The very internet that helped us to become better became more deprived of actual values, and overloaded by bloat, monetization, war against customization and addiction. It isn't used to be like that before, as it is aggressively now

Recently i've been looking into my archives of 2014-2016 videos i've used to download off youtube, since at this time I was living in eastern european town and i had limited internet access (it wasn't frequent, weekends were the only days when I had that opportunity to download something interesting or check emails, which were the primary mean of personal communication before i found out about social media, and before smartphones with messaging apps became ubiquitous, affordable and grew into network effect), so I wanted to watch something interesting at times, or even rewatch videos I liked since they contained deep insights or sneak peeks into someone's computers or phones.

The difference of that old youtube is quite staggering, how the same kind of people or topics became slightly less interesting to follow in our current year, 2026 (believe me or not, but it's easier to unfollow them to get an empty feed, which is for better). Or some of them are long gone from the platform, they no longer make content. Or they get inevitably older, and fail to actually communicate to the new audiences or younger viewers properly, instead staying in their outdated perception of world, not being aware of the systemic issues (such as digital clutter and addiction) and things like software, hardware and creative work.

Instead, another generation of "content creators" and "influencers" (how these words sound so delusional, and sometimes insulting, for me which remembers that this didn't exist at all) took over the same recommendation pages and ditched older people, and algoritms themselves changed to reward their toxicity and constant information overload, which became a "norm", that having so many useless push notifications, emails, subscriptions suddenly became a good thing. Of course it's not. But their culture and lifestyle actively promotes that fear of missing out, even if it isn't justified by real means (surely that there are things you shouldn't miss out on, like homework or classes, and well, try to study a bit more, it is rewarding, despite the hassle of working the way through rigid curriculas, I'd really want to see this change (because this is deeply frustrating for me at least) and educators get less rigid on their subjects, understand students, and overall process to feel less like punishment, but benefits are existent even now)

These people who were young and passionate, worked with low-end hardware or grew up financially enough made nice videos out of their own hands, or even then-youtube recommendation engine shown some enthusiast-drawn animated parodies that weren't about sensationalism. That kind of exploration wasn't about hype cycles, it was about discovering some anonymous guy which made weird experimentation videos, and followed by awkward description or even small community link somewhere on social media. And sometimes, when you wrote a comment, the author of the video actually responded with some feedback, especially if it was about constructive feedback (weirdly now I don't hear about the "constructive feedback" anymore on modern social media, it's long gone because hollowness is rewarded better).

And the platforms captured new people by offering the things, that old, blog- and forum-based internet already struggled to keep in a consistent state, such as:

1. Fast, safe and virus-free experience (yes, at mid-2010s to late 2010s these were the refuges to escape against harmful, ad-ridden sites which became like that on purpose, since their stable layout helped people to find things they care about faster and with less fear of getting malware)

2. Human-oriented design decisions (current platform design is deeply inhumane, and not much anyone is bothered to stop that, and that lack of humane incentive affects the people that create and consume, tiktok is pretty great example of such systemic choice, when you shouldn't make respectful and good content, but become popular due to ragebait or actual hate campaigns, if you are a top executive which has the right to attack your userbase)

3. Customization, flexibilty and alternative experiences (remember actual alternative apps or frontends for your favourite sites? Now corpos are abusing cease-and-desists to threaten almost anyone, thinking that they are inevitable. Or toggles to disable some features? Now they are missing, and you are forced into mobile app which is made to be worse, but offering feature you need)

And the reality behind that is these things which made these platforms good, worked for them for some time. But these things are being systematically broken and further destroyed with:

1. Bloat, which also makes these places less usable, frustrating and unsatisfying, when you have to sweep through incredibly laggy interfaces in order to find something, when a useless button or feature forced onto you. And you can't do anything with that, because the greedy corpo managers think that you have a powerful machine which they have for billions they make on monetization and report "endless growth", you can get out with wobbly layouts because the page takes so freaking long to load that the button suddenly moves away and you do a wrongful click, increasing the time to load a next section and frustratingly clicking back to experience the same lag again.

The platforms like youtube, instagram, reddit, discord (in most of cases) were known at their rise to offer that easy, smooth, lightning-fast experience combined with individual personality and purpose. They had the interfaces that were expectable, not changed every day to benefit "investors", fast mobile apps that didn't load some strange UX experiments to make the app loaded with new ways to put these short-form recommendations and advertisements into your eyeballs. They didn't use any web browser wrappers, didn't took ages to load and didn't slow down the device to show some content, and enriched your life with things you want from them.

It was a feasible counter-culture from such giants like facebook which were already found themselves in not too great position due to their rigid design, slowness and overly cluttered interface, and huge privacy scandals.

As soon as youtube (as a great and notorious example) ditched their old and efficient interface from mid-2010s (completely removing it to make the polymer interface default), I knew it was over. Same with modern reddit (which now kills old reddit to "protect itself"), discord (which over 2 years ditched their old UI on desktop and made it very sluggish, and started using react native for modern app). Instagram was also known to have sub-100MB android app which was fast, efficient and didn't push useless things with ads, annoying (unremovable!) animations, very alarmingly red badges (they were more tinted, not so ludicrously bright as they are now).

I miss late 2010s and early 2020s (when economy slowed down due to covid crash, so bloat didn't grow up until 2022) so much, they were the times when the platforms already refined themselves to a point they didn't took attention away so aggressively and had the super-fast expereiences. Now it's (almost) gone, and awareness of people about humane history of these platforms further pushed underground, and this is very sad, at least for me.

2. Alternative clients are dying. At least there are still few escapes largely derived from open-source culture, but they are also under heavy risk zone. Companies themselves became way too insane trying to crush down the things that do not help to benefit their destructive "business model", and with the recent worsening practices intentionally done to make people find them, but you can't simply do that because it violates everything and even the laws (which are engineered to prevent people from freely building such things, but not only as non-commercial projects out of enthusiast hand but to protect them from cease-and-desist which is incredibly troublesome for developers to follow on, so they simply shut down things and it's officially over, and no one even talks about that).

It's easy to lament and brag about these things, but someone may ask, what comes next?

A thing that is now called so precisely (digital minimalism, when it isn't about rejecting the technology-involved past but improving the future with mindful choices), and that's why I spent 2 hours actually writing down that post on my old laptop, to express my feelings in the way I wanted to. Like the things such as going "offline", not on social media, literally sound exact same and easily referencing to my now-becoming-glory days of having limited internet access, when back then downloading music was a necessity to carry it around no matter where I go (to a Nokia feature phone with sd card and usb cable, or sometimes acquiring a song via bluetooth or lately, via Shareit android app which didn't need internet to exchange files over a wifi hotspot from classmates or friends). Now there are much lower friction, open-source, malware-free ways to do that, so it becomes less of a chore, despite using a streaming service is so much easier.

Especailly how limiting the flow of information (leaving useless group chats, discord servers, decluttering emails to make them serve a good purpose, unsubscribing from tens of youtube channels and so on, my tab bar is currently almost empty in browser) and changing life priorities in these places, existence of which are also ramped up by social media (ironically) suddenly becomes a sign of specific mindset, like it gets more normalized not to be in the loop and just "think deeper" about larger, complex things and do things that many people just don't seem to find meaning in. Of course, I can admit it can be lonely experience at times, but when looking through the chronological histories of things I've being missing out, it doesn't look like that it's a sign of failure. Like it's cooler to suddenly open up a page of person (profile pages are still chronological by default, and latest stuff is always at the top) and see content that's being already refined in time. That's why bookmarks exist, use them again, they are still unbreakable ways (most of the time) to jump to pages you want, not the corporation wants to be disguised as "home" or "feed" which are actually pages for discovery, not for updates.

And most notably, it shifts the way with which people i do socialize, it isn't frequent or for quick talk, because the default thinking state is about complex things and it results in changes of behavior, that I can stay without putting up my phone because there is no real intent to do so (no new notifications, nothing) for much longer even in some uncertain situations, and i can't simply open up tiktok or some short-form video platform, because i don't have an app for that or it's way too hard to actually reach that spot. Because in the real world, messaging apps are still a large brink of valuable communication which helps truly connect and not designed to make me spend on them my entire life.

Of course, it feels a bit off that i hopped onto this journey quite recently (from circa-2024 when i felt a strong need to study better, and it worked actually), and that in my early 20s i can simply ignore trends and do supposedly strange things (which are stereotypically look inappropriate for my age), like writing long-form difficult texts by myself, do homework without even going online or using some garbage llm (or doing it intentionally to submiss things, or google some word that i don't understand in the text), and reading books actually (which indeed is a novel thing for me, because the internet, good, fast internet had the pagination and catalogs which felt like a library, but it's dead now because why you should care about ability to read the entire forum post catalog or posts on some social media page, right?) which are easier to consume because they preserve the progress of reading (aka last page) and you can save drm-free files on your device like mp3 songs, depending on the way how you acquire them.

But that's the thinking i'm not going to give up even in the long future because i have a large brink of low-internet past that more frequently pops up in my memory, and the most valuable things do happen outside of this hyper-reactive algorithmic world, coordinated in few places and gates, and in the worlds that seem invisible to massive audiences (like alternative social media, purpose-driven communities or long-form writings, or indie culture of internet which also insists on intentional use of it).