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It feels like everyday there is a new video or post all about how the internet felt so personal once, before big tech corporations arrived and destroyed it all by standardizing everything and removing your freedom to customize your own page. And while I do agree with that sentiment, I do also believe that by doing nothing and basing everything on nostalgia, we are leading the movement of "reclaiming the internet" to failure.
'The internet used to be fun! You'd go on a site and see fun things! Every site was unique in its own way! Now everything is flat and looks the same!'
'You used to be able to fully customize your profile on social media! You had full control over everything!'
All statements I agree with. The web feels a lot more soulless now than it did years ago.
But I do also believe a lot of people are viewing this through nothing but nostalgia, while doing absolutely nothing to incentivize bringing the old web back.
It often feels like they're stuck in their own time bubble of "how the web should be", and refuse to innovate in any way.
Efforts such as remaking MySpace are great, MySpace used to give you so much freedom on how to make your profile look like, but along with it comes pressure: Pressure to be nostalgic
The pressure that you have to make your profile look like it did in 'ye old times'
And I think mindsets like that are simply poisoning the effort to take back the internet. The idea that anything that is deeply personalizable is simply "old school" will never take it out of that nostalgia goggled "old school" aesthetic, so no real site or social media will ever adapt it because no site or social media wants to appear like they're "yesterday's site". You wouldn't buy food that looks like it has been expired for 5 years.
By this I am not trying to say to no longer make your profiles look old, what I'm trying to say is don't feel pressured to make it look old
It's ok to look new! It's part of your freedom! The freedom we were promised when reclaiming the internet!
If we only stick to making recreations of the past, no one who lives in the present will pick it up.
TL;DR: Bring back the old internet by integrating it with the new internet. Imitating what once was won't help bring it back
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Accurator
The real reason for the perceived death of the internet is overregulation. Everything from hard- to software and everything inbetween in being engineered to funnel the greatest amount of people through marketable pipelines. I guess you could call it "app-ification".
Take phones for instance. The average Chinese burner has now more RAM than entire workstations did ten years ago, yet they are more restrictive than ever. The firmware doesn't allow for any utility beyond what can be packaged into an "app", hence why despite lapcomp level CPUs they can't even approximate desktop functionality. My Lenovo from 2013 runs a faster browser than the newest iPhone 7000 or whatever number they're at. This isn't by accident, it's by design.
Within the confines of their "apps" big data corporations can sanitize the consumer generated content to optimise their product according to "advertiser friendly" standards. Of course these standards are highly arbitrary and dysfunctional. The most successful advertisement campaigns have always been provocative in some manner, so these are really HR standards, which themselves are determined by political demands and the agendas of multinational investment conglomerates such as BlackRock, but that's a tangent. The point is that these are the guidelines and development parameters imposed upon the IT sector, which is why net traffic is so condensed into very few corporate systems, and thus feels "dead".
The increasing prevalence of bots certainly doesn't help. But those too are only being used to satisfy these same investment political demands.