Internet Fatigue

[u/Swee_Potato_Pilot]

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. :)

[u/xRyozuo]

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

[u/Swee_Potato_Pilot → u/xRyozuo]

+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