I used to be a blogger, now I have a blog. And it’s a goddamn ghost town. Before blogging, I built and ran various websites. Small communities formed, people were passionate, it was great. The Web was a helluva place. I don’t even know how to find that Web anymore. Social media, Apps, and The Stream have taken over the world and snuffed out what was once the worlds most interesting form of human communication. It’s not that the Web as an underlying piece of technology doesn’t exist anymore, but it has rapidly been relegated to the status of Usenet.

For several years now I have been trying to put my finger on exactly what has changed and why and how and I just read an article that absolutely nails it, Hossein Derakhshan’s article “The Web We Have To Save” (http://hoder.com/en/posts/4). Thank you Hossein for writing this, it really clarified some things for me.

If you plan to read the rest of what I have to say here, please take a moment or two to read his essay.

Done? Good.

When I started reading this article I was expecting a rant about how “they just don’t make the internet like they used to” but there was much more to it. It wasn’t simply a rant about “kids these days” it was about the subversion of the early Web from a platform for free speech, connection, and information sharing into a broadcasting platform, fundamentally the move from a book-internet to a television-internet, from an active, thought-provoking, engaged type of internet into a passive, mind-numbing, disengaged type of internet. I’ve felt this for years but I’ve struggled to fully express what I’ve been feeling.

Let’s begin by doing a little analysis, shall we? Here are some of the things I rarely do anymore:

• Write essays or anything else longer than a sentence or two
• Engage in internet-based discussions with people outside major social media sites
• Explore the Web
• Read something that is actually thought provoking online

Instead my online time is spent mostly in apps. When I follow a link out to the wild web I usually get hit with “HERE IS OUR COOKIE POLICY AND YOU MUST AGREE” or “WE NOTICE YOU ARE USING AN AD-BLOCKER, PLEASE WHITELIST US” or “<BLARING AUDIO FROM AUTOPLAY VIDEO>” or a single paragraph being displayed followed by a paywall asking for my $$.  

I’ve made some changes to my browsing habits.  I have switched my searching to StartPage.com (which provides more anonymity and less BS), I have switched my news source to APNews.com, but the truth is that the Web has become a fantastically unpleasant place with way more in common with television than it has in common with books.  It’s aggressive, invasive, controlled by governments and corporations, and incessantly loud because the Web now serves at the pleasure of the social networks.  If you click that bait when it pops up on your infinite feed, the owners of the various web properties that are struggling to stay afloat via their decreasing ad revenue (90% of the revenue goes to FB and Google and everybody else shares the remainder) feel that they need to do everything they can to grab your attention.  It’s like how advertisers make their commercials louder than the television programs, so you’ll perk up and pay attention.

The thing is…  I HATE TELEVISION.  I don’t watch television.  I don’t come home and turn the TV on and let it babble in the background while I do things.  The more the internet acts like television the more I dislike it and the more social media dictates the way the rest of the web works, the more it becomes like television…  It’s a vicious cycle.  Apps and social media have given everybody a few mindless, endless, personally tailored channels to peruse until they die.  These channels are assembled out of a combination of all your social relationships + filtering to your tastes and interests + random content scoured from the internet and the result is:

• shallower social relationships
• less exposure to new thoughts, perspectives
• content that is distorted by the need to maximize sharing 

This has given me an idea.  Something significantly beyond writing my own ranting post about this.  (Which, clearly, I have also done.) 

You can’t put the modern internet back into the bottle it spilled forth from, but what if there were a website/app that rewarded content and providers who are civil and allowed users to avoid the messy shitty noise of the current internet?  I have thoughts about a way to do this.  I need to do a little digging.  I believe this is a solvable problem and I think I might have some ideas on how to solve it.  (Hopefully) more to come…