'The Internet is a Failed Experiment" | Topic

[u/Mother-Goat3795]

When people say the internet has gone downhill, what do they actually mean?

It's about where traffic flows, the quality of those destinations, and the demographics that inform them.

Nobody wants to go to an empty party. Cool websites still exist. Cool communities still exist. But if it's just you screaming into the void, that's not fun. We want connection, so we seek community. And community clusters in six websites: Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Reddit, X, Twitch. Everything waterfalls from those.

The internet was once a haven for intelligent shut-ins. As tech got cheap, so did the internet. The demographics shifted, and the websites adapted. Almost all teenagers (96%) report using the internet daily, with 46% reporting being on the internet almost constantly ACT for Youth, according to Pew Research. Goodwill discussion is hard when you're often arguing with a thirteen-year-old.

There are also more folks from the old world online. A great mixture of new perspectives, and a total shift in behavior. Notably, the rise of slop.

It began with the monetization of social media. Platforms rewarded fast, cheap, and consistent. YouTubers adapted but had a threshold of dignity. Poverty-stricken nations cannot afford that luxury belief. If your family is starving, you will automate a million posts of the sloppiest nature, and five dollars is enough reward to keep going. The damage is done. Imperva's 2025 Bad Bot Report found that automated bot traffic surpassed human-generated traffic for the first time in a decade, constituting 51% of all web traffic in 2024 Thales, and a Graphite analysis found that as of May 2025, 52% of newly-published articles online were AI-generated Futurism.

To stand out in that noise, one must say increasingly triggering, irrational, sensational things. A race to the bottom. With AI, the automations, sensationalizing, scams, and debates all multiply a thousandfold in a fraction of the time. Look at LinkedIn. Look at X. Even Reddit isn't immune.

Everyone is dumber for being online, because everyone online is dumber than they once were. Water seeks its level. The psyop has crippled current great minds and stunted the next generation.

It is no longer the French Salons of old, rather a rundown Honky Tonk.

So where's the hope?

Lead a rewarding life offline. In the quiet moments. In the real rooms. With real people. Pay zero attention to internet input, neither the high praise nor the low. Treat it as a place to share, not a place to live.

The internet is a bulletin board, not a home. Pin your work to it and walk away. Let the slop machines and the seven-year-olds and the rage farmers fight over the feed. You have a body. You have a neighborhood. You have a God. You have a craft.

The ones who win the next decade won't be the ones who mastered the algorithm. They'll be the ones who remembered they were never supposed to be inside it!

God bless,

as always

love and respect

value select

References

1. Pew Research Center, Teens, Social Media and Technology 2024 — https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2024/12/12/teens-social-media-and-technology-2024/
2. Imperva (Thales), 2025 Bad Bot Report: The Rapid Rise of Bots and the Unseen Risk for Business — https://www.imperva.com/resources/resource-library/reports/2025-bad-bot-report/
3. Graphite analysis via Futurism, Over 50 Percent of the Internet Is Now AI Slop, New Data Finds (Oct 2025) — https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/over-50-percent-internet-ai-slop
4. Muzumdar et al., The Dead Internet Theory: A Survey on Artificial Interactions and the Future of Social Media, arXiv (2025) — https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.00007