Everyone is showing off their fake perfect life on social media. Artificial intelligence and bots are spamming blogs and message boards. Wordpress and other platforms all use the same looking templates while UX/UI design systems have uniformed the experience we have online.
I long for the old, ugly, user-unfriendly and anonymous internet of the past.
The animated flames, website counters and webrings. Bring back geocities and angelfire. A place where everyone can share about their nerdy hobbies or favorite bands.
Give me something brutal but honest, I wanna be shocked and possibly grossed out. I want to be surprised, I want the nostalgic feeling of exploring the web, I don't want to have everything algorithmically curated to me.
Yesterday's tech used to be open, everything could plug into each other, the more open you were to more chance you had of succeeding. The whole concept of the world wide web was based on this idea, but we lost it.
I remember a time where every couple of years, there was a new site, a new app, a new idea, taking over and pushing aside the current giant. True competitive innovation. But we lost that too.
Today's big tech companies have created monopolies and built digital walls to keep users prisoners within their platforms.
Nobody likes facebook anymore and yet they stay on. Many startups have tried to come up with better, privacy-focused and more open alternatives, but the cost of switching is too high. Quitting Facebook means losing old photo memories, communities, followers, clients, chat logs and more. They own your data, you can't bring it with you. You can't join another service and connect with people on Facebook. This is as if you could not send an email to a hotmail account with your gmail account. Or if you couldn't make phone calls to an iPhone with your Android device.
The technology exists, just look at activity pub, the fediverse and services like Mastodon. Facebook could do it, Twitter could do it, but they don't. It's a business decision.
They also have the numbers. People won't give another service a chance because there's less users. They stay on Facebook because this is where their friends are. Competition either dies out, or gets bought. So the internet stays the same, stagnates and rots.
Most platforms look about the same. They all have a variation of posts, stories and reels.And people use them to share screenshots from other platforms! Screenshots of twitter memes posted on facebook, tiktok reels posted on instagram, etc.
Break down the monopolies, open the platforms and let us explore and get lost online without "guidance" from algorithms, that only divides us more and more by putting us further down into echo chambers.
What we need is an internet devolution. We need to go back to the previous save state and start over, hoping for a free, open internet.
In the meantime, join me in making an ugly old school html website, where you can write like no one is reading.