The Early Web Was Human

Being a mid-to-late millennial has put me in an interesting spot. I remember the world before the internet, but I also grew up alongside it as it became what it is today. I was a kid in the ’90s with endless time to explore online compared to the generations before me. If the internet broke, I had to figure out how to fix it, same with the family computer. That curiosity shaped who I am today. It makes me sad that the next generation will never know the internet I grew up with. The weird, wonderful, human one. The internet used to feel like a place; it was messy, diverse, and human. Now it is a product. It’s optimized, sanitized, and owned. The shift from small communities and personal sites to algorithm-driven feeds hasn’t just changed how we communicate; it’s reshaped how we think and feel. There was a time when the internet felt like wandering through someone’s home. Now it feels like a giant mall. I remember trawling message boards for the games I played or losing hours inside strange, wonderful GeoCities pages. There was always something weird and wonderful to discover. Back then, the internet was the wild west, no rules, no SEO hacks, just people building pages about what they loved. I thought about this again when I stumbled onto milk.com, a domain someone bought in the early ’90s and refused to sell, no matter the offers. He turned it into a simple personal site. It’s still there, quietly defying everything the modern web became. It’s amazing. I suggest you check it out.

The Shift

In the late 2000s, I started to notice the internet was changing. Social media had been around since the early 2000s, but by then it was beginning to reshape the web into what it is today: a product. I remember building out my MySpace page; it’s what first got me into basic web development. It felt like having your own little site, complete with chaotic HTML, custom backgrounds, and whatever song you wanted blasting when someone visited. And of course, the infamous Top 8. The friendships that were quietly torn apart when someone disappeared from that list—it was a funny time.

Then Facebook came along. At first, it felt exclusive; you needed a student email or an invite to join. It was simple, clean, and had fewer options to make your profile yours. It catered to a different crowd: students, then professionals. In many ways, it was the LinkedIn of its time. What I didn’t realize was that the web was starting to standardize. We were trading creativity for convenience. Out with the messy individual and in with the sleek, uniform feeds.

The Consequence

With this new shift, we’ve lost nuance, patience, and creativity, and our attention spans have shrunk lower than ever before. Everything now feels like a feed. Even the ads in front of us are personalized, and we willingly opt in for it.

With the rise of AI, we’re standing at the beginning of another transformation. It feels oddly similar to what I sensed in the 2000s, another wave that will reshape how we experience the internet. Soon, these feeds won’t just be curated by people but by machines. We won’t be able to tell which comments are real or which posts were written by an algorithm pretending to care. Everything will be tailored to us: our fears, our tastes, our attention. Attention is currency. The more time we spend on a site, the more data and money it generates. Somewhere along the way, we stopped being the explorers of the internet and became the explored.

I can’t help but wonder what we’ll lose this time. The first shift cost us creativity; this one might cost us reality itself. But maybe the answer is the same as before: to build small again. To write, create, and share in ways that aren’t optimized, only honest.

The Resistance That’s part of why I built this site. I doubt many people will ever see it, but the ones who do might get a small kick out of it, and that’s enough. It’s honest. I’m not posting for likes, chasing algorithms, or trying to monetize my thoughts.

I built this as a place to share my curiosity, something not owned by a company, not tracked, not optimized. Just mine.

That’s the real act of resistance now; carving out a small, quiet space online that isn’t built to scale. A space that still feels human. Maybe the internet doesn’t need to be fixed; maybe it just needs more small corners like this one. Maybe the future of the internet isn’t something we build together at scale; it’s something we reclaim, one quiet corner at a time.

Thanks for reading —Kyle