The feeling is hard to shake. You search for a specific recipe, a niche tech fix, or a piece of local history, and instead of a forum post from a real human, you get a wall of AI-generated sludge. It feels thin. Hollow. It makes you wonder: did we just lose the vibrant, messy, and human internet that defined the last twenty years?
Honestly, the shift happened while we were looking at our phones. It wasn't one single event like the death of a platform or a specific law passing in 2026. It was a slow erosion. We’ve entered an era where the "Dead Internet Theory"—the idea that most online activity is just bots talking to bots—isn't just a creepy creepypasta anymore. It’s starting to look like a business model.
The Algorithmic Rot and the Loss of Discovery
Think about how you used to find things. You'd go to a subreddit, a specialized blog like Daring Fireball, or maybe a weird GeoCities-style hobbyist site. Now, the gatekeepers have changed the locks. Google's Search Generative Experience (SGE) and other AI overviews mean you might never even click through to a website. Why would you? The "answer" is right there, scraped and summarized, often without giving the original creator a cent or a single hit of traffic.
This creates a death spiral. If creators can't get traffic, they stop creating. If they stop creating, the AI has nothing new to train on.
We're seeing the "Enshittification" of platforms, a term coined by writer Cory Doctorow. He describes a cycle where platforms are first good to users, then they abuse users to make things better for advertisers, and finally, they abuse everyone to claw back value for shareholders. It feels like we are in the final stage of that cycle for most of the major apps we use every day.
Did We Just Lose the Commons?
The "digital commons" used to be a place where information was shared somewhat freely. But today, the walls are higher than ever. Twitter (X) locked down its API, making it nearly impossible for researchers to study social trends. Reddit did the same, sparking massive blackouts in 2023 that ultimately didn't stop the IPO or the data-selling deals with Google.
We've lost the ability to archive our own history.
When a service like MySpace wiped years of music uploads, or when Sony recently threatened to delete Discovery content users had actually purchased, it highlighted a terrifying reality: you don't own anything. Not your movies, not your music, and certainly not your digital legacy.
The Rise of the Dark Forest
Internet theorist Yancey Strickler talks about the "Dark Forest Theory" of the internet. It’s a reference to Liu Cixin's The Three-Body Problem. The idea is that the public internet has become so predatory, noisy, and filled with bots that humans are retreating to "dark forests"—private Discord servers, WhatsApp groups, Telegram channels, and gated newsletters.
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People are hiding.
They’re tired of being "engagement-farmed." You’ve probably felt this yourself. You post something on a public feed, and instead of a friend replying, you get three bots trying to sell you crypto or "re-invest" in your account. It's exhausting. So, we move to the group chat. While that's great for privacy, it means the public-facing internet becomes even more dominated by low-quality, automated content.
The Search for What’s Real
The question of whether did we just lose the real internet often comes down to authenticity. In 2024 and 2025, the explosion of generative AI meant that the cost of producing "content" dropped to near zero.
If it costs nothing to produce a 2,000-word article, the internet gets flooded with 2,000-word articles that say absolutely nothing. You've seen them. They have headers like "Understanding the Importance of [Topic]" and "In the Modern Landscape of [Topic]." They are the digital equivalent of beige wallpaper.
This has led to a desperate search for "human signals." It’s why people append "reddit" to every Google search. They are looking for a person who actually held the product, visited the restaurant, or fixed the sink. We are currently in a "Verification Crisis." If a video can be faked, a voice can be cloned, and text can be hallucinated, what is left to trust?
The Consolidation Problem
The internet used to be decentralized.
Now, five or six companies control the vast majority of the pipes. When Amazon Web Services (AWS) has an outage, half the internet disappears. When Google tweaks an algorithm, entire industries go bankrupt overnight. This fragility is a far cry from the "distributed network" that was supposed to survive a nuclear war.
We’ve traded resilience for convenience.
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What Actually Remains?
It isn't all gloom. We haven't lost the infrastructure of the internet, but the culture has shifted permanently. The "Early Web" of 1995-2005 was about exploration. The "Social Web" of 2005-2015 was about connection. The "Algorithmic Web" we are in now is about extraction.
But because humans are inherently social, we are finding new ways to build. The Fediverse (platforms like Mastodon and BlueSky) represents an attempt to go back to a decentralized model. They aren't perfect. They're often confusing to the average person. But they represent a refusal to let the old internet die without a fight.
The niche is the new mainstream. If you want quality, you have to go deep. General-interest sites are struggling because they can't compete with AI at scale. But a person who knows everything there is to know about 19th-century Japanese woodworking? They still have a community. Their value hasn't diminished; it has actually increased because they are one of the few things an LLM can't convincingly fake—real, lived experience.
Why the Loss Feels Personal
For many, the internet wasn't just a tool; it was where they grew up. It was where they found their people when their physical surroundings were lonely or hostile. Losing that sense of "place" to a sea of advertising and AI garbage feels like a personal bereavement. It’s the loss of a digital third place.
How to Navigate the "Lost" Internet
If we have indeed lost the "open" web, we have to change how we interact with what’s left. You can't just passively consume the feed anymore. If you do, you're just feeding the machine.
- Support the "Small Web": Bookmark actual websites. Use an RSS reader like Feedly or NetNewsWire. Don't rely on an algorithm to tell you what's new.
- Pay for Quality: If you value a journalist, a podcaster, or a researcher, pay for their work. Substack and Patreon have their flaws, but they are direct links between creators and audiences that bypass the "ad-tech" hellscape.
- Use Better Search Tools: Try tools like Kagi (a paid, ad-free search engine) or Perplexity (which, while AI-based, cites sources more transparently). Stop clicking on the first three sponsored links on Google.
- Be a Human Online: Post your own photos. Write your own thoughts, even if they're messy. Use your real voice. The more "perfect" and "optimized" we try to be, the more we look like the bots we're trying to avoid.
- Verify by Default: Assume that any sensational video or out-of-character quote might be synthetic. Check multiple sources. Look for the "fingerprints" of AI—weird hands in photos, repetitive phrasing in text, or a lack of specific, verifiable details.
We might have lost the internet of 2010, but the internet of the future is still being coded. It just requires more intentionality. We have to move from being "users" to being "participants" again. The era of free, high-quality, easily accessible information might be closing, replaced by a world where you have to hunt for what’s real. It’s more work, but the "real" stuff is still out there, hidden in the corners of the dark forest.