I am with you on this, the Internet is a sad, pale shadow of what I first discovered in the late 90s. I'd add on top of your complaints, I will add the non stop advertising and tricks to track everything you do.
this post was submitted on 07 Dec 2025
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Follow the money.
When people gladhearyedly made free content (like a silly video of some MMO or whatever) there was a bit of their soul in it.
Now even the best video is made exclusively with the goal of hooking you on some payment plan or other monetising scheme.
II don't know if this is me getting old, decay of platforms, or losing touch with the 'good' communities.
I have a lot of nostalgia for...even going back to slashdot, where I could load a page & be fairly certain to see (among a bunch of dumb shit) something new and interesting, worth going to read in more depth, and probably find added value in the discussion. Reddit had that, especially in focused communities. Lemmy...kind of, but I think it's still too small, or maybe too meme-focused.
Of course, in those good old days, I was naive and dumb. There was a lot more information that I had never seen before. Tech, generally, seemed more dynamic, where now it's kind of ossified around Meta, Google, and nvidia. New developments feel incremental.
I'm online just as much now, but it feels like just reading headlines & nothing really worth pursuing deeper.
You just reminded me of how well considered slashdot actually was.
I specifically remember that if you did not have a history of positive contributions, you simply were not able to contribute.
There was some secret formula on the back end, and if you could even make a reply, consider yourself lucky and you better make it worthwhile.
This is going back 20 plus years, but I haven't been there since they instituted the fire hose. Not sure how they do it anymore.
It's been sold a few times and now a shadow of its former glory. I think they still do the thing where random users are selected each day to moderate comments, and anyone can log in and 'meta-moderate' those actions up or down. Can't see why any caretaker would change that. Comments still scored negative to +5, collapsed at <3, invisible <1. It's a good strategy for silencing crap, but it really promoted groupthink, because any comment that got visible would quickly be modded to +5 or -1. Still seems to have an editor-approval process for selecting stories from the firehose.
I think the main difference between /. circa 1998 and modern social media is that social sites in 1998 were small enough that the founder was a user, probably the main programmer, and probably fewer than 10 collaborators. Kids goofing around with their university's free bandwidth and direct connection to the internet, before firewalls became a thing. They might have thought about making some money, but it wasn't the main goal. More interested in a good experience for their users than in collecting all the possible users. My recollection is slashdot was one of the first sites to have programmatic content generation. I know I based my own first CMS off their 'slashcode.' In Perl.
It's usually the vocal minority making everything depressing and I find that if you block 20 or so communities or a handful of power users then you get a nice feed without missing out on anything.
You can also visit us on !dull_mens_club@lemmy.world and
I'm finding that it's not just the Internet but technology as a whole is also not as fun.
I still use several social media but it is all moderated.
- Ad blockers
- Block spaces, users and terms
- Subscribe to specific content
- Add time constraints to apps
- Use RSS reader
- Read physical books
- Do physical activity ie waking
These are some of things I do for my own quality of life.
My biggest pet peeve is with HTML 5. There is no reason on Earth that a website should know if I'm using an adblocker; HTML 5 makes it so. No reason a website should be able to find my home address, even through a VPN; again HTML 5. The list goes on.
Everyone gushes over how great open-source is and how it's going to save everything. HTML 5 is totally open, but it was hijacked by Google. They made it so complex and obfuscated that no one can implement a fully compliant browser without relying on Google code.
[off topic]
Maybe you're just getting older.
I know the older I get, the less pleasure I get out of things I used to enjoy.
When I first started cooking for myself I'd search through cookbooks and try new things; now I can eat the same dozen meals over and over.
What I did to avoid that was try completely new things.
Instead of going online, try gardening or biking or playing pickleball.
Yes. The internet is definitely not as fun as it used to be. Although part of that could be getting older and less naive, I think a big component is the fact that it's easier to be a dick to internet strangers.
It used to be a cycle for me where I would find all this great stuff and expand my subscriptions to feeds and such. Eventually it would be too much and not enough good stuff so I would have to cull and explore again to dial it all in again. But lately that has been harder, I guess for the reasons you list. Lemmy and fediverse feeds help but don’t really scratch the itch either so I find myself mindlessly scrolling a lot like I would do when it wasn’t all dialed in. Not really sure what the answer is yet, entshitification is very real.
The ability for any person to join any group and add their two cents is ruining the internet.
It ends up feeling like being an honors student who is forced to be in a special needs kindergarten class.
It's a metaphor, people, put down your crying towel.
I browse Lemmy daily, and just block a community whenever there's too much ragebait or politics on it, or whatever really. I also block users whenever I'm getting annoyed by them. After doing this for a week, it became quite enjoyable again.
Part of the fun was that not everyone was was online, so you saw unique things that other people didn't.
Everything is monoculture now. Everyone is referencing the same things and everyone is pretty much in the loop.
Its corporate social media. They changed the algorithms so that you have "content" shoved down your throat as soon as you walk in the door. You are profiled, stalked, and they attempt to keep you scrolling as long as possible for ad revenue. Shit that barely passes as "content" by people with half a pulse that isn't funny gets pushed on you.
You're tired of being used to generate money for someone else.
I don't think it's just nostalgia, something is off about current social media, even compared to only two or three years ago. And I for a life can not tell what exactly are off with them! It annoys me.
This is as much as a note to myself as it is a note to others:
If you are still planning to use social media, I suggest to curate your feeds very strictly. I don't wanna generalize social media recommendation system (also known as the Algorithm) as objectively bad, but they definitely feel like a bottom feeder in terms of quality of contents. They're not always bad, sometimes I find high-quality videos in YouTube's home page, but even then they're getting rarer nowadays.
Prefer using social media that still have customizable feed. Meaning: if the social media's feed home menu is an Algorithmic feed instead of reverse-chronological feed AND you cannot change it, avoid it or don't use it at all. I don't recommend Instagram or anything else by Meta, since the main feed aren't really customizable as far as I'm aware, I forgot if they still have chronological feed or not.
I recommend Bluesky as well, since the main feed is highly customizable. Their built-in "Discover" feed is trash but you can replace it with "Following" feed which shows you reverse-chronological feed of posts from users you follow. Or if you still want Algorithm/posts recommendation I suggest using this feed: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:3guzzweuqraryl3rdkimjamk/feed/for-you.
For reddit-like alternatives I suggest PieFed, since it's built to have a decent quality discussion with features like word blocklist or reputation system[^1]. The UI desperately needs an upgrade though.
Oh another thing: One thing in common between the apps I recommend above are, they have word block list feature. As much as you can block/filter out words related to the topic you are not interested in.
Please adblocker. It's a necessity nowadays, similar to how antivirus software are a necessity 10 years ago.
If you don't wanna use social media, I think I can recommend RSS. The disadvantage of this for me is it's harder to find content using RSS since there are no centralized place to find new feed to follow, as far as I'm aware at least. Even without it, usually with RSS the main body content is not included, so you have to open the original page. I'm fine with this with websites like personal blog, but with YouTube, it's too distracting.
Oh, another advice, specifically for Discord: join as few servers as you can. And prefer joining smaller (members count below 1000) server. Way less distraction and you can in my experience smaller servers are actually more high-quality. It's even easier to make friends in smaller server too!
If I can summarize it in one sentence: Heavily curate your feed. Emphasis on the heavily
Don't be ashamed of being nitpicky. Don't feel bad blocking someone. Nothin' personal, mate.
Also notice how I didn't recommend you to stop using social media entirely. Of course, I won't stop you from quitting social media completely, but I don't think it's bad to keep using social media. It's still a decent way to keep informed. You can still learn new things from social media.
If your friends are in Instagram and you still feel like connecting with them, feel free to do so. If you're an artist still relying on Twitter, I won't judge you. Just be mindful of the drawbacks and limit the usage.
After all it's a human instinct to connect with others right?
I don't think any social media is perfect, not even the Fediverse, ATProto/Bluesky, or other sites that claims to "fix" social media.
[1]: I feel like this system could be heavily abused, but so far it works great, surprisingly.
One heartbreaking thing I learned from all of this is: good thing doesn't last. Or if it does last overtime it becomes stale or just bad. Many good subreddit I used to join either became too populated, abandoned, or straight up doesn't exist.
Oh yeah there's a video I highly recommend: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEJpZjg8GuA
Sometimes I think, I’m just getting older. With a wider scope now in my forties I’m disillusioned of the peaceful world I thought experiencing in my younger years. Maybe this is just live. Everything is on fire and no one had time for fun anymore
I don't think I'd say I don't enjoy being online anymore, but a lot of it is definitely worse. It's just all a hassle now. It's made me just not use most of the internet to be honest.
I play a couple games, and use YouTube and Lemmy.
currated lists
There’s no fun at all anymore, everything is either AI, ragebait, politics turned into fights and just overall misery around the world (wars, fascism, racism and general hatred).
Social media sucks, but unfortunately most of my clientele are primarily using them as their sole means of communications but also entertainment, so it's a necessary evil as long as I keep my actual personal information involved to a minimum. That asides from manually curating my online experience, I'm using uBlock Origin and a multitude of Tampermonkey scripts to control and filter out content I don't want.
So I was wondering; do other people have a similar feeling about the internet not being so fun anymore as it used to be?
With a world now heavily polarized, and the Internet largely corporate-dominated, you watch what you say in these days. Like if on Reddit, you never casually talk about harming a notorious toxic fascist personality 'cause that'll land you an insta-ban.
I still have plenty of fun online interacting with my friends I've built up over the years. We chat on discord, hang out in mutual friends' twitch streams, game, etc.
I limit my engagement with Lemmy to right after I wake up or while on the can. There's some news I choose to engage with on YouTube every day to keep up on things but it is a choice I consciously make. I normally curate mine heavily and it's largely mini documentaries on subjects I find interesting. Or cooking recipes I watch to help me figure out what to make with my ingredients I have for dinner.
I feel like my experience is this way because I still engage with the internet the same way: curated by me as much as I like. I don't scroll any algorithm but YouTube and I constantly search for things rather than let it just give me them. I have never used autoplay. It's still me searching for things and interacting with things on the internet, not the internet just showing me things. No, I don't think I'm above algorithms, manipulation or propaganda, etc., I just still use them the way I have for 25+ years.
This is totally anecdotal obviously and I'm not claiming this is the sole reason I still enjoy the internet a lot. But I do feel like it is something that could be a large contributing factor.