The internet used to be weird because of humans

Maybe it's nostalgia but I miss the earlier days of the internet. The time when everything wasn't a walled garden. Communities were smaller and fragmented. Content wasn't an optimization game or AI slop. You knew you were talking to a person. It was a fun, wild time between forums and flash games.

We've already entered the next stage of the internet. No one knows what's AI generated or not, or if they're talking to a bot or a human. I was talking with a friend recently who appreciates reading Reddit comments pre-2024 because every more recent comment reads like something out of a LLM.

There's more here on the experiments I'm running to take back some form of control. It's harder than I thought. Convenience has won. But life is a lot more than just the convenient thing.