I Miss When the Internet Was Fun

Do you remember Hamster Dance?

An entire website dedicated to animated hamsters dancing to a ridiculous little tune. That was it. That was the website.

And people loved it.

I was thinking about it recently because I’ve been building myself a personal website. I’ve deliberately made it look a bit like something you’d have found on GeoCities in 1999, complete with some questionable design choices.

I know what year it is. I’ve been building websites for over twenty years. It’s supposed to look like that.

But it got me thinking about how much I miss the old internet.

Not necessarily the technology. I don’t particularly miss dial-up connections, Internet Explorer or waiting twenty minutes for something to download.

I miss when the internet was fun.

When the internet was somewhere you explored

I used to spend hours just looking around the internet.

You’d find a website, follow a link to another one, end up on somebody’s personal blog and somehow lose an entire evening reading about something you hadn’t previously been interested in.

There were forums for everything.

I spent an extraordinary amount of time on Sheffield Wednesday forums. People would write enormous posts about football, other people would reply, and conversations could carry on for days.

Sometimes they were interesting. Sometimes they were complete rubbish.

But that was part of it.

People had their own websites too. Some were beautifully designed. Most weren’t.

You’d find flashing GIFs, visitor counters, terrible colour combinations and pages dedicated to the most obscure interests imaginable.

Nobody seemed particularly bothered about whether there was a commercial reason for any of it.

Someone wanted a website about dancing hamsters, so they made one.

Fair enough.

Twitter was genuinely brilliant once

I think the period I miss most was Twitter around 2010 to 2013.

And I know that sounds ridiculous given what Twitter eventually became, but it really was a lovely place.

You followed people because you were interested in what they had to say.

And, broadly speaking, those were the people you saw.

There was Follow Friday, where people would recommend interesting accounts to each other. There were Twitter meetups. You’d discover someone funny, start chatting, and gradually get to know them.

I made friends through Twitter who are still my friends today.

Actual friends.

People I go to gigs with fifteen years later.

That’s quite something when you think about it.

And I don’t think I’d have the same experience starting from scratch on today’s social media.

Not because people have stopped making friends online. I’m sure they haven’t.

But because the whole experience feels different.

I used to write something on Twitter knowing that perhaps three particular people would find it funny.

I wasn’t thinking about reach or impressions.

I just thought those three people would like it.

And sometimes they’d reply, and we’d have a laugh.

That was enough.

Somewhere along the way, it changed

I don’t think there was one single moment when the internet stopped being enjoyable.

It happened gradually.

Personal websites gave way to social platforms. Forums became less central to how people spent their time online. Everything started looking and behaving much the same.

Then the algorithms became increasingly important.

Now, algorithms aren’t inherently bad. They’ve helped me discover plenty of interesting things.

But there’s a difference between a website recommending something you might enjoy and a platform deciding almost everything you’re going to see.

You used to follow people and see what they posted.

Now you follow people, and the platform shows you whatever it thinks will keep you there.

And apparently what keeps us there is being annoyed.

Twitter’s transformation after Elon Musk took over was particularly depressing for me. I know algorithmic timelines existed before that, but the experience changed enormously from the Twitter I remembered.

The people I’d chosen to follow became less central to what I was seeing.

Instead, there seemed to be an endless supply of strangers arguing about things.

And that’s largely what social media feels like now.

I’m part of the problem

It’s easy to complain about everyone being angry online.

But I’m guilty of it too.

I’ll see somebody say something ridiculous, feel compelled to reply, and suddenly I’m involved in an argument I didn’t particularly want to have.

Sometimes I’m trying to make a reasonable point.

Sometimes, if I’m being fair, I’m just trying to score one.

And I don’t think that’s entirely accidental.

These platforms are designed to keep us engaged. Outrage, disagreement and controversy are particularly effective at getting people to respond.

So that’s what we get more of.

The world feels gloomy enough without opening an app and immediately being presented with another hundred reasons to be angry.

I don’t remember going online feeling quite so depressing.

Perhaps that’s partly nostalgia. Perhaps I’ve changed too.

But I do think something about the experience has fundamentally shifted.

Are we even talking to people anymore?

And then there’s the bots.

I genuinely don’t know how often I’m talking to an actual human being on social media anymore.

There are obviously real people there. But there are also automated accounts, AI-generated posts, engagement farms and people deliberately manufacturing arguments.

Sometimes you can spot them a mile off.

Other times, you’ve got absolutely no idea.

And even when you are talking to a real person, the interaction can feel strangely artificial.

Everyone seems to be performing for an audience, trying to win an argument or attract attention.

Including me, occasionally.

I find that quite sad.

Because the thing I remember most fondly about the internet isn’t a particular website or piece of technology.

It’s the people.

I met people online who became lifelong friends.

And now I can spend an evening online without being entirely sure whether I’ve had a meaningful conversation with another human being.

That’s a pretty strange development.

I don’t think we’re getting it back

I don’t think we can recreate the old internet.

The world has changed. Technology has changed. The way people use the internet has changed.

And plenty of those changes have been for the better.

I certainly wouldn’t want to go back to the connection speeds.

But I miss the sense of discovery.

I miss finding something strange and wonderful that somebody made just because they fancied making it.

I miss reading people’s thoughts properly, rather than scrolling through a hundred short posts designed to get a reaction.

And I miss being able to follow people simply because I liked them, without an algorithm deciding that what I really needed was another argument.

Which brings me back to this website.

I’m not trying to bring back the old internet. One bloke with a deliberately ridiculous GeoCities-style homepage isn’t going to achieve that.

I just wanted somewhere to write things down.

Somewhere I can have a thought, explore it, put it on a page and hopefully stop thinking about it.

Maybe somebody will read it.

Maybe they’ll disagree.

Maybe three people will like it.

That’ll do.