2024 seems to be the year when everyone figured out that the Internet is terrible now. The big tech companies have all stopped innovating now that the investment money has dried up, and are now busy trying to suck every last cent of profit that they can from their users. Now that Google, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and all the rest have gotten everyone dependent on their ubiquitous services, they don't have to care about the customer experience anymore. Elon Musk can let Twitter turn to absolute garbage, and people are still using it because they have to - the livelihoods of many creators hinge on it. Youtube is waging war against ad-blockers instead of trying to make their site more usable without them. Amazon has inserted so many ads into Prime, it feels downright hostile.
But the worst - and perhaps the most emblematic example of this attitude - is the once vaunted Google internet search engine. Advertisements, SEO optimization, and the prioritization of product searches have made searching far more difficult than it used to be. More obscure sources have been buried or deindexed, frustrating research efforts. Recent "algorithm updates" to address spam and AI-generated content don't appear to have helped much. And this isn't a new phenomenon, with complaints about the erosion of search quality going back several years. It just took a while for everyone to notice, the same way it took a while to realize that Amazon largely turned into a dropshipping business for low quality Chinese knockoffs, and Craigslist turned into scam central.
In short, capitalism has caught up. The free trial has finished and now we have to pay the subscription fees, or deal with a worse and worse online experience. Paywalls limit access to real journalism while misinformation runs rampant. There aren't real kid-friendly online spaces anymore, because moderation costs too much, so you have to be a helicopter parent or keep your kid off the internet until they're in high school. Everybody wants you to download an app. Everybody wants permission to access your data and feed it to an AI. The algorithm determines everything you see, and gaming the algorithm is now a necessary skill set to actually get anything done or find sources that aren't awful. The worst scams and abuses aren't being cracked down on because legislators still don't understand how anything works on the internet, despite most of us now spending way too much time online.
I find myself nervously eyeing the parts of the internet that are still in relatively good shape. Social media site Reddit recently had an IPO, and can't seem to keep futzing with its algorithms, but its user base remains as ornery as ever. Programming site Stack Overflow is in the middle of a war with its users over a partnership deal with OpenAI. The New York Times published a concerning article on the future of Wikipedia last year, Wikipedia’s Moment of Truth, which is doing nothing for my peace of mind. I tried using Microsoft's Bing search engine for a while, but their Copilot AI assistant (based on OpenAI again) was so intrusive that I eventually quit.
Now in the far distant past, when an online service started behaving badly, the users would jump ship for a competitor. My early internet history led me through tons of defunct online communities like Usenet, Livejournal, MySpace, Vine, and Digg. I've been feeling for a while that it's time to start searching for greener pastures, so I've been quietly spending more time on Bluesky and Metafilter, and developing other fallback options in case things start to fall apart. However, not everybody knows how to do this, especially the younger folks. Some services like Youtube and Google Search are so entrenched and so dominant, you have users who would be unable to function online without them.
Then again, users have a history of adapting quickly in a pinch. Remember when Zoom exploded during COVID lockdown, when it turned out other options like Skype and Google Meet just weren't going to cut it? Or before that, remember how fast Blackberry went down when the Iphone made its debut? If someone figures out a search algorithm that can reliably outperform Google Search, it'll catch on quickly. You can kill TikTok - and hopefully they will, because the app is straight trash - but an alternative is probably just around the corner. Let's just hope that Elon Musk doesn't end up running it.
Anyway, it's probably a good thing that the honeymoon phase of the Internet's takeover of the planet is done. Now we can get started on finally fixing it.
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