Why the Internet Feels so Hostile Now (And What to Do About It)
If you're here reading my blog, you probably, like me, long for the days of a simpler, more human-centric internet. Some of you may wonder what happened to the best days of the internet, back in the late 90s, 2000s (and into the early 2010s)?
Well, everything became so captured by corporate interest that it became nigh-unrecognizable as the democratized, people-centric internet it used to be. It became this advertising-and-product centric behemoth. Even things like counterculture and subculture became nothing more than something to be bought and sold. Out was the personal website, in was the "personal brand" (those words make me want to vomit).
What can you do about it?
This rot hasn't reached every corner of the internet, and indeed, more places are popping up that resist it! I would say, try spending more time there and more time reading/watching things that require an attention span of longer than fifteen seconds. If you're still on things like TikTok (shudder) you're probably mostly just accelerating the problem.
I would say, for your microblogging needs (think Twitter), you could look at moving to the Fediverse! The Fediverse is a worldwide network of servers that serve as a decentralized "social media" (I hate that term too) environment, You may have heard of Mastodon and it is indeed a big part of the Fediverse. It feels like a blast from the past in many of the best ways.
You can also seek out old-school forums for your interests. I promise they're still out there. I still regularly read and post on various forums. There are also very old-school bulletin boards like The Midnight Pub. If that seems more your speed, perhaps you should check out the smolweb, things like Gemini and Gopher - which are entirely different internet protocols to HTTP that don't lend themselves over to corporate takeover as well. They are also entirely text-based, though media can be shared through them. Gemini is new, but Gopher is very old and in fact rivalled the Web back in the early 90s.
You can also check out things like Neocities and the whole larger Yesterweb project. You could try checking out things like Marginalia, which not only is a cool search engine and old-school Web hub, it also has a random website feature that can be used to find a lot of cool things!
Another thing worth mentioning is perhaps returning to more long-form communications. Send your friend emails, call them on the actual telephone. The social environment of the old internet is another factor as to why it was the way it was. People were less isolated, atomated, and averse to socialization.
I mean, that's the whole reason we're here, right? To connect with other human beings. We can't lose that or we lose a lot of what we are.