I Miss the Internet.

In October 2014 the online journal GIZMODO published an article heralding The Great Web 1.0 Revival. Its author Kyle Chayka observed: The booming size of today's mainstream social networks and the constant level of noise we have to deal with has inspired a sudden return to a time when the internet was quieter, safer, and more intimate… We're nostal... See more

In the late aughts, Twitter and Facebook still valued curiosity, but over the next decade they realized that it wasn't good for business; curiosity brought people to their platforms, but then it whisked them away. So Facebook began paying news companies to make videos that could be hosted on the site, so that users would never leave the page. Twitt

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People were losing excitement about the internet, starting to articulate a set of new truisms. Facebook had become tedious, trivial, exhausting. Instagram seemed better, but would soon reveal its underlying function as a three-ring circus of happiness and popularity and success. Twitter, for all its discursive promise, was where everyone tweeted co

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But like, the internet used to be a place! Or at least it was for me. I love how the internet exposes the weird and funny things about being a person alive in the world. TikTok is especially good at that. But I do think the internet used to be a lot weirder. Certainly more specific. It used to be a place you’d go for a specific interest. Now it is ... See more

It is worth remembering that the internet wasn't supposed to be like this. It wasn't supposed to be six boring men with too much money creating spaces that no one likes but everyone is forced to use because those men have driven every other form of online existence into the ground. The internet was supposed to have pockets, to have enchanting fores

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