I Kinda Hate The Internet Now

Image: “Computer on fire” / Badly edited by author

*warning: I went off on a rant.*

I was reminiscing the other day with a friend about a long-forgotten period of time — the days when the internet was fun. 

Tightknit forums with positive vibes, the early viral videos on YouTube (looking at you, Star Wars Kid), MSN Messenger, the band pages on MySpace, using Limewire to download music (at a glacial speed), searching for information and actually finding it — and actually being able to read it. As I recall, it was pretty magical. I can remember sitting down at night somewhat excited to open my shitty laptop and chat with friends, watch dumb videos and generally have a good time. Sure, it was clunky and slower. But it had charm. And it worked well. It might be a case of rose-tinted glasses, another example of someone claiming it was “better back in my day.” 

But, while the internet is still used in much the same way today, something has changed.

I feel no sense of joy using it. No curiosity. No intrigue. No excitement. That feeling of tapping into an endless world of possibilities is gone, replaced with a begrudging realization that I’ll have to enter it again and battle to find what I need, trudging through ads, paywalls, vitriol, disinformation and more. 

I’ve come to the realization that I kinda hate the internet now. 

I barely use it. There are only a handful of sites I read, a small number of websites I use, and a few platforms I am logged into. And each year, that number dwindles further. 

It’s hard to know where to begin. A post on Reddit by jalousiee is a good starting point;

“The Internet these days just feels like we’ve been relegated to a McDonald’s play place. You have to sit in the sticky, plastic chairs that everyone else has sat in while you eat your shitty double cheeseburger. It’s hot, it’s stuffy, it’s gross, and you want to leave but you can’t because all your friends seem perfectly fine putting up with this dogshit. And because you don’t want to become a social pariah, you have to sit there too and pretend like you’re okay with it.”

Let’s tear down this shitty new internet.

My dislike of the current internet is multifaceted

The internet is polluted with ads of every form, type and size — popups, banners, baked-in ads on videos, sponsored posts — and they are now invasive to the point they have harmed the internet experience. They are everywhere. Worse, we’re tracked around the internet (thank you cookies) in an attempt to make these ads more ‘relevant’; instead, they’re just creepy and have convinced huge swathes of the internet-using population that their computers are listening to them. No ad is a good ad, and while it’s been an acceptable payoff to use the internet, the reward is no longer worth the infuriation it causes. Even ad blockers, which have been my saving grace for years, are now struggling to free me from the clutter. 

Thanks in part to these ads, most websites are bordering on unusable. The first whiff of money, and everyone got greedy. Click off an advert here, only to have a new one pop up as you scroll. Huge areas of white space that are really video ads struggling to load. Then, a chatbot pops up to ask if you need help (and if you engage with them, the advice is the opposite of helpful). The popup windows offering you shitty PDF guides in return for your email address. Then, there is a post that is just a disguised sponsored post. Pages stuffed with affiliate links (DON’T GET ME STARTED ON RECIPE WEB PAGES.) Or the pay-gating, which has made most news and media websites barely functional and is becoming more aggressive in a desperate attempt to keep these businesses alive. As someone who writes on tech and business, I can only read a small percentage of websites now (and I can’t afford to subscribe to them all). 

Then there is search, a once glorious feature that allowed us to find almost any information, video or image we could think up with the typing of a few words. The top of Google results back then had authority and trust. And for a while, it was glorious. Then came SEO gurus, growth-hacking, and paying for positions. Then Google itself started playing dirty tricks or manipulating search results, and the whole thing has become a shit show—Google’s monopolistic powers over what is seen and what isn’t have resulted in lower-quality search results. Search sucks so bad that people now think asking an A.I. chatbot questions (which just pulls info from the same website anyways) is a better alternative. Says it all. 

One of the most damaging shifts is the move to engagement as the priority metric. This came with the rise of social media, also known as Web 2.0. Forget the quality of content, accessibility, site design or speed/ease of use. Everything is about views and clicks — the attention economy mind rot. It has resulted in the explosion of clickbait, hate bait, engagement bait and endless forms of awful, copy-and-paste content designed to “hack” growth. Every forum or tweet or social post, or comment section is filled with hate, sexism, extreme political views, OnlyFans porn previews, triggering replies and more, all for the sake of views. Everything is systematically designed and curated to generate anger, tribalism and polarization. Whatever it takes to get your eyeballs fixed on that screen, it’s fair game. The tech industry turned the internet into a dopamine machine, and they are doing everything they can to get you hooked on the nasty shit. 

Worse, a lot of the drivel isn’t even produced by humans. As the internet expanded, so did the realization that it could be farmed for engagement. Enter the bots. Some platforms (looking at your Twitter X) have been destroyed by bots. P U S S Y I N B I O. But these bots do more than slide into your DMs or respond with the same auto-generated nonsense. They also work in tandem to deploy campaigns of disinformation. And as we saw with the elections, this is scarily effective, especially on the older generations who still don’t understand that everything you see online isn’t real. Really, it’s time that penny dropped.

Web 2.0 also brought us algorithms, which has led to what I like to call the vanilla internet. Why try anything else when you can get the same shit fed to you day in and day out? Algorithms have been so well designed and executed (think TikTok) that they’ve removed the need to explore. They’ve taken away the desire to widen horizons. That’s where the curiosity drained away. It’s all paint by numbers (and we’re the numbers). These algorithms have infested every platform and have forced us to become more insular and develop tunnel vision. We’ve seen the polarizing consequences of this time and time again.

More recently, we’ve found ourselves on the cusp of another big shift, perhaps even another age of the internet — the era of A.I. generated sludge. Every platform, every comment section, every social post and now many reputable (or formerly so) media sites are filled with A.I.-generated content, responses and replies. Social sites are polluted with A.I.-generated images that the untrained eyes (read: social users aged 40 and above) cannot tell are fake, generating ungodly volumes of clicks. Not only is the internet harder to navigate now, it’s harder to tell what is real and what isn’t. The way A.I. has been implemented to date shows the suckiness of the internet is only going to get worse. A lot worse. It will amplify every one of these problems. 

Perhaps this was all inevitable

The internet is still a relatively new technology in the context of time, and it may only have been a more blissful place in those early years because people hadn’t clocked on to how it could be monetized, farmed, controlled or bent to their will. 

Alas, we are where we are — on the verge of ruining it completely.

The question is where to point the blame. That’s a hard one to answer. As the users of the internet, we’re all accountable for how we use it, what services we use, and what models we are happy to engage with. If you learn that Facebook was stealing your data to sell to Big Advertising, and you still use the platform, you’re complicit. If you hate that Google isn’t playing fair with search but still use Google, you’re complicit (I’m guilty of this one). If you hate that media sites have adopted A.I. to turn out sludge, and you still read them, you’re complicit. 

But a lot of blame also falls on tech overlords and venture capitalists, who have been destroying the experience in the pursuit of turning it into an attention-farming system because, as we all now know, clicks drive advertiser money. Venture capitalist money and its control over media, platforms, and social companies have forced them to design not for customer value but for shareholder value. Every update, every pivot, every decision is made to drive that line higher.

I wish I could end this on a more positive note.

I thought about offering solutions, but I don’t have any. The internet is controlled by a handful of monopolies, which are resistant to change because change lowers their stock price. Many users are resistant, too; either they don’t care that it got shitty or they are in too deep and have accepted it for it is. Those who have sold their souls to plunder the internet for a living with shitty courses and growth-hacking guides certainly don’t care. Scariest of all, many of us are addicted and don’t even come to the internet for joy, knowledge or connection anymore— we just do it because we are 100% wired into the machine and can’t break the cycle.

It’s pretty bleak. 

What we need is a giant reset and a chance to start over. 

It’s unlikely that will come anytime soon.