The internet is worse than it used to be. How did we get here?

I think a large part of it is the balkanization of the internet into multiple opaque walled gardens. You can’t find anything, or freely join communities to exchange information anymore because everything is locked away behind some search engine blocking login.

Discussion moved from public, open bulletin boards, forums, and similar to Facebook groups, discord, etc. It’s locked away, unindexable, and unfindable. Even Twitter clammed up recently. So the only thing left searchable is auto-generated clickbait. While FB, and friends are optimizing engagement by nursing misery behind their login walls.

The only growing public forum left is Reddit which is why more of us keep adding “site:Reddit.com” to our search queries to surface quality results. And even Reddit has threatened to close off.

Controversial opinion, and while I do think Google is largely to blame, I think there is another more systemic reason: speed/storage increase. Humans don't do well with an abundance of resources, in the sense that the end result with abundance is usually extreme waste and low quality. We just aren't evolved for handling abundance properly.

For example: extremely cheap food beyond the basics leads to obesity and poor diets. Cheap fossil fuels leads to climate disaster.

And in this case, cheap space and bandwidth (and to some extent ease of use) has led to anyone being able to put up a website, and cheap bandwidth means that people will waste more time using the internet as a random diversion rather than merely using it to obtain the most essential information. That means there's a much higher incentive to put tons of ads on it and SEO game it.

Or, think about this: what are the BEST parts of the internet? In my opinion, they are the parts with the LEAST amount of speed/modern features that require lots of storage. For example: email, this old-fashioned looking website, personal blogs.

Yes of course, some newer things like YouTube are quite interesting, but even YouTube is being overtaken by headline-hype videos and overly commercial things like sponsored videos and an algorithm that promotes tabloid-like stuff.

But imagine if YouTube was more restricted: it takes a while to load a video, maximum 1080P, and maybe you can only watch 1-2 a day. Then I believe it would be much more interesting.

Money and Javascript.

The vast majority of people only visit websites that are other people's jobs. Popular websites now are those that provide legal ways of moving money. It's why no matter how good an open social network can be it'll only ever attract a fractional percentage of people(1) because KYC prevents any non-incorporated/institutional group from moving money. (1: ie, mastodon's 1 million, IRC's ~600k, etc).

And perhaps more importantly: the growth of HTTP as a javascript application delivery protocol instead of a way to access HTML pages on websites. The shift to browsers being fully fledged VMs runing real applications with lots of bare metal access means the utmost of security is required at all times (HTTP/3 can't even make a non-CA TLS connection). That security mindset makes for a lot more friction for humans trying to play around and share things with each other.

The old profit motive. The internet went from a collection of places where we cooperate with each other, or simply hang out, to one giant market place where everyone is trying to sell you something. Those other places still exist, but search engines won't help you find them. There's no money in it for them.

Mostly it's Google's fault.

I sometimes think this is not entirely fair of me -- if it hadn't been Google it would have been someone else? E.g., I'm sure there's a parallel universe where the Internet ended up being dominated by AOL, and it's hard to believe that would have been much better.

But in this universe it was Google.

Publication is a one-way information flow. We've basically sold out on an interactive 2-way flow for Disney and like, because what we want (as consumers) turns out to be passive entertainment more than active 2-way flow.

That plus ads, and the attempts to monetize. Nobody seriously wants to go back to the public broadcast model but nobody also seriously doubts we were in some ways better served than we are by 10+ monthly rental models, and IPR lockups in packages. Which all start ad-free and then quietly introduce the ads, unavoidably (unlike 30 sec skip days with a decent VHS or the PVR followons) because money.

counter-take:

if your food stores used to be 800m^3 of grain, and you manage to increase that 1600m^3 of grain, plus 5000m^3 of rabbit shit stored in the room next door, did your food supplies get better or worse?

almost nothing on the internet, in category terms, has gone away.

lots of new stuff has arrived, perhaps (perhaps) in volume outweighing whatever one might consider good.

i suggest that it is far from clear that this means "the internet is worse".

I agree with most of what the op is saying, but it's not all bad. ChatGPT has transformed the way I use my computer and brought back the excitement I felt in the late '90s. Shopping online and finding the parts I need has never been easier, and shipping back in the '90s and early 2000s was terrible compared to today.

The internet people often complain about is mainly used by casual users who stick to social media platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook, or by those who use Google for basic searches without knowing how to filter out low-quality content. With ad blockers and some discretion, you'll mostly be fine. Just steer clear of content farms, like those health and beauty sites, and you'll have a much better experience. Wikipedia and YouTube alone have the potential to change lives, and we didn't have access to either in the '90s or early 2000s.

If you're stuck on social media and don't know how to navigate the internet, that's on you. I didn't have the luxury of watching any episode of Star Trek whenever I wanted in the '90s. I still remember when the movie Mimic was released in 1997, and they posted the trailer online. I was so excited to watch a tiny square on a website after waiting almost 30 minutes for it to load. (The resolution was probably less than 200px!) Now, we can stream 4K movies whenever we want. That's true freedom. What we really miss is the time when fewer people were online, and the internet felt like our own special club.

Advertisements, marketing, "streamers" er I mean influencers, and monopolies.

1) We have become lazy. Bit tech worked for us. Provided value. Bait and switch. Enshittification. Remove features, make them worse

2) Internet islands are not connected. Walled gardens. Platforms want to keep you in. Balkanization

3) Bots are everywhere. When you remove, sometimes you remove too much. Sanitization.

3) Controversial topics boosts your visibility. Social media therefore focus on what divides us

2) Algorithms use users vulnerability to waste time on funny gifs with cats. Algorithms use their users to sell their attention for profit

1) People had their blogs. Their pages. There were hobby related. No many pages I see are CV-like pages. It is again used for "sell-buy" mechanics. There are no "Links" section where author provides link to interesting places. Often there is no passion

0) Search is broken. Since you cannot find anything there is no motive to "create anything" outside what is visible

-1) I am trying to fix my approach toward search. I cannot replace google, but I may create something that helps me. My project for keeping bookmarks, and navigate the internet https://github.com/rumca-js/Django-link-archive

The economic incentives that drive what gets published/surfaced.

If you genuinely enjoy something, then capitalism will do its best to extract more value from you doing that thing until you can barely stand to do it anymore. Anything less is equivalent to leaving money on the table.

My favorite example is ads on NBA jerseys. Fans probably hate that shit, but as long as they keep watching, they're actively rewarding the capitalists who made that choice. IOW fans are not just complacent, they're actively part of the problem.

Google.

The perverse ad incentives is what broke it.

Internet is fine and there’s weird fun stuff all over it

It’s the web and social media that sucks

I think the real reason is that now EVERYONE is online. It used to be only people with high levels of interest and motivation could even participate, but now that there are no barriers at all, it's just awash in shitty halfbaked ideas and low effort junk.

Ads. It was ruined by advertising.

> "In sum, the accelerated commercialisation of the internet, the dominance of media tech giants and the presence of bad actors have infiltrated content on the internet. The rise of AI further intensifies this, making the internet more chaotic than ever."

monopoloies and enshittification?

like almost everything, at the start it serves and is designed by it's users. then when money gets involved it shifts to serving the interests of the money people.

you see the same in so many other industries, films, tv, video games.

Can this be fixed? If it can't be fixed, can we get around it?

"It's capitalism, Stupid." We've incentivized bad behavior and have gotten bad behavior.

Google shares an enormous part of the blame for this. We were on the cusp of a semantic web 13 years ago. But the Ad supported Internet can't persist if the Internet is content. So we have 2024's crapfest.