The internet isn’t dead in 2024—but it is one big churn (exploring history and causes)

In My Humble Opinion
1

You’ve probably heard of dead internet theory. Here’s a good article on it:

A key quote: “As evidence, [author of famous post on the theory] IlluminatiPirate offers, “I’ve seen the same threads, the same pics, and the same replies reposted over and over across the years.”

Although I don’t feel I see the exact same stuff over and over, and I don’t think there’s any kind of conspiracy at work, I think that the Internet, as a medium for presenting content and fostering interactions between people, reached an impressive peak around 2015 or so and has declined in terms of both quantity and quality since then.

Different things have peaked at different times. For example, blogging probably peaked around 2012, YouTube around 2014, and Facebook around 2016. Moreover, there has been very little innovation or exciting new online products over the past 10 years (TikTok being the big exception that proves the rule).

But why has this happened? I have seen very little analysis or commentary online about this, so I thought I’d provide some thoughts. I going big-picture here, so this will be a bit long.

1. People have explored the limits of self-expression

At the dawn of the 21st century, being able to express oneself to people around the world and receive instant feedback was new and fun. People chatted in chat rooms, argued on the SDMB, blogged, rated and reviewed movies and records, tweeted and made YouTube videos. Slowly but surely, however, people ran out of things to say. People got bored of responding to others as well, so there was less incentive to create.

As a case in point, take a look at a site that I still think is very good: www.rateyourmusic.com. Participation seemed to peak around 2006. Pick an artist that is popular, and in most cases the number of reviews per album goes down dramatically after that.

I have reviewed maybe four movies total on IMDb.com (and I’ve only left one up). Pretty early on, I thought: “I’m not going to give corporations content for free.”

Remember the concept of “flame wars”? Those seem largely over as well. I remember when I first started playing chess online in 1998. People would cuss you out when they lost, they would regularly accuse you of cheating, etc. That more or less died out after a few years as the novelty of getting anonymously angry faded away and moderation improved.

Another example: any veterans of the SDMB from 20 years ago or so can tell you that the tenor of the site was a lot different (I joined in 2003). There was endless drama and countless bannings. People debated with real fury. Moderation, I can only suppose, was difficult and time-consuming. We all seem to have grown up—and gotten tired of that kind of thing—since then.

It’s true that new generations continue to come online, but the big difference is that they have always had the internet. They were not thrown into the deep end of self-expression as adults and invited to swim or drown. That happened in the first two decades of the internet and can never be repeated.

2. The low-hanging fruit of content has been plucked

I would say the Golden Age of online content was roughly 2010 to 2015. Listicle sites like www.cracked.com were at their height (I used to read on there every day). YouTube had a ton of enthusiastic creators. And peeps were blogging like heck.

I still watch a lot of YouTube, but the number of channels to which I subscribe that actually continue to put out content is a fraction of what it was five to seven years ago. A lot of people have run out of things to say (per #1 above) or stopped being able to make money (per #3 below). But another factor is that a lot of what can be done has been done at this point.

An example is content about raw denim (collecting denim is a hobby of mine, and I don’t focus specially on raw, but it is an interest). “To get the best fades, don’t ever wash your raw denim.” There you go, you can find that advice regurgitated 250 ways online, and anything interesting to say was said by 2011. I still check out the relevant subreddit and look at fades from time to time, but it’s never going to be new again.

Multiply that by every possible topic, and you have your “dead internet,” pretty much.

3a. Opportunities to make money via online content have greatly diminished for individuals

In the year 2000, I was getting checks sent to me in the mail from the site www.epinions.com. I would write reviews of whisky, people would read them, and I would get checks for $10.00, $15.00 or so. That was cool, but it didn’t last long. Even so, that was the thinking back then. It was going to be this wonderful world of creativity and participation, and we could all make money doing it!

People used to make a lot of money via blogs as well. They’d put up a blog, get some readership, and put in some Amazon affiliate links, Google AdSense links, etc., and—voilà!—$$$. Andrew Sullivan quit blogging back in 2015—now ancient history, but his blog was huge at the time.

Oh, and YouTube. In addition to YouTube trying to raise up new content creators and paying them money circa 2010, there used to be big companies running multiple channels, such as Machinima. Machinima, Inc. - Wikipedia. Nowadays, the three things I hear the most on YouTube are “demonetization,” ”copyright strike,” and “Patreon.” It’s the golden age of e-begging. For all the excitement over TikTok, Hank Green has complained on YouTube that he makes virtually nothing from it.

Frankly, I am surprised and happy that YouTube still exists at all in 2024. It’s not clear whether it’s ever been profitable for Google, and moderation seems to be a nightmare both for the company and the creators. I have no doubt that one of these days one or more of the following will happen: YouTube will completely block users blocking ads (they’re trying hard already), require all users to pay for access, or simply fold up shop.

3b. The opportunities seem poor for companies selling content, too.

Just to state the obvious, the internet is now a pay-walled dungeon. Every half-assed regional newspaper wants you to subscribe, but that isn’t all. Even big companies are now e-begging! Really, NBC needs me to turn off my ad blocker or subscribe in order to see what little content of theirs I encounter in the first place? (Though a lot of companies have suddenly adopted this same pop-up that has “Continue for now without supporting” in small type.)

The advertising model was never a good one for online content. The subscription model isn’t working well either. There is no visible way forward. Over the next few years, we are going to see a vast culling of companies putting content online, even though the pickings are already pretty poor. (I’m not talking about streaming service companies here, although there is catastrophic trouble in this market as well…)

4. A lot of the content that was created is just gone

Awhile ago, I found a rather interesting cached page about Jacque Lacan written by Richard Webster for his website. He was a fairly well-known writer who wrote the book Why Freud Was Wrong, which was a best-seller and “important” book when it came out in 1995. Webster died young in 2011, and his website is no longer up.

That page was cached, but I didn’t find it via Google but as a link on an old post somewhere; i.e., I was lucky to see it at all. He had, from what I could see, a pretty big website with a lot of content on it. That perspective is now gone, or at least hard to access. In time, no doubt, it won’t be accessible at all.

Multiply that by a very large number, and you have your “dead internet.”

5. Websites are eliminating features (maintenance and moderation are a pain)

It’s now many years ago that IMDb eliminated the forums that were attached to each movie and person (actor, director, etc.) in the database. That was a huge trove of information simply wiped away. No doubt it was a pain to moderate and maintain, but… When do you think someone will put up a new website that’s popular and makes possible discussion on that scale? Probably never.

Meanwhile, a bunch of major websites have simply ditched their comments sections. Moderating and controlling all the bad actors is no fun. Over the past 20 years, we’ve learned just how bad people suck when they can participate in something anonymously. It’s yet another reason why the internet is trending toward less and less, not more and more.

6. Entire categories have been destroyed

I had some dating success on the free websites OKCupid and Plenty of Fish, but Match.com acquired them (as well as Tinder and many others) and turned them into swipe-right garbage. Will there ever be good online dating again, free or not? I have my doubts.

Facebook changed the world with its rise, and for a while social media was really fun. Then Facebook turned out to be a bad company, and a lot of people (including myself) quit the site/app based on that, and Gen Z never really got into it. Meanwhile, no real competition has come to take its place. Will another social network be created that replicates the good parts of the Facebook experience? Probably not.

So what does the future of the internet look like? Not promising, IMHO.

From the dawn of the WWW in the mid-‘90s up to the rise of Facebook in the ‘10s, we really didn’t know how the various incentive systems and business opportunities would shake out. The internet started out naïve and hopeful, but it turned out that money is scarce and people are assholes. As in many other areas of life, we can’t have nice things.

Thanks in advance for your thoughts!

2

The other new technology which is going to have a negative impact on the internet is AI. I expect human produced comments will soon be a minority on the internet; instead the majority of comments will be written by AI.

3

In other words, the internet has become a vast wasteland.

4

Great point. Anything left is going to be gamed by AI for whatever pennies and yucks can be squeezed out of the thing.

5

Yeah, his timing was similar to that of the early 2000s, when I remember communicating with the guy who ran Arts & Letters Daily (that still exists and looks *exactly as it did back then!), and we both agreed that things had taken a turn for the worse, as a lot of free/cool stuff had already gone away and multiple monetization models had failed (see my thing about Epinions above).

So I don’t think he was wrong per se, but the true big picture had yet to come into view.

6

reddit is the worst when it comes to bot content; whole subs are chock full of the most repetitive and boring anecdotes imaginable, where it is a few jokesters trying to impress everyone else for upvotes with their inane and unconvincing tales and an increasing number of pure bot posts (either copied over from ChatGPT et al. by said jokesters or posted via automated means with no human intermediary). I feel sorry for those rare but sincere persons trying to wade in there and get useful feedback about whatever topic, only to get a bunch of unhelpful generic feedback for their trouble.

7

Another example of AI hurting things is that people are setting up bots to automatically create and submit bug reports to, for example, open source software projects. These “bugs” are generally bogus and waste maintainers time to examine meaning there is less time to act on real bug reports. Expect bug bounties to go away.

Fran Blanche on her YouTube channel has made some videos lately about how YouTube’s “helpful” AI suggestions for content descriptions and reply to comments are a mess. And content makers cannot get rid of them, report errors, or anything.

Things are getting really bad out there and will just get a lot worse.

8

The internet (Google) died around 2009 when Google decide to delete millions of web pages from Yahoo, probably because it fouled up their ranked advertising searches.

Also, when Google decided to pay “Content Creators” (nee youtubers) and call hobbyists “makers”.

Which then led people to believe if they bought a 4k video camera and HD lavaliere microphones like other people “making money,” then they would be taken seriously, and the attention and dollars would follow. Why not convince attention seeking people, via “channel metrics” to go to Youtube boot camp, get a free Youtube channel advisor and learn how to promote themselves and… things.

Who needs to vote in society, when upvotes and likes can do the voting for them. What politician cares about actual physical votes, when some popular 20 year old gets 10000000 thumbs up for an anti-government conspiracy about UFOs?

In other words, the internet used to be free. Now everything has a price.

9

I’m sorry to have to ask, but I’m an old guy who is not with it: are you talking about the content, or the medium? It sounds like this is about content, but I’m not sure.

10

The internet is a lot more than social media. I use it all the time for my finances and for shopping. In that sense, it’s far from dead.

11

I realize I’m an old fart and I seem to be surrounded by old farts. I’m not a user of TikTok, but I hear about it all the time. Not here though. Other than the brief mention by the OP, it’s been ignored. But people get their news from TikTok, fads spread through TikTok, people make money off of TikTok. The company claims 150 million active users in the U.S. monthly. A part of the internet used by half the population can’t be ignored. Especially since they claim a billion monthly users worldwide.

The rest of the comments here are no doubt accurate. They were foretold long ago by naysayers who correctly perceived the problems inherent in a volunteer activity. People get bored, or busy, or occupied elsewhere, leaving a core of overworked, overstressed believers if the group doesn’t simply die out. No reason existed to assume that the internet would be immune to these normal patterns, even with the gigantic potential number of volunteers. The equally gigantic scale of the edifice overshadowed that, as we can see on Wikipedia, where multiple articles stopped updating as the creators vanished.

Volunteers don’t need reimbursement outside of appreciation. Everyone else does. Advertising supported much of media - newspapers, magazines, television. Whatever people paid was profit; advertising covered all the normal expenses and more. Advertisers have no sentiment. They go where the audience is. That’s not news sites. Compared to TikTok, Facebook, X, and the others, their audience is pitifully small and inconstant. All this was understood a decade or two ago. Nobody has figured out an answer. Substack is not it.

When radio became a thing in the 1920s, pundits proclaimed it would be the greatest disseminator of information and good culture ever invented. Advertising took over within a blink of the eye. When television became a thing in the 1940s, pundits proclaimed it would be the greatest disseminator of information and good culture ever invented. Advertising took over within a blink of the eye. When the internet became a thing in the 1990s, pundits proclaimed it would be the greatest disseminator of information and good culture ever invented. Advertising took over within a blink of the eye.

Amazingly, the internet is still the ultimate source of information about absolutely everything, although gigantic holes of no information exist everywhere. Being a million times better than any past medium apparently is no longer impressive. True, it is simultaneously a million times better at dis- and misinformation than any past medium, which is no doubt a downside. Yet the latter is due to how powerful and all-encompassing the internet continues to be.

I’m making the distinction between what the internet is and what some of us wanted the internet to be, and thought it might become. That the internet grew past that small niche was inevitable if one looks at the history of all other media. The internet is not dead; I use it everyday and I’m utterly reliant on the offerings available at a keystroke. The criticism here is parallel to my criticism of the ending of the movie Her. A computer superintelligence connecting all other superintelligences wouldn’t need to abandon any part of it. It could supply personas with a infinitesimal fraction of its output, just as our dumb computers display the time on the screen.

We’re the time display of the internet, an infinitesimal fraction of users with outsized expectations and demands. We are old and outmoded. I’d tell kids to get off my lawn, but I haven’t seen a kid playing on the street for ages. They’re inside doing stuff with the screens that I don’t know and probably couldn’t comprehend.

12

Even laws with good intentions can have very negative effects on the type of forum Straight Dope is an example of:

Its owner said they were unable to comply with the lengthy requirements of the Act, which created a “disproportionately high personal liability.” The new laws, which were designed to crack down on illegal content and protect children, threaten fines of at least $23 million for sites that fail to comply with the laws. On Monday, Ofcom set out more than 40 measures that it expects online services to follow by March, such as carrying out risk assessments about their sites and naming senior people accountable for ensuring safety.

13

That looks so familiar, from historical examples of onerous regulations crafted and lobbied by big corporations to get the small entrepreneurs to throw up their hand and sell out.

14

Thanks for the replies, everyone, I’ll be responding.

Content, medium, ecosystem, infrastructure, incentive systems, etc. Although, the “dead internet theory” seems to be mostly about content.

By the way, my thought is not that “everything sucks now,” but I do think that the internet has failed to fulfill its original promise and, even in terms of what hopes corporate media had for it, it is way down from its circa 2015 peak.

I would note also that the “killer apps” possible on the internet seem to have been discovered, and the creation of new business models and monetization strategies seem to have stagnated. It’s rather similar to how killer apps for PCs–words processing, spreadsheets, video games, internet access–had been developed by 2000, and new ones failed to appear.

Yes, some of these things will be around forever and mesh well with individual and corporate incentive systems. Shopping and finances are great examples of this. At the same time, these are more efficient updates of previous systems and not something that the internet itself engendered.

What are the killer apps for the internet? Email, shopping, functional commerce (bill pay, banking, etc.), meetings, video streaming (in various formats, including TikTok), corporate and personal expression (blogging, corporate and personal websites, etc.), and social media. I’m probably missing something. I guess AI delivery could be considered an app–or is it just an upgrade to existing apps? I’m not a theorist, but I haven’t seen theorists talk a lot about this, so I’m trying here.

(Lol, I missed something big, maybe the biggest thing of all, and I’m going back and putting it in here: porn porn porn porn porn porn porn porn…)

Now, it’s all a lot, but the trouble that Big Tech is facing is a lack of new territory to conquer. Is the “metaverse” going to work out for Meta? I don’t think so. The best pitch Zuck could come up with is that you can have cool business meetings with your own neato avatar? The launch was so lacking in vision that it became a laughingstock, to the extent that it registered with the masses at all.

AI is another “next big thing,” but its development is staggeringly expensive to the major players, and again, that great bugbear of the internet, monetization, is rearing its ugly head.

As plastic and fungible as the internet is–you can create anything, right?–not a whole lot new has been created since 2010, while once major “killer apps,” such as blogging, have become moribund. TikTok has been the big thing. I don’t think that’s anything majorly new, just a different version of what YouTube does. I personally haven’t gotten into short-form video, and I don’t watch that many “shorts” on YouTube, either.

15

Yeah, and the sad thing is that Reddit is more or less all that’s left if you desire to read a discussion on an individual topic. There’s the Dope, which is not a major internet entity, and there are individual forums, blogs, and bits and bobs, but nothing really big. I’m thankful for Wikipedia, but it is not a medium for discussion.

YouTube is a such a disaster these days. It’s like the Leaning Tower of Pisa without the Italian government propping it up. You can see it teetering and crashing in real time.

And with respect to both of your comments, yes, AI is going to gunk up the works like nobody’s business and give birth to a million new scams. It already is.

16

I didin’t know about this specific thing, but of course, there are now infinite complains about Google and Enshittification - Wikipedia.

Yes, it was around 2010 that YouTube made this big push to put its own money into helping individuals and consortia develop new channels, an endeavor that soon died with a whimper.

It does, but the even sadder thing is that even big corporations struggle mightily to monetize their business models. A lot of stuff just hasn’t worked out.

17

By the way, in terms of things not working out, a lot of that is not because the internet has failed but rather because the particular business model was never viable or because our economic system itself or some aspect of it has failed.

The whole issue of advertising is a case in point, which was intelligently explored by Exapno_Mapcase above.

The main issue with advertising is that it was always tacked onto and usually unrelated to the product itself. In the era of print, especially when there was a low supply of and high demand for information, this usually wasn’t a problem. You read the newspaper, the advertising was not too visually intrusive, and you may even have wanted the ads to know about the sale at the supermarket, etc. Sometimes it could be quite synergistic: if you were reading a fashion magazine, the ads for fashion were positively desired.

In the era of radio and TV, the breakdown was apparent, since the ads interfered with the enjoyment of the product itself and were rarely related. If you were a kid watching a TV show in the 1970s, as I was, the endless “don’t squeeze the Charmin” bullshit ads were anything but welcome. Nevertheless, the medium of TV at least had a valuable resource to sell, eyeballs on the screen, and it monetized very neatly. (As for radio, David Ogilvy himself in his book Ogilvy on Advertising: Ogilvy, David: 9780394729039: Amazon.com: Books said that its effectiveness in advertising was unknown.)

Finally, when we get to the internet, advertising instantly achieved true dogshit status. This article is from ten years ago but has stuck with me:

Online, advertising is, as with other media, arbitrarily connected to the product and intolerable to the user but now even fails to monetize most business models. It probably also fails to provide a return to most of the individuals and corporations that purchase it, though I’m no expert on that.

So, advertising sucks, but the impressively pathetic thing is that, thirty years on and with millions of brilliant minds at work on the problem, we have still failed to create very many workable new monetization strategies for online business models.

If you can charge for the product itself, that’s great. I pay $120.00 a year for Chess.com (website and app), and it’s totally worth it. I finally subscribed to dailykos.com. I of course buy tons of actual stuff online from Amazon and other online retailers. I pay for Amazon Prime. I pay Apple for cloud storage. But that’s about it. I am pretty resistant to paying for streaming services and subscriptions, and I just don’t do Patreon, Buy Me a Coffee, or any of that crap. And I guess people are mostly like me, since it seems pretty hard to make money online unless you’re Google or Facebook or are selling physical products. Meanwhile, a lot of these companies are losing billions of dollars a year, either as entire companies (Open AI, etc.) or specific divisions within them (the metaverse thingie in Meta). But hey, at least Uber is profitable now.

18

Yes. Another example: I got a couple of relationships out of Craigslist personals, but their response to the new human trafficking law was just to shut all of that down. Like many things online, once that was gone, it had no replacement.

19

Plus, maintaining online cultures is difficult, and the editing culture at Wikipedia is famously, well, dickish. Almost all male (the culture and individual behaviors chased away most of the women a long time ago) and mostly dicks. I used to edit typos and stuff on the site, but I gave that up a decade ago. I still appreciate the information, however.

Totally not. And no, I’m not going to sign up for a Medium account to read this article I’m not being allowed to view–stop asking!

It’s a million times more powerful, but whether that power is usable or actually used is a different issue. I’ll note again the case of IMDb deleting all of their forums for each individual movie and cast member. The power was there and being used, but then it ceased to be used–probably because it didn’t make money and was a pain to moderate and maintain. It was incredibly useful and interesting, however. Now it is gone and probably nothing like it will ever be created again.

Another case: Every song ever made should be online and available to listen to, right? Why not? And we had Napster and Limewire, which were incredibly inefficient delivery systems that also ran afoul of the world’s maze of copyright laws. But now we have streaming! Oh yes, I forgot, I gladly pay for Spotify. And Spotify is great. I am impressed with the obscure stuff that is on there. But oops–big oops–Spotify is failing to monetize like so much else. So how long will it be around? How long will all the corporate entities cooperate with it?

So yeah, the internet is big, but it should be so much bigger than it is, and it has already seemed to shrink from what it once was.

Well… my kid is 19 and idolizes the early 2000s internet. They have a CRT monitor on their desk from 2006 and use it actively. And yes, they are super smart (dad brag) and do all kinds of coding and have a ton of online friends gatherred through things like Discord, and it’s all very complex and involves a ton of stuff that I don’t know or care to know, as well as some things I need to know and will learn eventually.

The thing is, it’s all fragmented among young people too. My kid knows one subset of online reality that probably most kids don’t, and vice versa. And old little me knows a bunch of things that they don’t know (e.g., they don’t know the basics of online banking).

20

There’s a great example of how the Internet isn’t completely dead yet. Fran’s channel is delightful and original.
I think whether you consider the Internet dead or not might depend a whole lot on where you hang out most. Some platforms seem to exist for the primary purpose of stripping creative content from its original creative context, just for clicks, but if it’s anyone’s complaint that the whole Internet is just that, they’re doing it to themselves.