The End of Amateur Web Hour

Me and some friends made our first, awfull webpage in '95. We were 14 and 15 years old. It was bad. But, fun bad.

Since then we made a few other stupid sites and so did many others. GeoCities was a weird and wacky place for a while.

Therefore I can very much relate to this piece on not being able to be bored on the internet anymore.

And then, one day, I think in 2013, Twitter and Facebook were not really very fun anymore. And worse, the fun things they had supplanted were never coming back. Forums were depopulated; blogs were shut down. Twitter, one agent of their death, became completely worthless: a water-drop-torture feed of performative outrage, self-promotion, and discussion of Twitter itself.

And this comment on hacker news captures the feeling I have very well:

[T]here's a lot more content to consume now. However, it doesn't feel like a community... it feels more like watching reruns on TBS. (..) Most of social media now is a broadcast, not a conversation.

A while ago I had this idea for a blogging platform/software where you could only follow a set amount of people, and only a set amount of people could follow you. It would be the sort of constraint you have on Twitter, but instead it would be on your connections.

I thought that maybe then it

  1. wouldn't feels as intimidating to produce stuff
  2. You'd litteraly know all the people who read your posts
  3. It wouldn't become a popularity contest

I'd be more like writing a letter. And it would be easier to comment. There would be less spam and less trolling. And the posts wouldn't feel like personal branding, community curation and content marketing.

There would just be these rooms or tables you could sit at. Then you could leave a table and go to another one, freeing up the slot for someone else to come and introduce themselves.

I never tried to make anything of it, of course.


The internet was a silly kid once, and then it grew up. You can still do silly things when you've grown up, but acting like a kid as a grown up just isn't the same as being a kid.

Or maybe it wasn't the internet that grew up, it was us. And we became grumpy old farts. Perhaps that's why Snapchat is huge among the younglings. Snapchat let's you keeps things private if you want, and it lets you be artistic and playfull with your photos.

But, yeah. The internet is not the same. Something, or someone, changed.

The internet is a utility world for me now. It is efficient and all-encompassing. It is not very much fun.

15.05.2018