When I first started exploring the internet it was very unique and strange. It was remarkable really, with countless ideas I’d never thought of. It was also very silly and obnoxious – but in a very different way than it is today. Almost every website looked different, people would try and express themselves through their website. Also there was no standard look, no precedent in what was normal – it was all abnormal. Templates were not super common, and it took skill to develop a site with HTML and such. I miss that internet, it has become a commercialized stale digital world trying to profile and categorize every individual for corporate and government ends. It’s calculated to influence each individual user of the internet in the way they think and act to help accomplish this. I wasn’t one of the first adopters of the internet in the very earliest days but I was on it well before Google was around. Google I believe is one of the primary ruiners of the internet.
Somewhat recently my wife and I have started to find that “the real internet” is still alive and kicking. As AI starts morphing and ruining things further for the masses, there is a very active counter-culture out there. And it seems to us that this is primarily in the blogging world and forum communities. You can still read websites (blogs) created for the primary purpose of self expression and sharing of ideas. And you can still go and ask questions to real people and get very good answers. Blogs and forums might be a little slower to get an answer, but the deep content and the interactive process can give you a much richer experience than an AI chat bot. There are forums around on just about any subject, it’s very worthwhile to get involved. In some forums you may just pass through as you get a quick answer. In others you may linger longer and make a few friends. In a forum focused on your primary passions you may become a very helpful member of the community helping countless people. Another great thing about forums and blogs is that the idea or conversation can stick around for others to learn from. I’ve learned from many old forum threads while using their search function. This started happening because now and then I’d fumble upon forums in my search engine queries and I was like, oh ya I forgot about forums and how good the answers were. So I’ve started going to some forums and just searching those instead of searching through browsers.
A little side tangent: I’m tired of so many of those 5-minute videos that explain almost nothing when trying to get some help with something. And what is it with the fad where almost every video people are twitching every second because of the insane amount of editing so common today. People don’t even bother completing a sentence and edit after every word or every other word. I’d rather watch a video double the length or more even if someone is struggling to explain something than have all those micro cuts. Soon AI will likely blend it all together so things look smooth like a single shot… Oh joy. I’ve been avoiding Youtube and watching video blogger type sites instead for some deeper analysis and quality content. I’m tired of every website trying to pry as much data as possible from me. It is nice using a VPN, browsers, and extensions that block a lot of that. I’m tired of reviews all looking the same and really just being an ad for Amazon posing as a blog. Because of being tired of all that I’ve been motivated to find alternatives, and in doing so it feels like I’m slowly going back to the real internet, with real people not corporate shills.
I’m so glad there are these privacy simplistic blogs coming around again. I really enjoy the "discover" feature on Bear Blog and the "read write.as" feature on Write.as, it really brings me back to the good old days of the internet. And it’s so great that so many forums are still around. Google used to be pretty great in my view, it really helped me dig into answers. It was a phenomenal tool for a while, and that is why they are so big – it used to be good. It’s become very shallow though, I noticed a major change with Google search around 2018 and it’s only getting worse. There were problems beforehand but at least search was still pretty good until then. I stopped using it some years back and it’s been very nice. I’m slowly regaining the internet and avoiding much of what I dislike about what has happened to it. Thanks in large part to bloggers and forums and some privacy tools.
Some silly side thought I keep having in various renditions. Wouldn’t it be hilarious if in another 10 years or so 80% of the internet users are AI agents of sorts, AI talking to AI with the majority of real people moving over to simple blogs and forums? And wouldn’t it be even more hilarious if another 10 years from then 98% of the internet is AI talking to AI and everyone else just kind of gets tired of it and shuts it off. Then we can all put our phones down and disconnect our internet and enjoy one another in person in the real world again. AI agents can set up all sorts of grandiose things for one another in the digital realm that never really happen, and we can go live life. All these data centers are to keep the internet going as people fade away back into reality. That would be totally worth all the money and resources for those centers.