22/02/2023
In Which I Reminisce About The Early Days Of The Internet
Remember the internet? Back when everything was less centralised, and things looked worse.
I spend most of my time on Discord and Reddit now, never leaving much. It's kind of sad.
SEO has basically ruined everything. That's why good stuff is buried and the spammiest spam is pushed to the top of search results. That's why when you look up a recipe you have to scroll through 5 minutes of fluff that I'm not convinced anyone ever reads to actually find the recipe.
Let's not be too critical though, the internet is a wonderful tool. I can literally pull a phone out my pocket and look up anything I want immediately. It's a rare occassion I can't find what I'm looking for.
But it just doesn't feel as expressive as it used to be.
Stumble Upon
I made a video recently musing about StumbleUpon, it was a discovery engine that took you to cool random websites. In modern times, with SEO spam, it's become more difficult than ever to find cool stuff.
It was just when we needed StumbleUpon more than ever that it was shut down, replaced by some awful service called Mix. Mix seems to just send you to blogs I've just been complaining about.
Mix is bad. It's been almost 5 years since StumbleUpon shut down now and there's no replacement. Or maybe there is a replacement, but because of the curse of SEO, I can't find it.
People used to make things for the sake of it. Now there seems to be a ton of focus on monetisation. Even this website that I personally made just points you to stuff I've made, some of which requires you to pay money to access.
Neocities
I love Neocities, because it kind of goes against the modern internet. There's no soulless corporate Wordpress sites here. You make an account, and you're given an index.html. That's it. That's all there is. And you can really show off your personality through an amateur looking website. And it's that amateur look I miss dearly.
Stuff on Neocities is cool. Check out this page I found called Tesseract. It's a page full of tesseracts.
It doesn't try to sell you anything, it doesn't try and justify its existense, it's just a page of tesseracts. And it's for that reason that it's very memorable.
The Blog's Life's Purpose
So that's why I'm here, writing this. I want to write about nothing, random musings, pointless ramblings.
I want to remember why I make content in the first place. It's for myself, I want to talk about stuff. And it's thanks to the internet I can share stuff with the world. It's just not guaranteed that anybody will actually read it.
Hopefully I don't just forget about this and never write anything ever again.