The internet used to be great. Between 2005 and 2010, it had hit the perfect balance: accessible but not controlled, chaotic but rich with information, decentralized but still connected. It was a place where weird personal websites thrived, where independent forums built around niche interests flourished, where people owned their digital presence rather than renting it from a corporation. Then, slowly but surely, everything started getting worse.

Bit by bit, the internet was sanitized, corporatized, and regulated into submission. It became a monoculture controlled by a handful of tech giants, dictated by engagement algorithms and strangled by bureaucratic regulations. Websites lost their uniqueness, communities lost their independence, and users lost control over their own digital lives. The web went from a thriving jungle of ideas to a walled garden where only those who play by the rules of corporate overlords can participate.

The Death of Unique, Personal Websites

There was a time when the internet was filled with strange, kitschy, handcrafted websites. They weren’t always good, but they were unique. They had personality. Before WordPress and other template-based site builders took over, websites looked wildly different from one another. Some had garish background colors, animated GIFs, and auto-playing MIDI music. Others were meticulously designed by their creators, reflecting personal aesthetics and interests. The web was full of discovery. You never knew what you’d find when you clicked on a random link.

Then WordPress came along and made website creation easy, but at a cost. The trade-off for accessibility was uniformity. Instead of a thousand unique websites, we got a thousand variations of the same blog template. As WordPress themes became standardized, web design became predictable. Sites started looking like carbon copies of one another. The rise of platforms like Squarespace and Wix only made this worse. Every website became polished, professional, and completely devoid of character.

What was once a digital landscape of experimental, weird, and deeply personal creations turned into a homogenous stream of corporate-friendly designs. It was no longer about standing out. It was about looking just like everyone else.

How Wikipedia Killed the Deep-Dive Website

The internet used to be filled with enthusiast-run websites dedicated to specific topics, each maintained by people who were deeply passionate about their subject matter. If you wanted to learn about medieval siege warfare, you didn’t just find a dry summary—you found a website run by someone who had spent years collecting obscure historical texts and compiling information with a level of detail you couldn’t get anywhere else.

Wikipedia changed all of that. While it provided a convenient place to get surface-level information, it also removed the incentive to create deep-dive websites. Why spend years curating information when Wikipedia would inevitably become the default reference? Why maintain a specialized knowledge base when your work could be copied, reworded, and flattened into a generalist summary? Wikipedia didn’t just consolidate information, it sterilized it.

On top of that, Wikipedia’s rigid editorial gatekeeping meant that control over information was no longer in the hands of passionate experts but self-appointed moderators who often lacked real expertise. Speculative, cutting-edge, and niche discussions were pushed out in favor of bureaucratic, citation-heavy text that often obscured as much as it clarified.

The Decline of Forums and the Rise of Aggregators

Before social media took over, discussion happened in thousands of independently run forums, each dedicated to a specific interest (anyone remember phpBB?). If you were into classic arcade games, homebrewing beer, or obscure sci-fi novels, there was a dedicated forum for that. These weren’t just discussion spaces; they were living archives of knowledge. The best forums had communities that lasted for years, with in-depth discussions that remained accessible for future users.

Then came Reddit, Hacker News, and other aggregator sites that centralized discussion into one place. Instead of browsing multiple independent forums, people moved to subreddits. Instead of engaging in deep, long-form discussions, they posted quick comments that got buried under engagement-driven algorithms. Over time, niche forums began shutting down, unable to compete with the sheer convenience of a one-stop discussion hub.

Unlike independent forums, these aggregator sites weren’t run by the communities themselves, they were controlled by corporations. That meant discussions could be censored, entire communities could be shut down overnight, and the experience was dictated by whatever changes the platform decided to implement. A vibrant, decentralized ecosystem of interest-based forums was replaced with a sanitized, engagement-optimized feed that prioritized viral content over substance.

The Social Media Takeover and the Death of Digital Ownership

Social media delivered the final blow to independent websites. Before Facebook and Twitter, people had their own blogs, personal websites, and dedicated platforms where they controlled their own content. With social media, that changed. Instead of driving traffic to their own sites, people started posting everything directly onto Facebook and Twitter. The internet stopped being a collection of independent voices and became a corporate-controlled feed where visibility was dictated by an algorithm.

The shift wasn’t just about convenience, it was about control. On your own website, you owned your presence. On Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram, you belonged to the platform. If the algorithm decided your content wasn’t engaging enough, it was buried. If you posted something that went against corporate policy, you could be banned. The open web was no longer open—it was gated by tech giants that had complete authority over who could speak and who could be heard.

At the same time, Amazon and other retail giants did to e-commerce what social media did to personal websites. Before, small online stores could thrive. Now, they were either forced to sell through Amazon (giving up control and profits) or struggle to compete with its dominance. Google Shopping, once a way to discover independent stores, became a pay-to-play system where only the biggest retailers could afford visibility.

Government Regulation Strangled the Internet

As corporations tightened their grip on the internet, governments started layering on regulations that disproportionately harmed small operators while benefiting Big Tech. Privacy laws like GDPR, for example, were supposedly designed to protect users, but they ended up making compliance so expensive and complex that many small websites simply stopped serving European users altogether. Meanwhile, Google and Facebook had the resources to comply, further cementing their dominance.

Other laws, such as child protection regulations, were used as excuses to increase surveillance and control. The UK’s age verification laws forced sites to collect more personal data, while US laws like COPPA made it harder for independent platforms to allow user-generated content without jumping through endless legal hoops. While these regulations were often framed as necessary for safety, the reality was that they gave governments and corporations more power to monitor and restrict the internet.

At the same time, global discrepancies in enforcement meant that while Western countries were busy regulating their own internet into submission, places like India, China, and Russia continued operating without restraint. The only people truly affected were small operators in the US and EU. Big Tech found ways around the rules, and non-Western companies ignored them entirely.

The Cloud Killed Digital Independence

The final nail in the coffin was the rise of cloud computing and the SaaSification of everything. Before, websites and services were self-hosted or run on independent servers. Now, everything was moving to AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure. While cloud computing made deployment easier, it also created massive centralization. If AWS goes down, half the internet goes with it. If Amazon, Google, or Microsoft decides to ban a service, it vanishes overnight.

Software followed the same trend. Instead of owning software, users were now forced into subscription-based models. Adobe, Microsoft, and countless other companies abandoned one-time purchases in favor of recurring payments, ensuring that users never truly owned the tools they relied on. The internet shifted from a place of ownership to a place of rented access, where everything (data, software, infrastructure) was controlled by a handful of companies.

Generative AI Will Amplify What’s Already Broken

AI isn’t the villain of the story. It’s not inherently good or bad. It’s a mindless tool. But like every major technological shift before it, generative AI isn’t arriving in a vacuum. It’s emerging into an internet that is already suffering from corporate consolidation, algorithmic manipulation, the decline of independent sites, and an endless flood of low-effort content. AI isn’t going to fix any of that. It’s just going to pour gasoline on the fire.

The biggest problem with the modern web is that most of it already sucks. It’s bloated. It’s homogenized. It’s ad-driven. It’s designed to keep people scrolling instead of thinking. AI isn’t going to solve these issues; it’s going to amplify them. We’re already seeing the beginning of this shift: SEO content mills are using AI to flood search results with cheap, mass-produced garbage, making it even harder to find high-quality, human-written content. AI-generated misinformation is blending seamlessly into the news cycle, making it nearly impossible to separate fact from fiction. Corporations are replacing human customer service, tech support, and even creative work with AI-driven automation, not because it’s better, but because it’s cheaper.

Search engines, which were already failing at delivering good results, are about to become completely useless. The web is already filled with regurgitated clickbait articles designed to game Google’s ranking system, and AI makes it trivial to generate an infinite supply of this junk. When search engines start incorporating AI-generated summaries at the top of results, they’ll be pulling from an increasingly AI-dominated web, creating a feedback loop of machine-generated, engagement-optimized nonsense.

Social media is going to become even worse. AI-powered bots are already indistinguishable from real users, and as AI advances, it will be impossible to know whether the person you’re arguing with on Twitter is a human or an AI optimized to trigger engagement. Corporations and political organizations will be able to manufacture public opinion at scale, flooding social media with AI-generated outrage, fake grassroots movements, and artificially amplified trends. The algorithm-driven nature of social media already promotes the most outrageous, divisive, and manipulative content. AI will allow that process to happen at an industrial scale.

Creativity isn’t going to be destroyed by AI, but it is going to get buried under AI-generated junk. It’s already hard enough for independent artists, writers, and musicians to get discovered in an ecosystem dominated by corporate platforms. Now, they’ll be competing against an endless flood of AI-generated content designed to game recommendation algorithms. Companies like Spotify and YouTube will push AI-generated media because it’s cheaper and more predictable than dealing with human artists. The internet was already shifting toward a soulless, engagement-optimized content factory, AI just removes the last bit of friction, making it even easier for corporations to flood the web with cheap, synthetic substitutes for human creativity.

AI also accelerates the erasure of digital ownership. The rise of cloud computing and subscription-based software has already made it harder for individuals to truly own their data, content, and tools. Now, AI models trained on centralized datasets will further devalue individual contributions, reducing creativity and information to just another commodity that can be automatically generated, remixed, and repackaged by a machine. Independent bloggers, forum moderators, and small businesses have already been struggling to survive in an internet dominated by tech giants and AI is about to widen the gap even further, making small-scale, independent digital spaces even more unsustainable.

The real danger isn’t that AI will replace human creativity or intelligence. The real danger is that AI will be used to accelerate everything that’s already broken about the internet. The centralization, the manipulation, the monopolization of information, the degradation of search engines, the disappearance of real discussion, and the replacement of authenticity with engagement-optimized noise. The web was already dying. AI just gives corporations the perfect tool to finish the job.

So, What’s the Solution?

The internet isn’t beyond saving, but fixing it requires rejecting the corporate-controlled, engagement-optimized machine that it has become. It means going back to what made the web great in the first place: decentralization, independent ownership, and human-driven content.

First, people need to stop relying on corporate social media and centralized platforms. Instead of living on Facebook, Twitter, or Reddit, we need to build and support self-hosted communities, personal websites, and independent platforms. Blogging isn’t dead, people just stopped visiting blogs because social media feeds took over. If we want a healthier internet, we need to go back to visiting and engaging with independent sites.

Second, we need to fight for digital ownership. The internet used to be a place where people owned their content, their software, and their presence online. Today, everything is rented. Cloud services, SaaS software, social media profiles that can be deleted at any time. The solution is to embrace open-source alternatives, self-hosted software, and decentralized protocols. Running your own email server, hosting your own blog, and using local software instead of cloud-based SaaS might take more effort, but it keeps control in the hands of the user.

Third, we need to support human-created content. AI-generated content is going to flood the web whether we like it or not, but we don’t have to consume it. If we want real, thoughtful content to survive, we need to seek out and support human creators—whether that means subscribing to independent newsletters, buying from small online shops instead of Amazon, or just making an effort to read blogs instead of algorithmic news feeds.

Finally, we need to push back against the idea that the internet should be controlled by governments and corporations. Regulations like GDPR, content moderation laws, and copyright enforcement aren’t protecting users, they’re making the internet more expensive, more centralized, and more difficult for small operators to navigate. If we want a free internet, we need to advocate for less corporate control, fewer government-imposed restrictions, and more technological decentralization.

This isn’t about rejecting AI or technology, it’s about making sure AI doesn’t accelerate everything that’s already gone wrong. If we want an internet worth saving, we need to stop feeding the system that’s killing it. That means moving away from Big Tech, owning our digital spaces, supporting real people, and refusing to let engagement-optimized garbage define the web.