We traded blogs for black boxes, now we're paying for it

Summary

We traded blogs for black boxes, now we're paying for it 09/09/2025 Come listen to the "old man yelling at clouds" in me for a bit. tl;dr: The internet is changing for the worse (or getting 'enshittified'). In this post, I write about the effects of algorithms on the public discourse to illustrate a greater point on the enshittification of the internet. Then, I offer my personal notes and curated resources to guide you on your personal internet deshittification journey. I miss the old internet, and I don't mean the slow dial-up internet. No, I miss the internet specifically before it collapsed into a single, endless feed that we access through proprietary apps (now with AI slop!). I miss how it was a network that's both human, and humane. Back when it wasn't (primarily, at least) an algorithmic black hole made to just suck us in. Maybe it's the increasing corporate ownership of the internet that took people's agency from their hands. Who knows? I want to remember, for example (and hopefully help rebuild) the internet where actual humans discovered each other's work by following trails others cared enough to leave behind; not because an LLM or some billionaire brat's algorithm 'fed' it to them. We used to use our curiosity to find stuff we liked, which felt more satisfying than any algorithm's statistically-determined aggregation. I've had this blog hosted on BearBlog for more than a month now, and thanks to the community here, I've rediscovered the indie web. What's left of it, I mean. Still, it has been an absolute joy to read human-written words on all kinds of things I'm interested in. Many of my thoughts on the internet and the digital world as a whole were shaped by those. How cool is that! If this kind of an internet is still possible, why is it such a small part of the general network? Well, money. Here are examples to what makes money on the internet: Context CollapseI recently watched a great video from Technology Connections titled 'Algorithms Are Breaking...