dead internet theory

james choice · 2026-05-06T12:55:57.938181-07:00

the internet is genuinely dying. the reason, as discussed here, is primarily the search engines. people have stopped producing because they can no longer get their pages noticed. social media platforms are no different. when you search on youtube, it shows 5-10 relevant results and then completely unrelated stuff. same on x. many platforms work the same way. this is why a lot of people who actually produce quality content eventually give up. they can't get to where they want to go. there are tons of youtube channels where they've stopped making videos. this is exactly the kind of example i was talking about, the internet dying directly, separate from bots and so on. ai is just the icing on the cake. ais come with biases on every topic. so you can never search for the opposite side of an issue. for example, i search "y is actually harmless" on yandex. the ai immediately says "y is actually beneficial. no." did i fucking ask you, i say, but it just keeps arguing with me. the search results are no different. i just want to hear the opposing view on that subject. the results insistently come back saying it's beneficial, and it never lets me search clearly. all search engines are the same. the youtube search section is the same. and then these sons of bitches set traps just to get us to accidentally click on ads. for example, when you're scrolling reels on instagram, everything's working fine, but the moment an ad pops up, suddenly it stops scrolling. makes you click by accident. like, my eyes automatically filter out ads. so these sons of bitches make ads on x look like regular people's tweets. or they change ad formats to throw off your visual habits. figured i'd vent while i was at it.

when the internet first came about there was a more qualified user base, if we think about the bbs era, there were even networks you could reach by dialing a number. you'd pick the source directly and move forward. right now people who don't even know how to read and write properly are using the internet, and technology has actually evolved to a level that people at that level can understand and be steered toward purchases, and everything falls apart from here. everything gets tried in order to draw engagement with garbage content.

i definitely miss the old news server days, it was like small neighborhoods of a few thousand people. right now if i said "xor," there are plenty of people from my generation on ekşi sözlük who'd get it and crack a smile.

i think there could be a solution and a way out of this. in my opinion what's needed is an indexing website, but one that'll imitate instagram and be text-based. people will create blog pages with their own domains, and everyone will publish their content on their own website, and the indexing website will present the daily published posts to followers with an interface similar to instagram reels. on the index, users will be able to follow relevant blogs, and they'll also be able to follow tags and discover different sites. a site like this might not gain acceptance among general users, but it'll be popular among qualified researchers or people who love to read.