And I am sure you know this very well already. This is not some crazy enlightening take, just a little frustrated rant about a technology that used to fascinate me so much as a kid, played an essential role in making me who I am as a person (in good and bad), and is now reduced to a husk to be abused by giant corporations for making money and to turn people hollow.
What I used to see as a magic place with infinite fun possibilities is now an inescapable prison of corporate cynicism, negativity, angry or awful people, and occasionally some interesting content. The Internet used to have such a unique personality to it, it was a place where for the first time in human history everyone had a way to express themselves and talk about whatever they liked, allowing all sorts of creative and intelligent people to build fun websites that were so entertaining just to sift through. Granted, this also meant a load of crazy people had the same visibility, but at least they were easy to ignore and only made a minority of the content you'd see.
One of my favorite things about the old Internet has to be that late 90s and early 2000s aesthetic, everything had to be blocky and the low resolution causing every pixel to be visible gave it extra charm, espepcially when seen on cheap flickering CRT monitors. In a way, that look still feels like home.
Today's websites and software all look the same, the websites we use every day belong to giant corporations who are collecting infinite amounts of data to sell us out, and for that reason every site has to follow the same rules as the others: lame sterile design, soulless graphics, a shitload of cookies being monitored and with that a cookies banner appearing every time we open a site for the first time, shameless ads plastering the screen, SEO-induced word soup to appear higher in search engine results, sponsored content everywhere being given priority over quality results, and recently an onslaught of AI content to make it all even worse and more insufferable.
The entire reason we decided to make this site was to create a place that could simulate (partially) that older Internet vibe, just a silly little corner of cyber space where some weird ass people talk about the strange little thingts they like and do in their quirky way, without trying to sell you something, or trying to steal your data.
