a long time ago, before it was corporatized and SEOptimized, there was a sense of adventure and excitement. You were a brave explorer stepping foot into virgin lands to discover the bounties within.

Following a link trail to weird and incredible new sites.

Following a ring network for amazing indepth information on subjects beyond your wildest dreams.

Chat rooms with normal people having normal conversations across the globe, before upvotes/downvotes and gamification of human interaction skewed discourse and interaction to dopamine driven extremes.

All of it peoples works of passion, ad free and real.

Now though?

Its no longer a place of nerd passions and interest. Now its an essential service. Now you have to be online, have to be always connected, to make sure you catch the important email, the fraud alert, etc etc.

You go where the Search Engine points you to, based on the years of tracking you.

Its wonders paved over with corporate interests and buried under an avalance of ads and tracking. With almost everything you do being monetized by someone, somehow, and almost always to your own personal detriment.

and no longer can you really have those all night conversations in a small chat room with vastly different people, because opinions and interactions have been pushed into parody-like extremes due to obsession and addiction to the chemical release of upvotes and likes and whatever else.

The internet went from a great wonder… to a public bathroom in the bad part of town.