Web 1.0

How many of you have stopped to look at what has been going on with the internet since the alleged improvements provided by HTML-5 and modern browsers? Almost all of it has been an effort by a very small number of big tech corporations to round-up internet traffic and keep people stuck in their "tech ghettos" like facebook, instagram, google, etc. I bet a lot of people don't even remember how things used to be back in the late 90s to early 2000s - where the web was really just a collection of unique and independently-run websites. We had simplistic search engines like webcrawler, and directories like yahoo and dmoz...yet people were able to find what they wanted because these websites would often link to each other.

If there was a group effort to refuse the "new" that is being shoved onto everyone, and people stopped trying to play a game they cannot win by catering to the whims of tech companies hoping for better ranking or getting noticed, there could be a resurgence in grassroots websites. There are simple things anyone can do, and it largely revolves around NOT using the "free services" the tech corporations use to bait you into their snare. Do these things really benefit you anyway or do you just think they do? Because I speak from personal experience: you do not need any third-party services to be successful.

I really miss the internet of the early 2000s, especially all those wild Geocities websites made by hobbyists. Centralizing information into a few platforms has definitely degraded the quality of content, users have sacrificed quality for scale.
There has also been a demographic shift - - the internet 20 years back was a lot nerdier and niche. Nowadays, everyone's on the internet, voicing their opinions whether they're qualified or not, and social media has also ensured that only populist content gets enough eyeballs. The inevitable result is that all content is clickbait now.

I don't want to complain too much, after all, we're marketers and we have to adapt to emergent trends, not complain about them. But yeah, I sometimes can't help getting a lil nostalgic about the 'wild west' internet of the early 2000s.