Veterans find the modern internet boring and repetitive

Veterans find the modern internet boring and repetitive

When did going online stop being fun? Complaints echo through veteran forums: the network that promised infinite discovery has shrunk to five pages, a search engine hiding interesting content, and an algorithm serving up the same results. They call it the sanitized boredom. It is not just nostalgia; there are dates, mechanisms, and named culprits.

From phone books to SEO: the evolution of search engines

The most repeated diagnosis points to a specific date: around 2010, search engines began systematically deindexing content. Personal blogs, old forum threads, and pages no longer generating enough traffic to sell data were buried in a sort of sub-deep web within the open net. The result is that the first fifty pages of any search are dominated by SEO, drowning out useful links.

Before, this school of thought argues, Google prioritized real relevance: pages popular due to links and useful content, regardless of whether they were major media outlets or personal blogs. If you read a Pynchon novel and searched for an obscure scientist mentioned in passing, the search would lead you to a specialized forum, then to another rare page someone had created, and you would end up trinc the thread for hours. That no longer happens.

Some nuance the issue: the content is still there, little has been deleted. What changed was the filter. And the filter responds to a clear economic incentive: what does not generate juicy data to sell is not shown.

AI-generated video and the reign of clickbait

The second focus of discontent is audiovisual content. Since the rise of artificial intelligence, the average quality of video platforms has plummeted: mass-produced clone channels made entirely by machines, titles that have nothing to do with the content or exaggerate a minor aspect. Clickbait has become the norm, not the exception.

The paradox is that AI also resists. Some describe fighting with image generators for hours to show a downward graph or a sad person: the system always returns happiness and upward arrows. You must be happy, damn it, one summarizes. The tool meant to liberate creation imposes its own bias.

The window of opportunity, warn the pessimists, will not last long: if the web took fifteen years to degrade, with AI the process is on track to complete in half the time.

Massification: when the web stopped belonging to a few

The timeline veterans use is precise. In Spain, pioneers started around 1996, with some universities slightly earlier. In 1999, the boom arrived with cybercafés everywhere. Around 2002, with flat-rate pricing, it became mainstream. And between 2010 and 2011 came total massification: older people on Facebook, WhatsApp as standard, everyone with a smartphone.

That is the crux of the matter for many: when something becomes democratized, it becomes vulgarized. While access was minority, those creating content were above average and the level was high. Opening it to everyone results in a showcase of human circus. The death of the web, one comment states, was brought about by making it portable and accessible to the entire population.

Others attribute it to the simple passage of time. Hedonic adaptation: what once produced pleasure no longer does. And those born in the nineties, now approaching thirty, miss a web that perhaps never was as good as they remember.

The loss of digital wandering

What is missed most is not a specific service, but a way of navigating. Nights of drifting: you started with a search for something interesting, went from link to link, ended up in strange forum conversations, and finished on esoteric pages about peculiar topics. That, they say, is impossible today.

Search engines no longer lead to forum discussions, and many of those forums are not even indexed. People who contributed quality content have moved to video, where at least they are not hidden as much, or to other platforms. A low-quality forum attracts low-quality contributions: the circle closes.

Porn remains, which moves faster and offers tons of material, and little else. The problem, a lucid comment points out, are the collective junk searches done like addicts to avoid boredom: the first chat, the first Tinder, the first IRC. That no longer exists because you only experience it once.

Soft control and the substitution of will

At the bottom of the discontent lies a larger suspicion. The web has become a pen of social networks and a ministry of truth disguised as journalism. Counter-power movements considered dangerous to the system were generated, and the response has been to castrate, empty, and automate.

The real Skynet does not activate all at once: it installs itself as convenience. Do not decide, I will help you. Do not remember, I have a copy. Do not fight, you are safe. The substitution of human will by perfect systems of soft control. The end of history does not arrive with a bang, it arrives when no one remembers how to fight.

If it is free, you are the product. And we are increasingly data for more refined social engineering structures. The web that promised to democratize knowledge and critical thinking ended up being the best instrument of collective discipline ever built. With personalized ads, of course.