Letting Go Of The Old Web
Google’s search results are now so bad that appending “reddit” to every query has become a mainstream coping strategy. People are actively routing around the search engine that was supposed to be the gateway to all human knowledge, because the results it returns are AI-generated summaries of SEO-optimised listicles that were themselves rewritten from forum posts that no longer exist. A study from Leipzig University confirmed what most of us already knew: search results have been systematically overrun by low-quality spam, and the higher a page ranks, the more likely it is to be monetised garbage.
Google knows this. An internal study from 2020 found that degrading search quality for three months resulted in “minuscule revenue losses.” They learned they could make it worse and get away with it, so they did. This is the web now. Not the web I started publishing on, and not the web that made me want to write in the first place.
The web I remember
I got online around 2000. MSN Messenger, GeoCities pages, web rings that linked strangers’ personal sites together in loops. You’d follow a link and land on someone’s hand-coded homepage where they’d written about their weekend and posted a detailed guide to building a PC from spare parts. Nobody was optimising for anything. Nobody was trying to rank. People just put things on the internet because they wanted to share what they knew, and the whole thing felt like it was built by actual humans.
Forums were the backbone of all of it. Ugly, slow, run by one person who paid for hosting out of their own pocket. They worked though. You could find a thread from 2006 where someone had already solved your exact problem, explained their reasoning, and stuck around to answer follow-up questions from three other people with the same issue. That infrastructure is mostly gone now. The servers got too expensive, the admins got older, everyone drifted to Reddit and Discord, and a decade of accumulated knowledge vanished because nobody thought it was worth preserving.
I’m not romanticising this. The old web had plenty of garbage. There’s still a material difference between a web full of bad personal pages made by real people and a web full of polished content made by nobody. The old web was messy. The new web is clean, professional, and completely hollow. We’re heading toward 90% of online content being synthetic, generated by machines to be consumed by other machines, and the humans still making real things are invisible beneath it.
Probably not real
What I’m actually grieving is the assumption that the web was a place where you could find people. Real people with real opinions who’d spent real time thinking about the thing you were interested in. That assumption is broken now. When you search for something, you can’t trust that a human wrote the result. When you read a review, you can’t trust that someone used the product. When you land on a blog, you can’t be certain the person exists. The default state of the web has shifted from “probably real” to “probably not,” and that changes how you interact with everything on it.
This is the part where I’m supposed to rally behind the indie web, behind RSS feeds, behind small blogs and personal sites and ActivityPub. The answer is to build your own thing, own your content, publish on your own domain. I do believe all of that. I’ve been doing it for over a decade and I’m not stopping. The indie web is real and the people in it are making genuinely good things. I still tell people to start a blog, to publish their thoughts, to put something real on the internet and I mean it every time.
The cruelty of that advice is that the infrastructure designed to help people find those blogs is actively working against them. You can write the most honest, thoughtful post of your life and it will be outranked by a 2,000-word AI article that exists purely to serve ads. That’s not a flaw in the system. That is the system. I’m done pretending that a few thousand bloggers can reverse what’s happened, no matter how earnest we are. We’re not rebuilding the old web. We’re tending a garden in the middle of a landfill.
I’m letting the old web go. Not because I want to, but because carrying it around feels like mourning something that was already dead before I noticed. The web I grew up with rewarded curiosity and connected strangers around shared interests. What replaced it rewards volume, engagement, and the ability to produce content at a scale no human can compete with. What’s left is a small, quiet corner where a few of us write for ourselves and whoever happens to find it. That’s enough. It has to be.