Will the Internet Ever Be Fun Again?

I am certainly not the first person to make this point, but the internet feels a lot less "alive" than I remember it from when I was a teenager. Not long ago, it felt like you could discover many different people, doing many different things, on many different websites. Now, it's clear that most people spend most of their online time on just a handful of websites.

People my age tend to spend a lot of time on Instagram and Tik-Tok, whereas generations above us generally lean towards Facebook. But everyone goes on YouTube - even my gramma told me she spends too much time on YouTube. All of these platforms have integrated the same scrollable short-form video content, but I think this is more of a sign of the times, or perhaps more of a symptom than the disease itself.

Ultimately, the internet of today feels less like a place where you go looking and discover, but instead either go looking and find nothing (unreliable search results and entire sites written by AI) or open an app where someone else (an algorithm) has curated content for you instead of you deciding what content you want to consume. Not only does this difference make you feel like garbage after you've scrolled Reddit, TikTok, Instagram Reels, or YouTube shorts for 30 minutes, but it's not even fun while you're watching. I think we've all had the universal experience of scrolling and thinking "Damn, I'm not even enjoying this," and then continuing to scroll for another half hour.

If you currently consume content like this, I think your life will improve by stopping it. The more I cut out / abstain from platforms that only care about milking my time and attention for ad revenue, the better I feel. But the part of me that remembers an internet before both the ubiquity and enshittification of these large platforms knows that there's a better place we can make.

To be fair, I think that the internet can be as awesome a place as you actively curate it to be. But I think that some amount of that curation has just become impossible. Many forum sites have just been replaced by a subreddit or Discord server. Many people don't talk about themselves anymore, they just "have an account" and "exist" on some large, distributed network.

That's a big piece I really wish was different - people really just don't talk about themselves or their life anymore. It seems like the popular internet (which I am defining as the way most non-technical people use the web) has become void of normal people. Sure, there are streamers or influencers or internet personalities or whatever you want to call them, but all of those people are basically just playing characters. The internet I like is the personal website of a random guy who uploads photos of flowers and bugs. The internet I like is the old Bodybuilding or Nissan Maxima forums that have more genuine interactions than Reddit could ever hope to have. The internet I like is the blog post about a very specific technical topic that only 14 people will ever care about.

What's the solution to this? Do I really expect everyone whose opinions I care about, or might want to care about, to have their own website? I really wish there were better options. But it just doesn't seem like we're ever going to get an actually good social media / social networking platform at scale. I could only see it working if people paid for the service. Personally, I'd pay for a good social media service that isn't incentivized to make itself gradually more shit all the time. I really wish I could have done this with BeReal instead of seeing forced "posts" from Krispy Kreme and the New York Yankees.

But honestly, to some extent, I think that a "perfect" social media platform would eventually just not be perfect after it gets to a certain size, unless follow counts or something like that were deliberately limited. One of my friends likes to bring up that he misses how Instagram operated when we were in middle school. Almost everyone would just post what they did that day, a really stupid photo of themselves, or generally just random stuff. And people would comment all the time. Now, social media sites seem to have more data uploaded them than you could possibly imagine, but almost no one is actually sharing real moments of their life or leaving genuine comments on other people's posts.

I don't really know where to go from here. I think if you have something to share with the world, it would be really awesome if you could buy your own domain for 10 bucks a year and figure out how to host a site and share your voice with the world. But I get that most people just aren't going to do that, and I don't expect them to.

I know that what I'm feeling isn't unique - that there are plenty of others who feel the same. I feel like each year, more people in my life tell me they're leaving these big internet platforms. But I'm wondering if enough people will quit to make a real difference - and where they'll go. I think the world would be a much better place if people drastically reduced the time they spent on some of these platforms, but I really believe that the internet and world could benefit from everyone consuming less and creating more.