Have you heard of the dead internet theory? The skinny is that the internet has become so filled with things ranging from misinformation, indecipherable garbage, nonsense, ads, bots and just downright JUNK that the internet only appears to be active, but in reality, is more like a zombie. The theory usually goes that the golden days of the internet are over and all that remains is a soulless husk being paraded around by the whim of the [insert evil organization or entity of choice here] for the purpose of [insert nefarious motivations here].
Fortunately (maybe) for us, this is not true. You probably just suck at using the internet.
I mean, there is something to be said about the internet being different, about corporations molding the internet to do their bidding. No doubt. Any trip to a recipe website will confirm this in the 2 minutes it takes to load all 50 ads on the website for the 200 words of content you actually went on the site for. The internet we know today is certainly not like the internet of the 90s or 2000s.
There was a lot of fun and intrigue in those days with everything being so de-centralized. Different topics had individual forums instead of all being holed up on reddit. (Which, I feel like we need to take a step back and say that reddit offers a lot of benefits, being centralized. No more searching 100 forums for one bit of info about some software for 15 years ago, chances are someone already asked about it on reddit. Stuck in specific part of a video game? You got it. Honest (usually not botted) product recommendations? Again, USUALLY, at least... Anyways, we'll just have to see if the company continues to be scummy. (Click here to learn more on why people are fine with centralizing everything. :P)
One of my favorite rebuttals to dead internet theory is YouTube. People take one look at the default front page of YouTube and see all the 100 million views-videos and say "wow, creativity on YouTube is dead!!!"
[Unrelated image...? Click on the image to be spooked - or better yet, go play Metal Gear Solid 2. An actual masterpiece of storytelling.]
The solution to this is to actually SEARCH for content you'd like. The algorithm for video sites is not always going to recommend certified-hidden-gem-bangers. But the suggested videos column next to videos has actually gotten good again in recent years.
Again, to those folks who yearn for the days when we had to scour the internet for different sites and forums we really vibed with... those days haven't gone away. Since I like video games, I've found a TON of video game and tech-related channels that consistently produce high quality, or fascinating, or educational, or entertaining content. Part of this is taking a chance - just because a channel has less than 10,000 subscribers and their videos typically only get 500 views shouldn't be a deterrent for you. If there's a cool video out there, just subscribe if you think there's a chance they'll put out ANYTHING else of interest. Here's some smaller channels I've found that I absolutely love:
Do you get it now??? These are not the kinds of videos or channels YouTube will typically throw out at you, but if you start searching for videos you think you'd like, chances are someone's made a video about it. And if they haven't? You make it. You can see from some of these channels that they are not the flashiest - hell, a lot of them go out of their way to look "low quality." Truly: if you build it, they will come. Seriously!
Another interesting case is a Deltarune theory channel called @HalfBreadChaos that almost exclusively uses text-to-speech for videos (and not LIFELIKE ones, either - they're very much digital), but because we enjoy the content and the writing by itself, it could be text on a screen with images and people will still flock to it if they're interested. (Another bigger channel that has often done this is @Enderman, who uploads oddities of Windows and the like. Really - for the longest time, a lot of their videos were just static images and short videos along with text, and the channel still has 350K subscribers as of writing!!
In addition, especially for something like YouTube, with these subscriptions and tons more, if you subscribe to channels that are even marginally interesting to you, you'll find that you can make your subscriptions tab a high quality experience. I wouldn't OVERLOAD yourself with subscriptions - for instance, I don't subscribe to many people who do daily uploads, because a lot of that, *by design*, will be less *edifying*, let's say.
So yeah, the above listing is a sampling of talented and passionate people who continue to prove a "totally dead internet theory" wrong. Grab an adblocker, look for content you want to see, and on sites like Twitter, go ahead, use that block list - and you'll find there's still some really good stuff online.
But... much like television, 90% or more of it is probably crap. But that 10% is still being made! Just like the old internet, you just have to find it.
tl;dr, check out my Hoarde page for more recommendations and crap
There's more content available today than one person could ever hope to consume in their lifetime. Hopefully you're now better equipped to sift through some of it 👍
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