new internet

In the early days of the internet, one of the first search engines, Yahoo!, hired “surfers,” people with particularly niche interests, to record and catalog new websites by hand. In those days, each site was crafted by hand by a person. Each site had a face you could see, and if desired, email.

“these platforms make it impossible to represent your full multidimensional self... your whole self can never exist in a single space.”

Back in the 2000s, a lot of blogs were about blogs , about blogging. If that sounds exhaust­ingly meta, well, yes — but it was also SUPER generative. When the thing can describe itself, when it becomes the natural place to discuss and debate itself, I am telling you: some flywheel gets spinning, and powerful things start to happen.

No, I think this will all end, as T.S Eliot said, with a whimper. People will simply lose interest and walk away. Because the internet now is boring . People spend all day scrolling because they are trying to find what isn’t there anymore. The authenticity, the genuinely human moments, the fun.

I think we see a decline in the big "open sea" social networks, replaced increasingly by fragmented silos. I don't know what will happen to Twitter, but if Elon's shenanigans cause it to fail I don't think we'll ever see anything quite like it take its place:

It's interesting to see how many people put "Twitter refugee" or something similar in their Bsky bios. Have people done that before when migrating to new platforms? I don't recall seeing "Friendster refugee" or "MySpace refugee" on newer platforms in the 00s.