The Internet Kinda Sucks Now

Stephen Moore
7 min readApr 11, 2024

This article was originally published on my Substack, Trend Mill.

I was reminiscing the other day with a friend about a long-forgotten period of time — the days when the internet was fun.

Tightknit forums with positive vibes, the early viral videos on YouTube (looking at you, Star Wars Kid), MSN Messenger, the band pages on MySpace, using Limewire to download music (at a glacial speed), searching for information and actually finding it — and actually being able to read it. As I recall, it was pretty magical. I can remember sitting down at night somewhat excited to open my shitty laptop and chat with friends, watch dumb videos and generally have a good time. Sure, it was clunky and slower. But it had charm. And it worked well. It might be a case of rose-tinted glasses, another example of someone claiming it was “better back in my day.”

But, while the internet is still used in much the same way today, something has changed.

I feel no sense of joy using it. No curiosity. No intrigue. No excitement. That feeling of tapping into an endless world of possibilities is gone, replaced with a begrudging realization that I’ll have to enter it again and battle to find what I need, trudging through ads, paywalls, vitriol, disinformation and more.

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Stephen Moore

Writer, editor, part-time furniture maker. Subscribe to Trend Mill for critical takes on our dystopian metaverse hellscape future - https://www.trend-mill.com