The internet is still out there
I’ve referenced it in passing before, but I have a longing to rediscover the parts of the internet we’ve lost since it appeared to consolidate into a handful of massive sites.
Back in the 90s, before big business started taking an interest in this fertile new ground, the internet was a sea of small websites made (usually by hand) by people who really wanted to be there.
Small beginnings
The thing about the 90s was, we were limited by how quickly we could download data to our computers. I had a 56K modem back in the mid 90s, tiny by today’s standards but more than sufficient for basic HTML pages and low-res images. Unless you were minted, chances are you were connected using the only phone line into your home and you would get disconnected if someone else tried making a call. Simpler times.
The software to make websites back then was quite primitive. They were static HTML pages that looked ugly by today’s standards, but they were ours and we put our heart and soul into them.
Connecting them all together was a handful of search engines, such as Lycos, Altavista and Yahoo! They were mostly fine, Lycos being my go-to search engine, but Google would eventually come along and eat their lunch. However, by that point the profit motive was already starting to creep in.
The thing is, whilst the likes of Facebook and Youtube would come along towards the end of the 2000s and into the early 2010s and become the “only” parts of the internet people would see, the World Wide Web was still out there, it just wasn’t being seen by people unless it was a list of the best vacuum cleaners or coffee grinders.
This is why, if you search Google for anything, chances are you are only going to find pages of listicles or advertorials.
Advertisements Suck
The trouble with Google and search engines which also have an interest in selling their customers is, search results are often skewed towards pages that are good for Google and not for the person doing the searching.
This is why nearly every YouTube video is about a product, or it is trying to sell you on a lifestyle that will require a whole host of products.
Yes, if you look hard enough there are video essays about old products, or about subjects that go deeper than a swipe of your credit card, but they generally don’t do very well. Photography YouTubers who do product reviews gain a lot more traction than channels who talk about actually making photos.
This is why one of the original photography podcasts, which became a Youtube channel, called The Art of Photography now mostly does camera reviews.
There is another way…
How do we change this? Well, first up, you need to start blogging. I’m currently using Micro.blog. It costs around $5 per month, plus you might want a domain name, but it is not essential. There is also Bear Blog Then just start writing about things that interest you.
But please, be yourself. Readers can spot AI slop from a mile away, so please don’t try to pass slop off as your own. Let your passion shine through, in your own voice.
Secondly, look for services where you can pay to make the ads go away. I have switched my video watching to Nebula, which costs around £30 per year and the revenue share for creators is apparently much better and they’re not at the mercy of an algorithm that only wants people to buy more crap they don’t really need.
In the UK we still have catch-up TV services like ITVx and Channel4, both offer the ability to remove the ads. ITVx (£5.99) and Channel4+ (£3.99) together are cheaper per month than Youtube Premium (£12.99).
There are also search engines like Kagi and Uruky which have a subscription attached, but will put what you are searching for at the top of the list not at the bottom beneath a dozen ads.
Kagi also has an app for iOS and Android called “Small Web”, which lets you browse through a list of small sites made by people like me…and hopefully you too.
You can also switch your social media to Mastodon, which is a network of instances scattered all around the world, so geographical, some built around hobbies or interests, but all with a shared timeline. It is ad-free, there’s no algorithm, and resolutely free from fascist billionaires, but you may want to donate to your instance, as hosting sadly isn’t free.
If you decide to give that a go, you’ll find me here.
I love the internet, I just don’t like how it feels right now. I’d like to think we can do something about that.
My Mastodon chum over at https://spacetimetech.wordpress.com is gathering some resources together to that end, so I’ll update this post when he’s published it. I just wanted to empty my head of things it had been chewing on lately.