by Sayuyo
I saw some posts and was thinking about it, and the internet has really shrunk since I was younger.
I can’t tell you the last time I’ve went on a personal site for various hobbies and this really sucks as various people’s personal pages had some great information. And yet somehow, back then with very little tech available, people seemed to be able to do a lot more than people are now.
It’s been a while since I’ve been on a site with truly awful interfaces and blinding red colors which was common back in the day. I can’t recall the last time I’ve even heard songs on various sites, which was a staple back in the day.
Blogs are pretty much gone from the internet. They’ve mostly morphed into vlogs. I can’t really remember the last time I read something similar to a livejournal, when everyone used to have one. Instead, facebook wall posts and twitter posts took it over.
Message boards are mostly gone. There’s some, but almost everyone has migrated over to reddit, twitter, facebook and so forth. Even something huge like the NBA, really only has a couple of other alternatives. I really noticed this during the 2016 election when the censorship boom really started and there was almost nowhere left to go once the bans started coming in.
The censorship has also gotten really bad. I can only remember getting banned a few times back in the day, whereas now I wake up every morning to see where I’ve been permabanned from. People have gotten more closeminded and less tolerant despite claiming the opposite.
Search results have definitely changed. I rarely get linked to various non-mainstream pages. It’s either mainstream sites or scam sites for the most part.
Mainstream sites like reddit, wikia and others have taken control of various topics.
EVERYONE now has a view on various political topics and they won’t hesitate to find a way to squeeze it in to the most random topic.
And overall, despite everything being lower quality presentation wise back in the day, the content was much smarter.
The internet shrunk. And with the shrinking, it got dumber and less creative. My daily rotation of websites has completely shrunk to the point that its even getting boring to be online, since there’s little left to discover.