Things I Hate About the Internet

Call me a nostalgia whore or accuse me of wearing the rose-tinted glasses again — but there was a time when the Internet was actually a fun place to be.

For a little moment, it was a place of wonder, of discovery, of community, of utility, a tool that seemed to open the door to endless, amazing possibilities. If only then we’d known that we’d actually opened the door to endless enshittifcation, monetisation, toxicity, division and clout chasers.

Putting into words how much I hate spending time on this damn thing is challenging, so I’ve listed the things that irk me the most right now. Let me know what you would add to this list with a comment below!

Paywalls

“To continue reading this, sign up to become a member. It’s only $5 bucks a month. That’s the equivalent of one overpriced matcha latte at Starbucks lol.”

How many times is the Internet experience interrupted with a message like this? These days, it’s almost impossible to read or watch anything without being met with a paywall. Worse, they are getting more and more aggressive as the walls close in on paid media, and the desperation to survive takes hold. What was once a daily or monthly limit or ‘soft paywall’ (remember when you got nice messages like ‘You’ve read one of your 10 free articles this month”?) soon became a hard one; now, you often can’t even read the opening sentence of post before being cut off with the plea.

Sure, your membership may be the cost of a coffee, but if I have to sign up for 472 others as well, I’d be halfway to buying my own coffee shop.

The Adpocalypse

Advertisement is without doubt the single biggest offender when it comes to destroying the Internet experience. It's gotten so bad it's being called the 'adpocalypse.’

Banners. Pop ups. Side bars. Windows begging you to sign up for yet another newsletter. Ads that appear when you click off the first one. Ads that dance around the screen like they’re playing some kind of practical joke. Websites using parallax scrolling so they can add an entire layer of adverts that sits below what you're reading, popping in and out as you scroll. Video ads. The hardcoded ones on YouTube. The ones on streaming sites THAT YOU PAY FOR ALREADY. Those annoying one’s that open up the App Store. Each one slowly eroding my will to live, and making doing anything on online a painful experience.

That's the way most Internet pages are now — an awful, soul-destroying and value-less experience.

Note: I get why it got it this way. Ads and paywalls help keep the lights on (sometimes), but must be a better way than this? Limits to how many, how often, what % of a screen can be filled with them, how long they can track you for, media sites mixing free and paid articles (remember if folks want to pay, they will, the rest of us wouldn’t mind engaging with what you do, and hey, maybe we will also pay one day?)

Is this AI?

“hey grok, is this AI?”

This one has almost immediately become one of my biggest bug bears. Every single goddamn post on every single goddamn platform is met with a torrent of “is this AI” responses.

Boy have we opened a can of worms here. Generative AI is getting to that place where it can be indistinguishable from “real” content, and now we’re questioning everything we see. That’s good, responsible Internet use — and frankly, something we should have been doing long before AI turned up — but it really is damaging to the utility of the web. Discussion and debate has been replace by the same question on loop, and when discussion does break out, users now want it summed up neatly by a chatbot. The depth, the unique insight, the quirks of human-to-human interaction are disappearing.

Vague Posting

“you guys see it too right” “oh that’s not…” “they didn’t know”

What happens when you allow users to monetise tweets? You get people posting things in order to bait a response.

Enter vague posting, which is the act of posting online without the context or otherwise necessary information needed to understand the post. It might be random clips of films, without sharing what film it is. It might be statements like “She was right” (right about what?!) or “Can I say it?” (say what?!), or “If you know, you know” (KNOW WHAT?!)

It drives me insane, and worse, it works every time. I have no stats to back this up, but vague posting must have sucked up a fair few percent of the entire engagement on X in the last few years. Well, that’s if we count engagement from bots I guess.

Andrew Rousso said it best — “can I get some fucking context!”

Shrimp Jesus

Question time: What are the benefits, the utility, the joy, of scrolling through feeds of accounts that pump out absolute gutter-level AI-generated shit?

The answer, unless you’re a boomer, is none.

The early version of Facebook was genuinely great. It was fun to keep up with friends, post pictures and poke each other (no, fair, that was weird). If those platforms could exist to serve no purpose other than providing a good experience for users, they could have left it at that and we’d have all been happy. Alas, growth at all costs, shareholder’s wallets and the dick-swinging contest between Silicon Valley’s elite meant each had to get bigger, draw in more money, and of course, get a whole lot worse.

We’ve now reached the end game of this. Mark Zuckerberg believes that the future of social media is a bunch of human beings scrolling through and arguing about AI-generated content on his many platforms.

That future is Shrimp Jesus, and it’s already here.

It’s addictive

The obvious answer to something you hate is to say Bye Felicia, and kick it to the dust. There’s only one small problem with almost everything connected to the Internet — it’s addictive by design.

There’s too much to consume and too short a time, and everything is now built to suck you in and keep you there. I think that’s the worst thing of all about the current iteration of the Internet, at some point it stopped being built around utility and instead was built around engagement, so the overlords could bleed us dry of data points.

The result is that most of us lack self-restraint, which leads to overindulgence and from there, a host of mental health and social issues.

I’m not sure that was the dream of its creators.