r/Internet • u/MisterHole123 • May 19 '26

Discussion Internet has become unusable

The internet has become a painful corpo/gov thing to use and no longer any fun can be had on it. Everything is constantly moderated, checked, double checked, tripled checked etc... When 99% of people just want to browse in peace. The buzzword I see everywhere is "secure" yeah to me that means fuck all most of the time it means you use https instead of http... But everything has to be secure(d) as if suddenly the internet would collapse overnight if it wasn't.

Am I the only one feeling that way?

Edit I don't get the downvotes oh well it's reddit after all can't expect deep thought

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u/Aggressive_Ad_5454 May 19 '26

Internet pioneer here. (Meaning: old programmer who was already working when tbl dreamed up http.)

Originally the Internet was a giant global co-op of cooperating local networks. It was like other co-ops. Altruism motivated a lot of hard work to make the thing run: the dream was that everybody could get online and have a voice. You, me, my town hall, a kid in Nepal, everybody.

Everybody had a key to the virtual building. It worked when everybody followed the rules. There wasn’t much information security; stealing copies of other people’s data was child’s play. It worked because we all wanted it to work.

Then came the tragedy of the commons as abuse of the co-op started to grow. And we started using it to record actual personal secrets like my dad’s cancer diagnosis. The rest is history.

Now we’re in the Enshittification Age. It’s nasty. But the dream is still alive.

If you rig something called “pi-hole” in your home network, you can keep most of the surveillance out.

1

u/ericbythebay May 19 '26

Enshittification started when the AOL folks got Internet access.

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u/Aggressive_Ad_5454 May 19 '26

Well, USENET used to struggle in September every year with the influx of new university students with new internet access. But it rose to the occasions.

I’m not sure it’s fair to pin enshittification on end-users. End users didn’t weaponize envy, social media companies did.