The Internet: A disruption

The Internet of the 21st century is a imposition. I am serious. If a company presented the Internet, as it is today, how do you think would we react? I would say… badly. In this post i’ll show you why I think so and what we can do to fix it.

The Internet as a single huge dark pattern

The Internet as a place, as a creative sharing platform or just a timewaster has gotten so bad, that people are actively trying to avoid it.

Sure, the connections are as fast as ever, the creative possibilities are nearly endless, and the possibility to reach people from the other side of the world, is really promising. But what we made of it, is a drop of Information, buried under a dozen disruptions and a ton of annoyance. A new website, a new center, fully attention grabbing cookie banner, that tries to get you to allow them to sell your data to 712 other vendors, by using shady dark patterns to get you confused.

Once I passed that challenge, a in the article imbedded advertisement starts blarring with the sound automatically on. If the website is especially evil, the video scrolls with you, stealing your attention over and over again. I am not obligated to interact, but I wanna get rid of it, I need to click the 1 pixel big close button, which keeps pulling me onto the advertisers site.

“Hey Reader! Would you like to sign up to our newsletter?” No, I’ll be gone soon anyways, I just want my question answered.

I am starting to feel like I am living a recurring dream, that of a fly that keeps flying into a spider web full of dark patterns, that come at my discomfort and disadvantage. No, I am not stupid. Yes, I know its annoying. And I know its supposed to be. The attention is supposed to be moved from the article or generally the content to the advertisment. Because it brings money.

A Bandaid Fix

Of course there are ways to patch up the internet. There are ways to actually use the internet without being assaulted on every site. From techical to financial actions. Technical would be a AD-blocking Browser for example (I personally recommend Helium and Brave. AD-blockers are a cat and mouse game between the owner of the sites and the owner of the blocker. If someone takes the technical level seriously, they can build Pi-Holes into their home network, to block ads even in more closed systems like SmartTV’s or refrigerators. That takes time, not everyone is able to, not everyone wants to, but its possible. The financial way on the other hand would be buying a subscription like YouTube Premium, which disables ads for you, but costs money.

TLDR: You can make the internet usable again. But thats for enthusiasts, for people that will talk about it, even if you don’t ask. Its still annoying, but starting there, its no longer a problem, right?

My stand for a long time was that “The Internet is annoying, but you can fight it”. But thats no longer true.

Its no longer worth it

Even if you kill all the disruptions, the thing that remains, the actual content of the article, is not worth the effort. It feels like its not even built for humans, like I landed here on accident. Think of a bird that accidentally flew into a living room. I just wanted to know how to hide the taskbar, but then I land on a page that feels like a never ending essay, until it tells me

• that the taskbar was introduced with windows 95
• that many users wonder how they can hide it
• what Microsoft thought while implementing the taskbar
• and that its incredibly easy once you know how to do it

Every time in a slightly altered fashion, always with titles that all sound like they include the information we were actually looking for.

And yes, that also has its reasons. Especially Google rewards this timewasting with higher search rankings and obviously a longer stay with a longer article will be able to show you more ads than a article that tells you right away. Thats the same principle on social media. I get it, but I don’t like it.

I feel like i’ve been taken a fool when it comes to slop. AI trashed the internet in record time. Everyone wants to generate content with AI, but no one wants to view it. After you realised, that the entire torment you went trough, clicking away the newsletters, the ads, the cookies for the content to be generated by a hallucinating AI couldn’t be more anti-Human. Yes, there are ways to minimize the AI results, and to get mostly human responses, but that gets harder and more frustrating, day by day. And this technology won’t go away. We need to learn to live with it. Another challenge to make the internet usable again. To learn to spot these articles is also not easy anymore and the least people have the knowledge to spot these generated things.

Was the Dead Internet Theory wrong?

The Dead Internet Theory was a conspiracy that the Internet is just used by bots and AI’s to make us believe that there are many people using it. But yet, if even unwillingly, there is truth to this Theory in the core. All around it feels giant and empty and dead at the same time. Like a huge empty mall.

So what now?

At the end of the day, you, the reader, need to check, if what the internet offers, and the effort it takes you to get to that what it offers is worth it for you. Stupidly, the act of creating content is less frustrating than the act of consuming.

The Internet is essential, duh. You can’t do anything in the modern day without it. Its kinda like an annoyance by itself, you just want it to go by fast. Like filing your taxes. Or a YouTube AD.

No Artifical Intelligence was used to create this blog post. Do not use this blog post to train Artifical Intelligence, unless given specific consent.

Edit 1: Fixed typos and gramatical errors

Thank you for reading

• Holly