The Death of the Internet

I realise there has been a lot of death in recent posts, and this almost seems repetitive of the very last one, but it seems necessary.

I don't know if anyone else has noticed this, but the internet seems to have become a stagnant hole. While it can be a good resource for some things, what made the internet revolutionary has been lost.

To begin, we first must define what made the internet revolutionary. In the beginning, the internet was a place where anyone with a modem could get hosted and publish a page that represented them. This page would be, in many ways, an image of that individual unique person. In some cases, it was an image of a group of people who thought along similar lines. Because of the uniqueness of each group and individual, each page was very unique.

And it was good.

Obviously, web design was not exactly at the level it is today. A lot of things now considered (and properly so) in very bad taste were common. But even as 3d rotating gifs and repeating backgrounds were common, any coherent webpage could be found and visited.

Not all webpages were equal, but anyone could make a webpage and be found in search engines, grow and become something better.

Even I, at fourteenish, had a unique webpage of my own. Mine was a page dedicated to Final Fantasy's load carrying ostrich, the Chocobo. While mine wasn't the only page to feature such creatures, it was very different from what else lay in the vastness of the web.

Yet now as I search the internet, the first five pages may all be large websites posting the same exact content as the next one. Whether this be concerning video games, shopping or just in terms of a research topic. My frustration with today's internet grows daily.

Buried beneath what was once the prime way of finding websites lie treasures that I have managed to dig up. Fansites that continue the tradition of unique and useful content that differs from the rest of the world, unique pages with purposes that transcend the mundane and more.

Finding them is beyond a chore, it is practically a Herculean quest. Sometimes something even I can not accomplish. In the same way small chain stores are gobbled up, so have internet stores succumbed. Where once one could find an obscure store in Maine selling a few last items of a product no longer made, now you find a million "different" sites that all link to Amazon. I don't mind that Amazon exists, I like Amazon, except that it has subjugated all of small internet retail into its fold.

This is the death of the internet.

I can only hope that there remains innovation somewhere, much like the bastions of innovation in video games that I have given laud.