There's an article in The New Yorker titled "Why The Internet Isn't Fun Anymore" by Kyle Chayka that is well worth reading. While Kyle focuses a lot on the decline of Twitter under Elon Musk as it has continued to evolve (or devolve depending on who you ask) into X; he touches on much wider trends across the modern web that have led to the internet becoming "not fun."

The gist of the article is captured in the paragraph from the article below:

"Posting on social media might be a less casual act these days, as well, because we’ve seen the ramifications of blurring the border between physical and digital lives. Instagram ushered in the age of self-commodification online—it was the platform of the selfie—but TikTok and Twitch have turbocharged it. Selfies are no longer enough; video-based platforms showcase your body, your speech and mannerisms, and the room you’re in, perhaps even in real time. Everyone is forced to perform the role of an influencer. The barrier to entry is higher and the pressure to conform stronger. It’s no surprise, in this environment, that fewer people take the risk of posting and more settle into roles as passive consumers."

To his credit, Kyle Chayka also notes that the rise of TikTok has led to its millions of users being subjected to Chinese political censorship. Mike Pence and others have focused so much on the Chinese government's data collection on TikTok users, but being on that platform also means you're looking at the web through the lens of the Chinese Communist Party's red tinted glasses.

However, I disagree with Kyle Chayka's basic premise that the casual net was fun. In fact, he unintentionally disproves this when lamenting the old internet:

"Remember having fun online? It meant stumbling onto a Web site you’d never imagined existed, receiving a meme you hadn’t already seen regurgitated a dozen times, and maybe even playing a little video game in your browser. These experiences don’t seem as readily available now as they were a decade ago. In large part, this is because a handful of giant social networks have taken over the open space of the Internet, centralizing and homogenizing our experiences through their own opaque and shifting content-sorting systems."

I couldn't agree more with Kyle Chayka here! Yet, what I think he misses is that having a totally random website takes a lot of work and creativity! Creating a new meme that hasn't been recycled takes a lot less work but still a lot of creativity. Creating a video game to play in a browser takes a ton of creativity and a ton of hard work. Social media killed that by making content creation super easy and hyper casual with virtually no effort and extremely limited creativity. Was it really fun seeing what people ate for dinner, their kid's school pictures, or someone's 20 word rant about how much they hate their job? No! That's why users have gravitated towards influencers who go through extraordinary means of putting on tons of makeup, working out excessively, cleaning fanatically, and paying professionals to edit their videos so they can put higher quality content out there than everyone else.

Is their content fun? Sometimes, yeah!

Does their content make the platform fun? Usually not.

These content creators, who are few and far in between, use the platforms as tools rather than letting the platforms use them. One of my favorite content creators is Vertiigo Gaming. I don't really play video games and I don't watch video game streamers because it seems really dumb to me. When I do watch Twitch, it's usually something on the Art channel so I can see someone create something awesome. However, Vertiigo is the exception because he puts a tremendous amount of effort into his streams, his story telling, and his content. He hires artists to create content, he hires musicians to compose custom music for his streams, he hires editors to create video clips and trailers. He's not just on Twitch, he USES Twitch!

The internet is fun wherever you can find truly creative people creating content!

If you want to enjoy a fun internet, you can't limit yourself to viewing content on only a handful of platforms! You've got to look for it across platforms, including and especially on independent websites. The latter isn't easy and we who run independent websites deserve some of the blame for not helping our users find the awesome content we ourselves enjoy. Finding fun content independent of social media platforms shouldn't be as difficult as it is.

I'll write more about that later, but the point of all of this is to say that the Internet is still fun. You just can't find it on the top results in Google searches or scrolling mindlessly through your social media feed of memes and 20 second videos. You've got to go looking for it... sort of how you did back in the Web 1.0 days.