What Happened to the Internet? The Complete Story

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Do you remember it? That screeching, wailing sound of a dial-up modem connecting, like a robot having a very bad day. It was the noise of a door opening to another world. A world that felt vast, weird, and wonderfully human. It was the internet of the late 1990s and early 2000s, a place built by enthusiasts, academics, and eccentrics. A place you explored, rather than a place that was served up to you on a plate.

Fast forward to today. You unlock your phone. An algorithm shoves a video in your face about a celebrity you don’t care about. You try to search for a simple recipe and have to fight your way through a dozen pop-up ads and a life story about the author’s grandmother. You scroll through social media and see the same five recycled memes and a parade of suspiciously perfect influencers. The feeling isn’t one of exploration anymore. It’s one of exhaustion.

It’s a common complaint you’ll hear in pubs, over family dinners, and in quiet moments of frustration: the internet just isn’t what it used to be. It feels broken. But it didn’t just happen by accident. The internet we have today is the result of a series of deliberate choices made over the last two decades—choices that transformed a digital public square into a handful of gigantic, privately-owned shopping centres.

This is the story of what happened to the internet. It’s a story about how we went from a space designed for connection to a machine designed for addiction, and what, if anything, we can do to find our way back.

The Garden of Eden: The Early Internet (1990s – Early 2000s)

To understand what we’ve lost, we first need to remember what we had. The early internet, the one pioneered by brilliant minds like British computer scientist Sir Tim Berners-Lee, wasn’t built to sell us things. It was a project born out of academia and a desire to share information freely. Berners-Lee’s vision for the World Wide Web was a decentralised space—a network with no single point of control, where anyone could set up a server and publish information.

And for a while, that’s exactly what it was.

A World Made by Hand

The ‘old web’ was gloriously, chaotically human. It was the era of GeoCities and Angelfire, where people built their own websites—their own little digital homes—by hand. They were often garish, covered in flashing GIFs, clashing backgrounds, and questionable font choices. But they were dripping with personality. You’d stumble upon a site meticulously detailing every episode of Red Dwarf, another dedicated entirely to a passion for steam trains in the Scottish Highlands, or a personal blog written by someone on the other side of the world.

Discovery was an active process. You used search engines like AltaVista or Lycos, which were more like digital librarians than the all-knowing oracles of today. They were clunky, but they returned a list of websites, not a curated answer. You had to click, explore, and sometimes get wonderfully lost. You followed webrings—chains of sites linked together by a common interest—to hop from one enthusiast’s creation to another.

Communities, Not Audiences

This was the golden age of forums and Usenet groups. If you had a niche interest, whether it was Warhammer, birdwatching in the Pennines, or modifying your Ford Fiesta, there was a community for you. These were spaces governed by their own rules and etiquette, often run by volunteers. You weren’t a ‘user’ or a ‘consumer’; you were a member. You built a reputation over time through thoughtful posts.

It was a social web, but it wasn’t ‘social media’. Your identity was often pseudonymous, tied to a username, not your real name and face. The goal wasn’t to build a personal brand or go viral; it was to share knowledge and connect with like-minded people. It was slow, thoughtful, and text-based.

The Age of the People: Web 2.0 and the Social Boom (Mid-2000s – Early 2010s)

Around the mid-2000s, things started to change. The internet became easier to use. You no longer needed to know HTML to have a voice. This was the dawn of Web 2.0, the ‘read-write’ web.

This era felt like a revolution. It was exciting. Power seemed to be shifting from big media corporations to ordinary people.

Blogging: Platforms like Blogger and WordPress let anyone become a publisher. Suddenly, you could read firsthand accounts from people in different cultures, follow the journey of a home cook perfecting their Victoria sponge, or get political commentary that wasn’t filtered through Fleet Street.
YouTube (2005): Before it was a slick, corporate machine, YouTube was a place for pure, unadulterated creativity. It’s where the first British YouTube stars were born, often just teenagers filming funny sketches in their bedrooms. It felt authentic and raw.
Facebook (opened to the public in 2006): Initially, Facebook was about connecting with people you already knew. It was a handy tool for organising university life or keeping in touch with old school friends. Its chronological timeline was simple: you saw what your friends posted, when they posted it.
Twitter (2006): Twitter was a global text message service. Its 140-character limit forced brevity and wit. It was brilliant for live events, breaking news, and connecting directly with figures who once seemed untouchable. During events like the 2011 London riots, it became an indispensable, real-time source of information.

This period felt like the promise of the early internet had been supercharged. We weren’t just reading the web anymore; we were building it together. The problem was, all these amazing new services were free. And as the old saying goes, if you’re not paying for the product, you are the product.

The Gates Go Up: How Walled Gardens Took Over

The explosion of user-generated content created a new, incredibly valuable resource: data. Your data. Your likes, your posts, your photos, your connections. And the companies providing these free services realised this data could be sold to advertisers.

This led to the single biggest shift in the internet’s history: the move from an open web to ‘walled gardens’.

Imagine the old internet was like a massive city full of public parks, libraries, and independent shops. You could wander freely between them. The new internet is more like a collection of giant, all-inclusive resorts. Think of Facebook (now Meta, which also owns Instagram and WhatsApp), Google (which owns YouTube), Apple, and Amazon. Once you’re inside one of their ‘gardens’, they do everything they can to keep you there.

Why? Because the more time you spend inside their walls, the more data they can collect, the more ads they can show you, and the more money they make.

This had a devastating effect on the open web. Why would you go to the effort of building your own blog when you could just post on Facebook? Why would you join a niche forum when you could join a Facebook Group? Slowly but surely, traffic and creativity were siphoned away from millions of independent sites and concentrated into a handful of massive platforms. We traded ownership for convenience. We gave up our digital homes to become permanent tenants in someone else’s building, living by their rules.

The Algorithm Decides: When Machines Became the Curators

The next logical step in keeping us inside the walled gardens was to make the experience as sticky as possible. A simple, chronological feed of your friends’ posts wasn’t good enough. It was finite. You could scroll to the end and then, heaven forbid, log off.

So, the platforms introduced the algorithm.

Think of it like this. Your social media feed used to be like a pile of letters delivered by the postman in the order they were sent. The algorithmic feed is like having a personal assistant who reads all your mail and decides what to show you. But this assistant doesn’t care if you’re informed or happy. Their only goal is to keep you looking at the mail for as long as possible.

To do this, the algorithm prioritises engagement. It pushes content to the top that is most likely to get a reaction—a like, a comment, a share, or even just a momentary pause in your scrolling. And what kind of content is most engaging?

Controversy and Outrage: Nuanced, thoughtful posts are often ignored. Angry, polarising, or shocking content gets a massive reaction. The algorithm learned that arguments keep us glued to the screen.
Emotional Content: Heartwarming stories, cute animals, and tear-jerking videos are all powerful engagement bait.
Professionally Produced Content: As platforms matured, they favoured slick, polished content from influencers and brands over the simple, authentic posts from your friends.

This had profound consequences. We stopped seeing what our friends were up to and started seeing a stream of content precision-engineered to provoke a reaction. It created filter bubbles, where we only saw things we already agreed with, and echo chambers, where those beliefs were amplified. It also made the internet a much angrier, more divisive place.

The ‘Enshittification’ of Everything

This brings us to the present day. Author and activist Cory Doctorow coined a wonderfully blunt term for the state of the modern internet: “enshittification.”

It’s a five-stage process that describes the life cycle of a digital platform:

Be good to your users: First, the platform attracts users by offering a great, useful service for free or at a low cost.
Abuse your users to make things better for your business customers: Once the users are locked in, the platform starts to shift value to its business customers (advertisers, sellers). The user experience gets worse.
Abuse your business customers to claw back all the value for yourself: Once the businesses are locked in, the platform starts squeezing them for more money.
Die: Finally, the platform becomes a miserable, unusable mess of ads and spam, and people start to leave.

We are now living through the end-stage of this process on almost every major platform.

Case Study: Google Search

Remember when you could Google something and find a link to a thoughtful article on a personal blog or a discussion on a forum? Now, the first page is often a wasteland of:

SEO Spam: Low-quality articles stuffed with keywords, written purely to rank high in search results.
AI-Generated Slop: Content farms are now using AI to churn out thousands of nonsensical articles that offer no real value.
Endless Ads: A huge portion of the results page is now dedicated to paid advertisements.
Forced Answers: Google increasingly tries to answer your question directly on the results page (with its own AI Overviews or featured snippets), preventing you from ever clicking through to another website.

Finding genuine information from a real human has become a chore. Many people now add “reddit” to their searches just to find authentic human discussions.

Case Study: Social Media (X/Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok)

X (formerly Twitter): Once the internet’s real-time pulse, it has been deliberately filled with blue-ticked trolls, engagement-bait, and rage-farming content to boost interaction metrics, making it a far less useful tool for news and conversation.
Facebook and Instagram: Your feed is no longer about your friends. It’s a relentless stream of ads, sponsored posts, and suggested “Reels” from accounts you don’t follow. The platforms are desperately trying to copy TikTok to keep you scrolling mindlessly.
TikTok: While revolutionary in its algorithmic discovery, it has created a culture of incredibly short-form, low-attention-span content, and its “For You” page is a masterclass in addictive, passive consumption.

Case Study: E-commerce (Amazon)

Amazon used to be a trusted online shop. Now, trying to buy a simple product like a phone charger is a nightmare. The search results are flooded with:

Alphabet Soup Brands: Products from inscrutable brands like “FNERGY,” “AOGUERBE,” or “YINSAN,” which are often just the same cheap item sold under dozens of different names.
Fake Reviews: It’s incredibly difficult to know if the 5-star reviews are genuine or if they’ve been bought.
Sponsored Products: The top results are almost always ads, not the best product for you.

The platform has been captured by third-party sellers who have learned to game the system, and the experience for the actual shopper has become significantly worse.

The Human Cost: What We Lost Along the Way

This transition from a human-centric web to a platform-centric web has come at a cost.

Loss of Community: The old forums created deep, lasting bonds. Social media platforms create shallow, fleeting connections. The incentive is to perform for an audience, not to connect with peers.
Erosion of Hobbies: The pressure to monetise every passion has turned hobbies into “side hustles.” The “creator economy” sounds empowering, but for many, it means constantly feeding the algorithmic beast, leading to burnout.
Mental Health Crisis: The algorithmic pressure to be perfect, the constant comparison, and the manufactured outrage have been linked to rising rates of anxiety and depression, particularly among young people.
Decline of Trust: When we can no longer trust search results, product reviews, or even what we see in our social feeds, our collective sense of shared reality begins to fray.

Is There a Way Back? The Future of the Internet

It’s easy to feel pessimistic. It can seem like the big tech giants have won and the vibrant, weird, open internet is gone for good. But that’s not the whole story. Pockets of the old spirit are still alive, and new movements are emerging.

The Return to Smaller Spaces

People are tired of the giant, noisy platforms. They are migrating to smaller, more intimate spaces:

Discord Servers: Originally for gamers, Discord has become the new home for topic-based communities, functioning much like the forums of old.
Newsletters: Platforms like Substack are enabling a renaissance of the personal blog, allowing writers to have a direct relationship with their audience, free from algorithms.
The Fediverse: This is perhaps the most exciting development. The “Fediverse” (federated universe) is a collection of independent social media servers that can all talk to each other. Mastodon, the best-known example, is like a version of Twitter that isn’t owned by any single company. Each server has its own rules and community, but you can follow and interact with people on other servers. It’s a return to the decentralised vision of the early web.

The Push for Regulation

Governments are starting to wake up to the harms caused by unchecked tech monopolies. Here in the UK, the Online Safety Act is a major attempt to force platforms to take more responsibility for the content they host, particularly in protecting children. While controversial and complex, it signals a shift away from the idea that platforms are just neutral arbiters.

A Change in Our Own Habits

Perhaps the most powerful force for change is us. We can consciously choose to spend our time differently online.

Cultivate your own corner of the web: Support independent creators through newsletters or platforms like Patreon. Pay for journalism you value.
Use RSS: Remember RSS readers? They still exist! They allow you to subscribe to blogs and news sites directly, creating your own chronological, ad-free feed.
Explore the alternatives: Try a search engine like DuckDuckGo. Give Mastodon a go. Join a Discord server for your favourite hobby.

The internet we have now is the one we accepted in exchange for convenience. A better internet will require a little more effort. It will mean choosing to be an active citizen of the web again, not just a passive consumer. It means seeking out the small, the independent, and the human, and remembering that the goal is to connect, not just to scroll. The screech of the dial-up modem is gone forever, but the spirit of exploration it represented doesn’t have to be.