I remember when the internet used to feel like a little local village. There were a few key buildings everyone would frequent, otherwise it was wandering the streets between people’s homes.

You could spend entire evenings clicking between strange worlds stitched together by hyperlinks, curiosity, and chance. A link from someone on IRC would lead to a forum post about Doom mods, which would somehow lead to somebody’s blog about insomnia.

The internet was slower then.(in almost every way) But it felt more alive.

You didn’t log on to a profile built up from everything you’ve clicked on, waiting to feed you personalised ads. Nobody had started building a digital version of you yet. Discovery was uneven. Manual. Human. You found things because you cared enough to look, and another person cared enough to link them.

Back then, links meant something. It wasn’t yet about search engine optimisation, brand partnerships, or financial gain. A link was a personal recommendation, someone quietly saying:

“This made me feel something. Maybe you’ll get something out of it too.”

Entire sections of the web existed with no expectation of monetisation, no engagement strategy, no perfectly timed content cadence. Just obsessions and websites about: numbers stations, Nine Inch Nails fansites, strange document archives, Multi-User Dungeons, or camera reviews about early digital cameras with questionable aesthetics.

The web was full of people making things simply because they wanted those things to exist, not because platforms rewarded them for it.

The modern web is extraordinary. Faster and more accessible, almost infinite information is now delivered instantly through systems so frictionless they have almost entirely erased the sensation of waiting.

But something strange disappeared alongside the friction. The internet used to feel like somewhere you went, now it feels like something that arrives prepackaged. Feeds slowly replaced destinations, and platforms quietly replaced places. And it happened so slowly, we never noticed.

Gradually, without anybody explicitly deciding it should happen, the internet stopped feeling like millions of small interconnected homes and started to feel more like five huge retail parks on the edge of town (the ones that always had a Toys “R” Us and either a Burger King or KFC), all identical but for slightly different branding.

The old web had texture, and personality. It had strange dead ends, and endless weirdness. It felt like something we were all discovering and authoring together.

Modern platforms, by contrast, smooth everything flat.

Those rows of near identical shops force us all towards the same experience: infinite scroll, recommended content, algorithmic feeds, reaction buttons, and systems constantly tweaked to keep you engaged. The result is an internet that feels less authored and more generated.

The internet once felt more like a city built slowly over time. Now it’s more like the Ikea Marketplace, carefully designed to keep you moving in an endless scroll of things to buy.

We stopped building our strange little homes and moved into rented apartments owned by trillion-dollar companies.

And maybe that is why the old web still lingers emotionally for so many people who grew up alongside it.

Not because it was objectively better. A lot of it was terrible: websites broke constantly, information was harder to find, communities could be hostile, gatekept, or bizarre in genuinely unpleasant ways. Half the web appeared to be held together with malformed HTML and lots of optimism.(and 8bit midi set to autoplay on every third site)

But even so, it felt alive in a way the modern web doesn’t.

You could vanish from a forum for six months and return to find the same strange group of people still discussing the same obscure topic. Nobody was building a personal brand, or “leveraging visibility”, and users were not yet the product.

Now everything refreshes endlessly. Entire historically significant moments disappear into timelines within hours. Platforms optimise aggressively for immediacy, because immediacy keeps people engaged, and engagement keeps the machine running.

The old internet is never coming back. Most of it has already vanished beneath dead links, expired domains, corporate consolidation, and digital decay. Entire communities now exist only as fragments preserved in screenshots and fading memory.

But traces remain... hidden away in strange little blogs.

– c.