weblog

Published on Saturday, 2025-11-15

It appears that everyone recently discovered The Dead internet theory and agreed that it’s now a fact. Slop takes over, there is nothing valuable left on the internet.

If you don’t care enough to click the above link: the theory states that the internet was taken over by bots and generated content. That’s sprinkled by conspiracy theory worthy of Agent Mulder, but that part is often ignored. Instead, the basic idea is taken and slop is added. And this is, partially, true: slop is produced en masse, and it’s really difficult to find distinct voices on the information superhighway. One might say that we are drowning in it...

... but that’s not true! Yes, the mainstream internet is completely useless. Google is useless, Facebook is useless, Twttr is useless, your favourite news organization’s website is useless. This is a fact, and I cannot disagree. But they have always been. Those sites were always slop - just not artificially generated. Well, maybe not Google because a long time ago, it was a great search engine.

The internet, however, was never about them. Those places belonged to Kardashians (if anyone remembers them) or other Jake Pauls. When a site became big enough, it was already useless. And when they gave voices to people who are so devoid of any interesting characterises, they were long removed from what made the web special.

The web’s beating hard, on the other hand, is still alive. Personal websites, IRC channels, Mastodon - those are where the spirit lives. Sure, forums may have become extinct (screw you, discord), but that’s a different subject. But to say that, just because slop overtook one part of the web, the entire internet is dead is a huge overstatement. There are blogs which are over 20 year old and there are quite new ones. Recently, I’ve discovered that there is a huge web of small personal sites made by people from the LGBT community - and they are spectacular.

In 2025, the surface level of the web may be rotten, but beneath it a vibrant community exists. I have no idea if it’s bigger than it ever was, but this may very well be the case. I know for sure that I will not find all the interesting sites on HTTP, and there’s even more hiding in Gemini space or Gopher. One just needs to know that they exist - and this is difficult.

But, again: it always was. Finding stuff on the web was always a huge pain in the butt. You had a few sites you knew and frequent, but your best friend could have had an entirely different set. And this is a great thing! If all of the web was at arms reach, it would homogenize and became yet another twttr - full of words which mean nothing, written by people who have nothing to say. Insted we have no center, just galaxies of interesting people geeking in their own unique way. I love it this way.