The Internet is not dead - Kevin Woblick's Blog
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https://blog.woblick.dev/en/2026/the-internet-is-not-dead/<br>After all those years, the internet is still alive and kicking, even though many think it's already dead.
Kevin Woblick
In the past years, more and more people wrote that the internet is basically dead and just an empty shell of its former self.
I do not believe this.
A History of Change
I was born into the emergence of the web as a mainstream medium and vividly remember watching my dad putting together a recipe website with HTML tables, inline styles, and tiny pictures. Then came the Web 2.0 with all those forums, the first social networks. For me, it was the golden era of the internet because everything felt free and without boundaries. Meanwhile, the first dark corners evolved: the first SEO-optimized corporate blogs popped up, spam became a real issue, and sites like Rotten published horrible content that should not have been freely available at all. One could argue that the internet was already dying at this time. Yet it didn’t.
Fast-forward a few years to the early 2010s. Facebook and YouTube took over the net. Twitter became the de-facto standard to rant about politics, while you shared photos of your mediocre pizza on Instagram. It was this time when politics should have stopped the platforms to tailor their algorithms towards hate speech, sexism, anger, and racism. This shaped our society to be glued to their displays, always chasing the next dopamine rush, and thus allowing a few big corporations to take control over the whole internet.<br>People seemingly stopped making their own websites, because every Facebook/Twitter/[insert random social media site] now came with a ready-made profile, accessible by anyone on the internet (as long as the person is also part of that social media site). Many small communities, mostly organized in forums, died, while people were rushing to re-create their hobby groups on Facebook.<br>I remember when people proclaimed that now the internet is really dead. Yet it didn’t die.
And today, we are steering towards a truly dystopian future. AI has taken over the internet, there is less content produced by hand than auto-generated slop. People are sending AI bullshit pictures via WhatsApp and talking to ChatGPT like it’s their dearest family member. Bots are swarming the social media sites to like your latest rant (or hooray) about Trump bombing Iran.<br>Very few people, sitting at the top of very few companies, became filthy rich and now dictate everything that happens on the internet.<br>It seems that almost all internet usage has moved off of laptops onto small black glass-aluminum bricks we carry around all day, anxious that the battery could run out. Doom scrolling is the new way of spending your precious free time.<br>And again, people throw up their arms in shock and scream that now the internet, after all those wonderful years, is finally dead and we should give up.
Bullshit.
There’s always Light
Humanity seems to have this weird little trait: while one half of it is actively working to destroy all humans, there’s the other half that smiles and optimistically looks into the future. Statistics say that we are living in better times than anyone ever before us. And that’s probably true. It’s like taking care of your beautiful, colorful, and cherished garden while there’s war right on the other side of your fence.<br>Speaking of gardens: there’s this small community, and you could also call it a trend to cultivate your own digital garden. Exactly like described: take care of your very own and personal website, while the internet is seemingly rotting away all around you. That’s not an ideal situation, but a good sign that there are still people who want to make their own part of the internet, just for themselves.
As the creator of Cloudhiker, I reviewed more than 40 thousand websites of all kinds in the past years. And while there’s indeed a lot of shit out there, I found so many genuinely awesome websites that all paint a completely different picture of the internet than the mainstream media does.<br>There are countless small communities, pretty much alive and kicking. The Indie Web consists of an uncountable number of personal websites, all sharing the idea of creating a space outside all the walled gardens. And making your own website is easier than ever before! (I would like to highlight Neocities here.) Web Rings, blog directories, curated RSS feeds. It’s all still there! I could go on with sharing links, maybe I’ll put together another article just for that.
So, people still seem to be interested in what the core of the internet is: sharing information and connecting with each other . After all those years, people still make websites about themselves, their work, their pets, their book clubs, their garage band,...