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I hate the modern internet.

There are many things wrong with it, and it keeps getting worse, so let me tell you about it.

At 21 years old, I am quite young in terms of the age of the internet. I was born in 2005, so considering that for the first five years of my life I didn’t really have any idea of what the internet actually was, I have only been experiencing it since 2010 (probably later). If we consider the time it took me to actually get a smartphone and actually start using the internet actively, we’re probably closer to 2015.

That was already really late. When I hear people about ten to 15 years older than me talk about what the internet was when they were younger, I feel nostalgia without having even lived through those times. With “the modern internet” I am referring to the era after social media started to emerge. If I’m not mistaken, Instagram was already really mainstream in 2015.

I hate modern social media. Actually, let’s talk about that for a bit.

The Decentralization Problem

I love decentralization. For one, I like not having to rely on one central authority to keep all my data all in one place and to be controlled by such authority in a way that allows them to completely delete me from their platforms. But the main reason is that I love that decentralized systems are usually much more people-oriented.

Before the advent of social media as we know it today, people would build their own sites. Hand-craft them with HTML and CSS and put them online. They first of all had to learn the skills required to do that, and then they had to actually put in the work and build their site.

That was like their own personal social media page, except that you could customize every aspect of it, talk about whatever you wanted to talk about, without having to worry about appealing to any algorithms and such, and simply be yourself online.

That’s not the case anymore. Look at the landscape today. People living fake lives in public trying to impress people they don’t even know. Trying to appeal to some mysterious algorithm they don’t even understand themselves. Chasing metrics and numbers which - let’s be real - don’t mean anything at the end of the day.

I like the first version much more. Don’t get me wrong, that internet still exists, in fact it’s becoming more and more popular recently with more and more people wanting to bring that experience back. Many people have started building their own indie sites. Kinda like what I’m doing here. But the problem is, it’s a small niche. This was not supposed to be a niche. This was supposed to be the internet. Now it has been pushed aside in favor of these centralized platforms. The internet was supposed to be decentralized. What even is this?

On top of this, we can thank modern social media for the terrible reputation that the internet has for the average person. Of course it has a terrible reputation. Algorithms that have been perfected to keep you hooked and feed you useless or even wrong information in order to show you more advertisements. Social media hasn’t been about connecting with your friends in a hot minute.

The main problem I have with social media is that you don’t choose where to go. The algorithm decides what you see. In many cases I would argue it can even decide what you think. It’s an echo chamber. On the internet I envision, you decide where to go. You visit the websites you want to visit. Maybe a website a friend told you about, or something you found linked on some other website.

One could argue that all search engines have some algorithm to decide what results to serve you, which is absolutely true, but I think that is fundamentally different and I don’t categorically dislike search engines. A good search engine strives to serve you good search results, which answer your question clearly and correctly. A good social media site (good, as in “good at achieving its intended purpose”) keeps you hooked for hours, consuming brainrot content. In fact, the content itself doesn’t really matter. Instagram doesn’t really care what you watch, as long as it keeps you on Instagram.

One could argue that Google has been going in that direction, which is true, and that is also why I try to avoid using Google as much as possible. I use Duck Duck Go.

I might write another article about why I strongly dislike modern social media specifically, but this is not the place for it right now. Just know that, since social media is a big part of the modern internet, it’s also part of the reason I don’t like what the internet has become.

Slop

Don’t even get me started on the fact that most content you see online nowadays is AI-generated (read this, it’s the first website I found about the topic. You can mitigate this issue by being more mindful about the websites you visit, but AI content is becoming increasingly hard to avoid. I don’t necessarily have anything against AI and machine learning, in fact I think these topics are very interesting and I would like to learn more about them; I just don’t like that people have been using these tools to replace what made us humans in the first place. What is the point in generating art with artificial intelligence. I thought art was supposed to be about human expression. If that’s the case, then it’s wrong to even call AI-generated art “art” in the first place.

You can really tell that many comments on reddit are AI generated. LLMs arguing with other LLMs. Sad times we live in.

Search Engines

This ties both of the above points together.

Search engines are great, if they do their job well. They allow you to explore the internet and find new content that you couldn’t have found otherwise. The thing is, we have one main search engine. It’s Google. That’s it. Every other search engine is a niche tool at best and impractical at worst. Bing is the second biggest search engine.

Historically, Google has controlled over 90% of the global search-engine market. Bing has a big portion of the remainder. The rest is split amongst very small, less popular search engines like Duck Duck Go and others. Duck Duck Go has been growing in adoption lately but it’s still very niche.

Now, I see two problems with this. One is a consequence of the other.

The first problem, is that - again - this creates a big centralization problem. Google decides what you see, it decides what to hide, what to censor. It decides what is right and what is wrong, and what is popular. If Google gets paid a lot of money to show stuff in their search results - and they do - then they can just do it.

The second problem (which, if it wasn’t for the first one, wouldn’t be an actual problem) is quality. I don’t know about you, but the quality of search results has kept dropping.

It’s almost as if all of the money that went into research for these topics wasn’t actually spent on optimizing for the best search results in order to create the best search engine possible, but to optimize for profits. Sounds familiar?

Slop (again)

On top of that, Google has started promoting these “AI overviews”, which I quite frankly hate. Sure, it’s great if you need to look something up quickly and just need a specific answer to a specific question and cannot be bothered to look it up. But is this really what we want? I see several issues with this.

First of all, there have been several accounts of the AI overview being flat-out wrong. This means that you basically cannot rely upon AI to give you correct information.

Many people report catching the AI trying to use sites like instagram as a source for information. Even satirical posts.

The second issue is that relying on a short AI summary for our “research” makes us lose the required nuance to form informed opinions. It’s hard to escape the convenience, but often (in fact, most of the time) the answer is not as easy as we expect it to be.

And the worst thing about all of this? You literally cannot turn it off. Sure, there exist some browser extensions which literally hide the HTML elements that contain the AI overview, but that’s arguably not the same. Also, I find it disingenuous that Google does not allow you to turn off such a controversial feature.

Maybe they want to be able to report a higher usage of their AI?

Conclusion

I honestly really hope that the indie internet comes back, and looking at what Google is doing with their search engine and the recent rise of alternative search engines and indie sites, that scenario does not seem so unlikely anymore.

I hope you could relate at least partially to what I said here.

Thank you for reading my rant.

Until next time.