Reminiscing the Lost World of Quirky & Weird Old Internet

Before the social media boom took over and killed all the joy of the internet.

Aug 28, 2024

I miss the old internet.

I miss the days of browsing the internet to explore information and communities, the feeling of uncertainty with intrigue, and reading stories with a skeptical mind on the web.

I miss the rawness of the internet where anyone and everyone posted whatever they felt in the most unhinged way. I know technology matures and so do we, and there is a case to be argued that the things we see on the internet in today’s times are some of the most unhinged and mindless content.

Do I sound like an old beaten-up record?

Probably, Yes. Am I an old beaten-up record though? I would say debatable. I am an old soul and frankly dealing with the souls of the new world can be extremely exhausting.

Let’s go back to the good old days of the internet. By that, I mean the early 2000s when the real innovation happened. Everything since then is just a regurgitation of what has been done before and remixed since then for an obscene amount of money.

I spent my college days and the early days of my career trying to understand the world of IT and the major players that run that world. There was one thing very apparent during those early days of the Internet -

Your skepticism of the place while you attempt to engage with people of similar ideologies.

I knew about the stuff I liked, I searched for the stuff I liked and I indulged myself in the communities that represented the stuff I liked. I did not have an algorithm throw stuff into my feed that I had no business knowing or even having an opinion about.

I know, in stark contrast to the internet of now where the CEO of Instagram is telling “creators” how to create content to get the best engagement. How about letting people be and find their content and the people who make them? No? It’s not profitable enough for them.

Finding the stuff I like is no more about Exploring but about Mining

The atrocity that Google Search has become to the extent that it is unbearable for a regular internet user. It is typical of monopolies to build something and then kill everything that even remotely resembles competition to a point where there is none and then either raise the prices or degrade the quality cause they no longer have any motivation to improve.

This is the typical brands in a Mall kind of mentality where they want to undercut every independent brand and when the latter is extinct, reduce the quality to a level where we are Shein-ing on plastic wearables.

I digress into my detest of the monopoly and my hypocrisy as I write about it on my shiny Macbook but whatchya gonna do? we all have to make a living.

I enjoyed exploring new artists and discovering new music either from my favorite quirky TV shows and movies or just from commercials that I came across on cable television. As a kid growing up in Mumbai, there was no other way to know that there was a band called “Dashboard Confessional” and when I got to know I wanted to listen to all their songs and ways to find them. I spent hours searching for it and marveled at my discovery.

Spotify and other streaming platforms not only ruined that experience but now such small bands might go out of existence cause there is no way for them to make enough money to sustain. They are at the mercy of the “algorithm” and “intentions” of these platforms, the platforms that only care about making more money.

On the topic of favorite shows, I spent hours ripping DVDs of my favorite shows into my hard drive so I could carry the material I liked with me. Netflix and other platforms made that easy for me but then now they decided that only providing service is not enough and they need to control the narratives of the shows and movies we watch.

I spent hours recently trying to buy a TV show called “Grimm” but struggled to find a platform that would make it easy for me to buy it outright into my collection. The complexity of digital rights governed by geographical locations made it an exercise in geopolitics.

How did we go from Orkut & Facebook to Social Media Influencers and Listicles?

“10 ways to earn a million bucks by writing on the internet.”

This is not new in the world of the internet, back in the early 2000s this was dismissed as spam but in today’s internet, this is the content synonymous with productivity and productivity gurus. The SEO-optimized world where everything we do, and everything we write, needs to be catered to the algorithmic preferences of search engines. The algorithms understand the world in terms of keywords but my writing, devoid of keywords, means nothing to my readers, who can understand the context.

Oh, the irony!

I am all for bringing order to the chaos of the early days of the internet but then we have stretched it to the extreme of taking the order and making it robotic. I have attended cohorts worth $$$ that teach us to write specifically in a way to appease the SEO Gods and probably in the process they will reward me with engagement and enough clicks to make a living on my writing. I should listen to them as they make millions while I have to rely on doing actual work.

The recent line of questioning on the big tech is a breath of fresh air and long may it continue alongside the boom and doom of AI. Looking back on the days when I could say I had online friends and real friends instead of followers and subscribers, I only hope to say that the rise in independent platforms holds off the pushback from these tech giants enough for people to feel comfortable and realize just how good, bad and weird was the old internet.

The internet of the old allowed us to be weird, quirky, and ourselves instead of trying to get us to adhere to some standard agreed upon by a few people who see it as an opportunity to profit.

Why Do I indulge in Social Media if it is so bad?

This is a question I have been asking myself more frequently nowadays.

I recently revisited my old WordPress blog. It seemed so naive yet refreshing to notice the good old bloggers engaging and commenting on photos, essays, and poems that lacked SEO characteristics, making it more natural.

The people of the old internet are still there and I realized I won’t find them on Twitter or X, Instagram, Facebook and Threads. They are people who value interaction and authenticity and that is only available in very niche corners of the internet.

So, I decided to shut down all other forms of interactions that I mentioned above and narrow down my options to a few niche platforms that resonated with me.