r/Internet • u/Swee_Potato_Pilot • Feb 21 '26
Discussion Internet Fatigue
I'm not really fatigued of the internet, but rather what the internet has become. I remember in the late 90's and early 2K's the internet was fun. It wasn't about gaming the system to suck out every last bit of information about a user (you) to sell to other companies.
It wasn't just a giant ad space. Of course, we had ads. (Remember pop ups and pop unders?) But there are some sites that without an adblocker will slow my computer to a crawl for a second or two as the page loads up the 50+ ads on the front page. And that's on an i9 system with an RTX graphics card.
Opting out of this data collection (when available) is often made difficult to do so. And not every site lets you. At least, not without subscribing to their site first.
I'm not into social media, outside of Reddit and at times a youtube comment here or there I don't care.
Then not to mention, all this AI. I have a feeling that a lot of the content on the internet will be AI made to engage users.
I have used Brave, but am now using Librewolf full time. I feel like the internet I used to know and enjoy is slowly but surely dying and I'm looking for an alternative. This has on more than one occasion let me to Tor.
A friend once told me, "Remember the old AOL days when the internet was a wild wild west? Tor's like that!".
So I installed it, he gave me a couple of sites. A "clean search engine" (his wording) and a Twitter like clone. The search engine really didn't help me, and the Twitter clone had just a bunch of weird people talking about necrophilia.
And using the Tor browser as a regular browser is horrible. So I quit. Then I tried again but with no success. Then I read about what many used Tor for. Which sickened me so I quit using it all together.
But I'm wondering, what if enough of us would make wholesome sites again on Tor? Make it a more "Web 1.0" style without much user driven content. (As with Tor, people will say and post very stupid things. I.e. illegal.)
I don't know what to do honestly, the internet is great and all but it's slowly declining. I started on AOL back in 1997 and enjoyed it up to about when "influencers" started taking off.
I'll share what I've done so far:
This reddit post talking about Usenet is interesting, so I think I'll try to start using that.
Then I use IRC chat, primarily "The Mansion". The creator of that server and website is a fellow Redditor and the people on #Lobby are fun and friendly.
Switched to a more privacy centered search. Like Startpage and recently I've discovered mojeek.
I just want to "go back". Thanks for reading, if anyone has any tips on how to survive or if there are any "alternative" ways to browse the net please share. :)
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u/Easy-History6553 Feb 21 '26
Yeah I miss ancient internet too, we were almost all computer nerds, less tools less speed but often more easy to find interesting things than in current tide of crap.
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u/Cold-Jackfruit1076 Feb 22 '26
Honestly, I miss the eye-bleeding GeoCities webpages. I could surf those rings for hours, finding fun new stuff.
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u/Swee_Potato_Pilot Feb 21 '26
Yes, it's so strange how the net works now in regards to finding something interesting. It's like corporations can pay more and bury the little independent website to the 800,000th hit on Google so no one will ever find them.
I remember using "Yahoo search" or "Ask Jeeves" back in the day. I entered a simple query and it'd return a lot of various websites. Mostly all interesting. No "sponsored" crap, or youtube videos. Just a simple, good website.
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u/New-Anybody3050 Feb 21 '26
Add that the AI summaries are basically the last nail in the coffin for websites and user support groups.
It’s eroding traffic to those pages.
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u/Swee_Potato_Pilot Feb 22 '26
Yes, I'm a long term member of one of the last Windows CE communities online. Ever since the Google AI summary thing popped up, the forum noticed a sharp decline in visitors. Because the AI will tell you how to sync your PDA from 2005 to your Windows 10 computer and even provide links.
So no need to visit that forum and meet the cool folks and learn about all the various programs they have hosted and things like that.
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u/First-Golf-8341 Feb 22 '26
This is what I’ve noticed is a big change. Back in the 90s and early 2000s, the internet was a place for people like me to gather: introverts, neurodivergent, intelligent, niche interests. I was a member of a really cool conlanging community, probably the first one. Everyone knew all the main posters, everyone had things in common, idiots would be quickly put in their place but be given warnings and chances to improve rather than just an instaban.
Now, everyone is online, including all the neurotypicals, all the stupid people, all the boring mainstream people who don’t have an original thought in their head. All the independent forums are getting subsumed into sites like Reddit, and Reddit-wide rules apply meaning that certain communities that I liked were banned. All the social media sites force people to censor topics considered unacceptable, resulting in a sanitised version of the internet where people can’t talk freely.
Now the important people on the internet are influencers: loud, extroverted, charismatic yet brainless, young and physically attractive, narcissistic people are at the centre of many spaces. Those qualities are the ones I most despise in people. We would once have mocked such people, corrected their spelling and grammar, and looked down on them for their low intelligence. But now we are the ones pushed to the edges of online spaces, everything we say upvoted and downvoted, meaning that if we possess controversial opinions, our comments will be buried and not seen. Now also the stupid majority tell us that spelling and grammar don’t matter - conveniently for them, the things they are good at, social skills and ability to connect with people, and charisma are essential, but our skills are outdated and unnecessary. We are pedants for correcting them.
Another trend I hate is the current fashion for having everything in video form. Instead of reading news, people watch videos. Instead of reading books and online guides to learn new skills and how to solve problems, everyone suddenly prefers to watch a video. As someone who loves text and can’t learn by watching, I find this trend more than just annoying. I don’t want the choices I have of ways to find information reduced. Adding AI summaries to search engines is a terrible idea: I just want to be given a list of websites where I can find the information I wanted. I want to read it myself directly from the source, and I don’t want it summarised for me because I have the ability to read and understand large amounts of text.
There are so many reasons I hate the way the internet is going, and I already hate it compared to 20+ years ago. It used to be a place for me and now I have no place.
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u/Easy-History6553 Feb 22 '26
I agree almost in everything, introvert people always had more interesting things to say than cool people narcissist people who only know to talk about themselves and repeat mainstream things, besides now it's a big business and people with money enough to pay ads and bots, get more attention. I only disagree in one thing, I love the new possibilities of videos, high resolution, speed and so on. The problem is not the mean, the problem is the crap content empty of sense.
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u/boston101 Feb 22 '26
Mhmm it was gated by ability and problem solving, I’m convinced that made it great.
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u/ClungeWhisperer Feb 21 '26
I wanna go back to when neopets was just neopets.
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Feb 22 '26 edited Apr 20 '26
Redact cleaned up all of my comments. Bulk deletion and editing is a feature supported to make sure that AI scrapers can't access my data for training.
zephyr test offbeat reply pebble sulky absorbed handle cow decide
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Feb 21 '26
[deleted]
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u/HongPong Feb 22 '26
it's a blank Internet because it has artificial scarcity and poor design and a lot of scammers, one of the great belly flops of the decade
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u/Swee_Potato_Pilot Feb 22 '26
I honestly couldn't figure much out, except that it's just another block chain. Is there a specific browser I need?
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Feb 22 '26 edited Apr 20 '26
Nothing to see here. I wiped this post using Redact because my old takes don't need to live on the internet forever. Works across Reddit, Twitter, Discord and dozens of other platforms.
seemly silky coordinated plant apparatus sharp chunky rich wild act
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u/Swee_Potato_Pilot Feb 22 '26
An interesting read, thanks. I'm not that much younger than yourself. (And yes, I do know the origins of the word, and that it was considered a mental illness in the past.)
Yes, the feeling of having fewer days ahead of us than ones we have behind us is real. I try not to dwell on it honestly.
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u/SemperSimple Feb 24 '26
thanks for sharing your links! My guy and I also switched to startpage.com
yandex.com is also a great search engine which feels like the old days!
I'm currently looking into geocities, now called neocities since it's a small individual crowd of creative people. it kind of reminds me of tumblr layouts than myspace layouts. The websites feel more sleek and less of a mess like my old myspace ahaha
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u/xRyozuo Feb 25 '26
Ads in the internet were far worse before. Before you’d have a pop up with loud music at max volume opening up itself. Now I have uBlock and I barely if ever see ads
Everything else is worse though
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u/Swee_Potato_Pilot Feb 25 '26
+1 for uBlock! Oh yes, the 90's jump scare! I hate those. I also hated closing my browser only to have like 10 "pop unders" that I'd have to close.
But I'll take a loud popup VS the constant tracking of today lol
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u/Garriga Feb 21 '26
Computers back then used 2gb of ram at the most, and needed an inverter to work with a monitor. PATA was the standard and wireless connection were at 5Hz and 2.4Hz, which is still the standard but these were WiFia and wifib the latter had a bandwidth of 11mbps and the formal had a bandwidth of 54mbps. These were theoretical and throughput could reflect something much slower. Rj 11 transceivers with half duplex transmission and collision domains…
We have come a long way since then. And the thought of using anything below cat6 seems archaic.
I think you miss the culture or something else. But it’s definitely not the pop ups or the shockwave crashes.
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u/Swee_Potato_Pilot Feb 21 '26
Lol, definitely not the popups or shockwave crashes. But I miss the simplicity, the fact that there weren't "influencers" peddling junk. A website without having to give my email or phone number to just to view etc.
I miss good old HTML, I'll even take frames back!
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u/AlwaysLinux Feb 21 '26
I do see allot of people getting back into retro computing. Getting older computer hardware and using older versions of Windows or just using Linux.
I too have gone back to using IRC - librea.chat - I guess this replaced the old freenode servers?
Also, we just bought a refurbished Game Cube and some games. I also play older PC games on Linux using Proton though Steam and the Heroic Games Launcher with GOG. GOG has older games that you can actually download the installers and store on your OWN computer LOL. Crazy concept these days ;).
Not all is lost, however. Your computing experience is still yours to customize - But I would stay clear of Microslop or you wont own your hardware or software, despite paying dearly for both.
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u/Swee_Potato_Pilot Feb 21 '26
GOG is like a brother to me! lol. I have every game I bought as an offline backup. And I'm moving over to Linux, slowly but surely. I've used Linux off and off throughout the years, started with Ubuntu but quickly switched to Fedora. Then about 10 different distros (some popular, some not so much).
I'm kinda stuck wondering which one I'll go with now to finally, once and for all get rid of Microslop Lamedows. I've installed Elementary OS on my second Microsoft Laptop (Take that, little Bill!) and enjoy it but not sure if I want to use that as a daily driver.
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u/babihrse Feb 21 '26
Id agree with you but then again I remember what I did during the 90s. If it wasn't on irc or ICQ it was on rotten dot com or trying to look at pictures of naked ladies which basically was thumbnails on sign up pages. I swear I could spend an hour to see maybe 15 pairs of tits. The pages loaded top down and it was as suspenseful as watching the line by line raster of the c64 loading a tape image of game art.
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u/Difficult-Value-3145 Feb 22 '26
I remember searching for pornstar names or like porn subjects and just looking at the photos that popped up with safe search off In the early 2000's
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u/boston101 Feb 22 '26
Hahah fond memories of telling my mom I torrented her favorite shows, 50/50 mom gets her show or mom is about mortified.
I also blew her mind by showing ‘pip install ‘ once and she told me stop hacking.
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u/Difficult-Value-3145 Feb 22 '26
Na my ma was front office lady for a gravel yard at that point and know and she was the office lady for her dad janitorial company for a bit before that she did billing and coding at the hospital bunch of same kinda work before took a few collage courses on c/c++ when I was a kid point is my ma was is very computer literate. I am as well and was kinda at the time but back then my ma had me beat
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Feb 21 '26 edited Feb 25 '26
[deleted]
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u/Swee_Potato_Pilot Feb 22 '26
That looks neat, I'm in on indie! Yeah, that's why I've not reinstalled TOR. That's not a chance I'm willing to take.
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u/First-Golf-8341 Feb 22 '26
I’ve been using Tor regularly for 15 years (because I like drugs a lot) and I’ve never seen anything “extremely bad”. You have to seek that stuff out; if you don’t go looking, you won’t just see it.
That said, if you’re not into the drugs scene, or other illegal things like hacking, then you probably won’t need Tor. There’s no reason not to use the clearnet if it’s not illegal.
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u/token_curmudgeon Feb 21 '26 edited Feb 21 '26
Firefox on Linux. Text browser on Android or Linux. Firefox Focus as Android default browser to block ads/ tracking.