hey everyone. been stuck in this loop for years, but today I finally decided to fully commit to it. as you can tell from the title, it’s about the modern internet.
everything was great up until around 2013, but what came after literally paved the way for the so-called "old web" basically shelving the real internet and turning it into something to romanticize. content made strictly for money, thousands of identical videos made just for views, pulling absolute backflips just to keep people glued to screens... everything became pure brain rot and engagement farming.
i log onto modern social media platforms, doomscroll trying to find something anything different, but it’s all the exact same logic, built with the exact same goal. old forums, IRC channels, none of them feel the same anymore. everything used to feel infinite and endless, like there were millions of raw things waiting to be discovered. now, sure, technically there’s more content than ever, but none of it feels real. it’s all copy-paste.
and beyond the creators or big pages, i’m talking about us as individuals. we used to use the internet to drop raw bits of our daily lives, share our hobbies, ideas, stuff we knew, or stuff we were trying to figure out. now? every single post is built on a few shallow metrics: likes, engagement, curated aesthetics, and flexing fake wealth.
this is day #1 of wiping the modern web out of my life and going back to the real internet.
once again; hello, friend.
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I wish you the best of luck on your journey! I also have slowly been cutting back on modern social media sites over the last 6 years and now only use rednote regularly to passively study Chinese and chat with my Chinese online friend. The only other social media platform I visit sometimes is Pinterest, but I could go weeks without being on it. I have completely cut out Instagram, Facebook, and Snapchat from my life. Thankfully I never had a TikTok account. That now leaves me with YouTube and Reddit, which I have had blocked on all of my devices since the beginning of this month. Since you don't actually need an account to visit those sites, they have been the tough ones to cut out completely. I relied a little too heavily on them for entertainment, so now I am trying to find a good balance.
If I may ask, what steps do you plan on taking? Are you banishing yourself from all social media? What about looking something up? Are you allowing yourself to visit only specific websites from before 2013? I probably could get some ideas from you!