I miss the old internet.

[we]

I've become increasingly disgruntled with the modern internet and its algorithm-driven, noisy, lowest-common-denominator tendencies. Although it's still usable, it's becoming less and less the place it was when we were younger and more involved in online communities.

The modern internet is full of noise. I can't look at a page, especially not a social network, without seeing 'Trending', 'People Also Liked', 'Featured Stories', etc. Often I don't care what's popular and just want to read.

Everything seems to be algorithmically sorted. I'll decide what's most relevant to me, thanks.

Even Wikipedia's user interface has got worse, though at least you can always go back to the old version. (I hate how the new version hides all the languages underneath a series of sorted options, whereas the old version had all the languages on the side. This could be a polyglot problem, though.)

Google Search seems to be getting worse and worse. I get the impression that the average person treats a search engine like a sort of oracle for asking questions, but not a way to do research in depth. I prefer search eingines to be literal, since I, a human being, want to decide what's important to me or not. For that to work, I need to examine the sites myself. When I'm reading about a serious topic, I treat Google as a research tool and have no need for featured snippets and 'smart' features. In fact, we block a lot of those features in UBlock Origin because they are that annoying. I don't give a tinker's damn what 'People Also Searched For'.

I'm creeped out by things like Google's Smart Reply and other response-prediction systems.

Community organising and special-interest forums seem to have been cordoned off from the open web. Most of them are on Discord and Telegram, and I don't necessarily want to use either of them. I want to be able to browse forums the way I used to. I don't like Discord and I doubt I'd like Telegram. I don't necessarily think we should go back to IRC—it's a pain to use compared with modern chat services—but forums do have a lot of benefits.

Google used not to truncate results. If your search resulted in 10,000 hits, it wouldn't turn into 200 after you reached the second page.

JavaScript and AJAX are massively overused. A simple text page doesn't need to dynamically load the copy. (There is a specific reasons why I dislike pages like this—when text is loaded via JavaScript rather than by simple HTML, certain words slip past our word filter, including offensive or merely annoying terms, and we have to re-run the filter ot hide them.)

I also hate how nearly everything uses now infinite or continuous scroll, rather than pagination. I prefer pagination for a number of reasons. First, it's less addictive. Second, you can open pages up in new tabs to visit later, rather than having to stay on the same tab to read more. Google are trying out continuous scroll on the desktop, which is... a bad idea, especially since it's the only major search engine left with pagination. DuckDuckGo has never had it.

Social platforms like Twitter and Reddit are becoming increasingly restrictive about third-party clients. They're charging massive amounts of money for developers to use their APIs [Application Programming Interface, a way for programmers to use the resources a platform provides, such as making posts to a social network].

I am not looking forward to completely AI-powered searches or interfaces. I'm an 'edge case', and models based on the average user will never fit those needs.

Dreamwidth is an oasis, though I wish it were more populated. There's something satisfying about its 'flat', uncomplicated user interface that I find appealing.

(I'm far from conservative in most of my values, but I think my approach to the internet is a bit conservative.)

Comments

[liminaltime]

I'm less happy with the modern internet these too, for many of the same reasons. It seems made for very short attention spans. I have a Discord account but I just can't get into most of it, and I find much of it inaccessible.

[we]

Yes! I admit that my attention span can be short sometimes, but that's more about uninteresting work than it is my ability to read and focus on complex material. In fact, I often prefer deeper, more complex writing over listicles and the sort.

I fucking hate Discord.

—J.

[cosmicjellyfish]

Co-signing pretty much all of this. The present-day internet is pure sensory overload to me (and profoundly isolating, to boot - not that I always found it easy to make genuine connections on the old[er]-school internet, but it was certainly easier). Everything about today's version of Online seems set up to benefit corporate interests over actual users.

[we]

It's extremely overloading. Everything has loads of pop-up notifications that won't leave you alone. Facebook is much more overwhelming than it used to be. Ever since they redesigned the site in 2021, we've used it less and less frequently since it's too... much.

It's all about corporate interests. Facebook/Meta, Twitter, Apple, Google and Amazon own the internet, as well as venture-capital-funded companies. Even on independent sites, the content is geared towards getting Google's attention by using SEO tactics, both legitimate and not. Honestly, the internet ought to be put under some kind of not-for-profit international governance board.

—J.

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