I lost my love for the web

Its actually simple math and sociology to explain how we got to 2022.

https://www.futuretimeline.net/data-trends/10.htm

Similar to the blog post, i enjoyed the Internet on its transition from acedemia to the general population. Everyone was smart, information was new and exciting and innovation was around every corner.

We have to look at smartphones and what transitions took place in the ecosystem around 2007/2008 that caused a spike in population and in inferior quality data and deformed emotions.

Internet hardware up to 2007 was resilient and durable. Smartphones never received updates and were disposible soon after purchase.

We saw the evolution from 3G (wap browsing was popular) to 4G (new LTE bands were added on that rollout, which obsoleted the inventory of phones at a rapid pace). If you wanted signal for dialtone, you upgraded phones.

Skipping the minutia, all of the surplus 3G and 4G equipment went to developing countries, so now, there are million of out-of-date (security compromised) devices (android, IOS minicomputers) that make a polluted ecosystem that did not exist prior.

Further speculation says the cost of entry to the Internet was probably a little higher prior to smartphones. Though, browsing on a personal computer could be done on 486 computers that upgraded operating system for years/decades. Mobile devices never had that luxury. They were landfill trash by design. No OS updates, OS upgrades or hardware upgrades. Desktop computers all had those luxuries.

Petabytes of inferior quality data were not the ecosystem or etiquette prior to disposible devices. We also did not see (1) terabyte storage devices until 2007 either, so cloud storage was gigs and gigs of harddrive space (which is now a security faux pas).

It wasn't perfect prior to 2007, but top-level domains in the original design of the Internet made .coms, .orgs, .nets, .govs, etc distinguishable, much like sections of a library. Now every top-level domain is just a generic .com with ads and commerce (ambiguity at its finest).

Read-up on network architecture and its easy to see that "low-population networks" are possible post-2020, easier than ever (dedicated satellite networks, petabyte array MESH networks, Software defined network infrastructures with unlit fiber, etc).

I did SEO starting around 2010 and laughed at how 3rd world relevance (a billion illiterates) manipulated search engines in ways the 1st world just wouldn't make time for, so I skipped the decade that burned the author out. I was aware of the irrelevance and insignificant cultures that still maintain their irrelevance in 2022.

I still read about a million words per week, but have the insight to skip tabloid data, never drowned in social media and have no use for inferior emotions (plus really good adblockers and a shortlist of websites that still contain 0% inferior emotions, just like the information superhighway that author eluded to).

The sections in the library are just much smaller nowadays :)