Pining for the golden days of the world wide web. A recipe for resuscitating the dead internet.
Looking back at the golden days of the internet through the rose-tinted glasses of nostalgia
The early internet was a fertile breeding ground for organic creativity, characterized by the abundance of human generated content, free exchange of ideas and genuine human interaction online. Long time users like me still recall, with a sense of nostalgia, the golden era of the internet represented by hosting communities such as GeoCities and Angelfire that were homes to many original, quirky, and niche homepages delightfully hand-crafted by their webmasters with much love and dedication. It was a time when blogs and homepages proliferated, fueled by human imagination and resourcefulness, with a spirit of openness that was unfettered by the shackles of the technology giants.
Back in the day, the term surfing the world wide web really meant something. The act of exploring the internet frontier through the web of blogrolls, web-rings and directory listings was a real adventure that often rewarded the user with hidden gems of wisdom and information.
My recollection of the past through the rose-tinted lens of nostalgia may be a little biased but that is how I recalled the wild west days of the internet.
Alas, as I survey the current internet landscape, I must admit that the days of the golden era of the internet are long gone.
Sad state of the current internet
Things changed for the worse when the technology giants got into the act with profit motive solely on their minds. These days, the internet is dominated by giant technology companies such as Google and Facebook that exercise control over large swaths of the internet.
These companies largely control the users' online experience through the use of algorithms that filter and promote specific content. Users commonly engage in the act of doom scrolling in which the social media platform continuously feeds them with algorithmically driven content. These users fail to realize that they are actively being deprived of alternative content and diverse viewpoints.
Search engines also act as gatekeepers to the internet that control, to a large extent, what you get to see on the world wide web. The profit motive has tainted the search engine algorithms that tend to promote monetizable content at the expense of lesser known but relevant websites. Evidence of the power of the search engine over the internet can be seen through the impact on the internet of the few Google service outages in the past.
The current state of the world wide web is so bad that a certain segment of the population now uses the term dead internet to describe it.
Proliferation of automated bots on the internet
Sadly, the activity of automated bots on the internet is increasing at an alarming rate. According to some estimates, nearly 48% of internet traffic can be attributed to automated bot activities, with genuine humans making up the remaining 52%.
Algorithmic curation and monetization
Our social media content is served to us by algorithms designed to maximize user engagement (such as likes, shares, clicks and comments) that drive monetization, revenue, and corporate profits. The profit motive leads these social media platforms to promote sensationalized content, which is often polarizing in nature, even to the extent of exploiting divisive social issues. For evidence of this kind of nefarious activity, just look up the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal.
AI-generated content
The extensive adoption of generative AI platforms, such as Open AI's ChatGPT, Google's Gemini and Meta's Meta AI, have resulted in an explosion of AI generated content that is polluting the internet. These artificial contents are characterized by their lack of originality, genuineness and devoid of human touch. To make matters worse, they are often made up of pieces plagiarized from existing human created articles and blog posts.
Search Engines - The gatekeepers of the internet
These days we cannot even depend on Google to give us straight answers to our search requests. Too frequently, Google chooses to push their AI generated Overviews, snippets and ad-sponsored links to the top of the search results page to squeeze more ad-revenue to satisfy their shareholders thirst for more profit. This is done at the expense of genuinely relevant search results thus robbing unsuspecting users of their time and effort. To make matters worse, Google AI Overviews have been known to provide erroneous answers to user search requests.
The awakening - Small/Indie Web movements
Fortunately, green shoots are starting to emerge though the growing indie web and small web movements. These movements advocate certain principles that users can adopt to help make the internet a better place:
- Simplicity, minimalism, and accessibility in online content
- User control over online data and content
- Decentralization of the world wide web
- Promote user privacy
- Increase the diversity of the web by encouraging more human generated content
What we can individually do to resuscitate the dead internet
There are some things that all of us do to play our role in curbing the advance of algorithms, bots and AI on the web. I list these items down in my recipe for internet resuscitation. The ingredients are as follows:
- Own our data and content by hosting independent websites that are free from the stranglehold of the social media platforms.
- Empower ourselves by self-publishing our thoughts, writings, and creations on our own websites.
- Adopt the use of blogrolls, independent search engines and the fediverse to establish social connections and interactions on our own terms.
- Revert to the use of basic building blocks of the web such as HTML and CSS to minimize the utilization of scarce server resources. We should all do our part to reduce the carbon intensity and footprint of the internet.
- Avoid the use of bots/trackers that intrude on the privacy of the audience.
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Thanks for reading.