The internet has become soulless and i hate it
The modern web is the most efficient version of itself that has ever existed. Pages load fast. Sites are accessible. Everything looks consistent across devices. Every interaction is optimized. By every measurable metric, the web in 2023 is the best the web has ever been. And most of it is unbearable.
I should be honest about my position here. I was too young to really live through web 1.0. I caught the tail end of it around 2009, the last few years before the platforms ate everything, so a chunk of what I’m about to say is half-borrowed nostalgia. I want to flag that up front, because the easy read of a post like this is “old man yells at cloud” and I am not actually old. But I think the thing being mourned is real, and worth saying out loud anyway.
“Internet”, an unknown 90’s stock image
The personal touch
Back then, websites felt like they belonged to a person. Each one was a little window into whoever made it. Their interests, their hobbies, the niche stuff they cared about enough to write down. The sites weren’t optimized for anything. They weren’t trying to convert you, retain you, surveill you, or push you down a funnel. They just existed, because someone wanted them to exist.
Out of that came communities. Fan forums, personal blogs, niche message boards, half-broken webrings. People found other people who cared about the same weird thing and built something around it. A surprising amount of it is still around if you know where to look.
The Melonland forum
Colorful creativity
Every site had its own look. Some used neon, some used pastels, some had animated backgrounds and cursor trails and tiled GIFs of dancing bananas. A lot of it was loud. Some of it was actively ugly. That was sort of the point. The web reflected the people making it, and people are loud and inconsistent.
Modern sites all look the same. Same fonts (probably Inter), same hero section, same off-white background, same rounded buttons that are tasteful and accessible and entirely interchangeable. Efficient. Clean. Professional. Boring.
It is not that the old web was good in a craft sense. A lot of it was genuinely terrible. It is that the old web was individual, and the new web is uniform, and individuality at the cost of polish is a trade I’d take back in a second.
Gifypet, a gif pet creation tool (??!!)
User-centric
The early web was made by the people using it. The sites you visited were built by hobbyists, not by marketing departments. There were no algorithms deciding what you should see. There was no infinite scroll. If you wanted to find something, you went looking, and the looking was part of the experience. You’d hit a webring, follow a link to someone’s personal site, follow a link from there to someone else’s, and end up somewhere you couldn’t have predicted.
The interactions felt different too. Forums, chat rooms, guest books. People talked to each other instead of performing at each other. The reward loop was the conversation, not the engagement metric.
Blog by Bryce
Big corpo
Then the platforms came. Social media consolidated everything into a few apps where every profile is the same template with a different name. The personal site became the profile page. Search engines started ranking the giants higher than the small sites, which made the small sites harder to find, which made fewer people bother building new ones. The flywheel of incentives turned, and what came out the other end is what we have now.
I notice myself rotating between four or five websites that all feel basically the same. They are functional. They work. I just don’t enjoy them.
Can we get back?
Honestly? Probably not at scale. The economics of the modern web reward consolidation, and that isn’t going away. But there are still pockets of the old web if you go looking, and there is nothing actually stopping new ones from being built.
Wiby is a search engine that only indexes web 1.0 sites. I have lost hours to it.
Neocities is a free host built specifically for retro-style personal sites. Anyone can make one. The barrier is basically just deciding to.
A few imageboards still exist that feel like a different era. Even 4chan, which I have complicated feelings about, is at least a reminder that not every place online has to look like Instagram.
The thing I’d take from any of this is that the web isn’t fixed. The reason it feels soulless now is that the people making it changed, not because the technology forced them to. If you want a different web, you make a different web. That option is still on the table.
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