of someone born in the 90s at least, there were websites, you went to the websites, you looked at the stuff, they were bedazzled with scrolling text and garish colours that by modern standards burned your eyes, and you were kinda done. The 1990’s is Pre-Google being the way absolutely everything was found on the Internet, if you can believe such a thing, and places like AskJeeves was where you would go to look for something you didn’t have the address for.

I’m painfully aware that someone born in the 90s, may have had a very different experience if they were born in 1990 or 1995, and for people who were teenagers in the 90s, this must seem like an actual baby explaining their first Internet experiences – fair – I feel like that when I talk to people in their teens now.

Forums, UseNet, Communities – this is the sort of stuff that feels like broke in the age of social, my space for me was the big kahuna, that looked like it would eat everything. FaceBook of course is what largely DID eat everything: blogging, specific communities, personal websites and blogging, all that. Complaining that Facebook has been successful is not new, nor is it new to complain that Facebook has allowed every person with any idea about anything to communicate with any other person, and then show that to the rest of us because rage bait is good for engagement, and Facebook is all about that engagement metric yo.

Anyway, something had to be first. In tradition, it kind of had to be something cringe, because it’s the first one (thankfully my teenage era blog posts and emo feels have been burned from the internet, praise be to iWeb and Apple’s pivot away from hosting) and firsts are hard. I haven’t written anything that may ever see the light of day in what is (alarmingly) nearly 20 years on the broader Internet.

With Mastodon, the resurgence of microblogs and slow, why-wont-it-happen-already death of Twitter/X/Whatever it is, maybe things will get better and return to something like open?

Whatever happens, it’s probably going to be sucky for communities as it happens, as it has always been.

Ask the Tumblr people and the Reddit ExPats.

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