Why We All Hate the Internet Now
You know that feeling, right? That heavy, slightly nauseous sigh you let out after scrolling for an hour and realising you saw nothing of value.
Remember when the internet felt like finding a secret, sprawling attic full of weird treasures? Back when you could actually stumble upon a deeply niche fan site for a forgotten TV show, or read a friend’s real, unfiltered feelings on their messy personal blog? It was messy, it was personal, and honestly, it felt like freedom.
Now? Now the internet feels less like a space for genuine connection and more like a never-ending, highly-optimised shopping mall, the kind with blinding fluorescent lights, where everything is a sleek advertisement, and every interaction is designed to extract just one more second of your time.
The truth is, the internet isn’t fun anymore. We’re all spending less time feeling inspired, more time complaining about being online, and almost everyone seems exhausted by the endless scroll. The vibe is a collective, exhausted, “Ugh, I’m just here because I’m used to it, not because I actually enjoy it.”
So, how did we go from the wild, exhilarating digital frontier to this homogenised, soul-crushing chore? Let’s break down why our beloved web has become the biggest source of burnout.
I Swear, I Just Watched an Ad for an Ad
If you’ve spent five minutes on a social platform recently, you know this feeling: Everything is an ad for more ads.
It’s like the platforms woke up one day and decided that showing you a friend’s photo was a waste of their potential ad revenue. Tech critics call this “enshittification” (yes, the term is crude, but it’s painfully accurate).
Here’s the gut-punch reality:
- The Hook: They give us a great, free service, easy sharing, connecting with friends, and fast videos to get us all addicted. Ah, the good old days!
- The Squeeze: Once our whole friend group is locked in, the platform turns on the users to make money. They prioritise showing you paid posts and low-quality ads over the content you actually followed people for. This is where the ‘social’ dies.
- The Fallout: Eventually, the platforms squeeze everyone, including the creators we love, demanding higher prices for less visibility.
The result is a feed that is basically a garbage chute of sponsored content, cheesy video pitches, and random accounts you definitely didn’t follow. We used to use the internet to look for content; now, every piece of content feels like a soft-sell ad.
Think about it: Your attention is no longer your own. It’s a valuable resource that is constantly traded. We’re not the users; we’re the products, and our time is the currency. It’s exhausting to constantly feel marketed to.
Why Everything Looks and Sounds the Same
Open your feed on any major platform; it doesn’t matter which one. What do you see?
- A 10-second video with the same sound clips you heard yesterday.
- An influencer giving you the same five life tips or morning routines using the same fast cuts.
- A ‘relatable’ post that is just a template filled in.
Everything looks the same now because we’ve handed total control over to the Recommendation System (aka, the Algorithm).
The Algorithm is a ruthless machine. It doesn’t care about your soul, your unique interests, or that hilarious inside joke you only share with three people. It only cares about engagement, that raw, measurable metric of watch-time and interaction. It figures out what keeps the largest number of people scrolling for the longest, and then it aggressively pushes that exact thing to everyone.
This system creates a digital monoculture. That wonderfully messy, high-effort, or deeply niche content that made the web fun? It gets bulldozed by generic, repetitive “slop” that is perfectly engineered for maximal consumption.
I miss the chaos! I miss the Tumblr-era internet, the unhinged text posts, the obscure fandom edits, the deeply personal blogs where people just expressed themselves. That felt alive. Today’s feeds, polished and performance-driven, have squeezed all the weird, unique personality out of the web.
We’re tired, overstimulated, and totally checked out. It’s like we’re all experiencing “ad blindness,” but for the entire internet. We scroll past the noise because nothing genuinely sparks that old thrill of discovery anymore.
We’re All Addicted, But None of Us Are Happy
Here’s the deepest cut: even as we complain about how terrible the internet is, we can’t seem to put it down. And that’s not a coincidence; it’s the platforms working exactly as they were designed.
Big Tech hires behavioural scientists to fine-tune their products into addiction machines. The endless scroll, the little red notification badges, the lottery-like rush you get when you see a ‘like’, they are all engineered to keep you hooked, constantly chasing that tiny dopamine hit.
The cruel part is, this constant scrolling leads to that nagging sense of digital emptiness. We spend hours staring at our screens, but research shows that passive consumption (just watching and scrolling) makes us feel lonelier, while active consumption (messaging friends, joining a specific group) is positive. Yet, guess which one the algorithm promotes? The passive one it’s easier to monetise.
We’re just wading through the slop, passively handing over our data and ad revenue. And the whole time, we’re wondering, “Is this all there is?”
The true tragedy is that we are all showing up to a party that ended five years ago.
Where Do We Go from Here?
The good news is that we’re all reaching our breaking point, and that burnout is forcing a change. We’re finally realising that we need spaces that feel human again; less extraction, more genuine expression.
This isn’t about logging off forever; it’s about choosing new, better digital real estate:
- Embrace the Niche: We’re seeing a huge shift toward small, private spaces like Discord servers or closed forums. These are places where you can actually talk to people who share your specific interest, not just scream into the void of a million users.
- Read Long-Form Again: The boom in newsletters (Substack) and independent blogs is a direct reaction to the feed burnout. We’re willing to pay a few dollars for content that is thoughtful, well-written, and, crucially, not interrupted by five low-quality pop-up ads.
- The Power of Deletion: Be ruthless with the follow button. Mute, block, and delete accounts that don’t bring you joy or genuinely inform you. Curate your feeds back into a gallery of things you like, not a mall of things advertisers like.
The internet was an incredible promise: a library, a public square, a playground. It turned into a high-pressure corporate office. The great challenge for us is to reclaim our digital lives, to abandon the platforms that treat us like resources, and to rebuild the small, weird, and wonderful web we all miss.
We don’t have to keep scrolling. We can choose to build something better.