A concerning shift has emerged in the internet’s infrastructure: more than half of all internet traffic is now generated by bots. Around 37% of those bots are considered malicious. Some serve useful functions like indexing and archiving. But many are designed to exploit, attack, and extract value from the web. Some scan for vulnerabilities. Others scrape (steal) content to train AI models without consent.
I started thinking about all this after checking my hosting dashboard and seeing nearly 100,000 requests to this little website. As flattering as it would be to imagine that my ideas are spreading far and wide, it’s clear most of that traffic is automated. The dashboard even reported 35 blocked attacks. It made me laugh at first… Who’s trying to siege my modest internet palace?
But it points to a broader, long-standing issue: the web has been commodified, consumed, and, frankly, stripped of its soul by moneyed interests.
The Big Tech Era
I’m tired of what big tech has done to the internet. Especially with AI now being force-fed into every product, new or old. Even Google search has become shittier now. The pursuit of endless growth has warped once-beloved tech companies into faceless giants, far removed from their original values. I don’t think most employees at these companies are evil. But their leadership is pushed to prioritize growth, consolidation, and investor returns. The result? A web that’s more extractive than expressive.
I’m a citizen of the US. In a country where losing your job can mean losing your health insurance, or worse, there hasn’t been much resistance to this shift; not internally, and not externally. Tech employees have to prioritize their livelihood before taking any moral stances against their leadership. I don’t think the sensible among them would want a shittified internet. But it’s easy to see how we ended up here.
Surfing the Web of Long Ago
I was lucky to catch the tail end of the internet’s golden age. I wrote my first lines of code editing my MySpace profile to fake a billion friends. I still remember how personal and weird the web felt. Before that, I spent hours browsing for Rollercoaster Tycoon parks and tracks, landing on niche forums and fan sites. One of my favorites was Lunatim’s site (now archived), which had a wild, GIF-covered layout and proudly declared it was “guaranteed to be 100% Usefulness-Free.” That’s the energy I miss.
Even corporate sites had charm. I used to visit the Cedar Point website as a kid to look at the rides and dream of going. The homepage had animated graphics that changed with the time of day and season. Google still had a serif logo. Most sites still linked to one another, and you could stumble your way through a constellation of interesting places.
Why did it feel so different? I think it’s because the internet hadn’t yet become a mature market. People made websites to share what they loved, not to optimize for clicks or profit. HTML was simple enough that even kids could use it. I know because I did.
One platform from my childhood, MatMice, let kids build their own webpages. After being bullied in school, I used it to build a “Wall of Shame” site about the bullies. Not the best move. It earned me a trip to the principal’s office, but it also earned me a few nods of technical respect from the adults.
I say all this because I got to experience a web that was diverse, expressive, and welcoming. It had its flaws, sure, but the spirit was different. Since then, the internet has been swallowed by advertising, surveillance, and centralization. What used to be hundreds of quirky, purpose-built sites has been reduced to a handful of giant platforms. Your attention is the product. Your data is up for sale. And little sites like mine are nearly invisible unless you go looking.
Building a Website with Small Web Soul
This site was built with that old spirit in mind. I used the Astro framework to create a mostly static, lightweight, and fast experience. I kept React to a minimum, only using it for a smooth homepage animation and a few small enhancements. Most of what you’re seeing is plain HTML and CSS.
I’m not trying to make things look retro for nostalgia’s sake. In fact, I’ve spent a lot of time refining the design to feel modern and polished. But under the hood, this site is simple. It’s content-first. It’s human.
That’s the kind of internet I want more of. A web where people share what matters to them, without chasing conversions or monetization. A web where every site feels like a personal space — a home — with a front door that invites you in. One that makes you want to stay, not one that floods you with content until you burn out.
I added this blog because I don’t want to post on Twitter (RIP). I don’t want to hand over all my data to Instagram. I don’t want to sell my thoughts to LinkedIn or TikTok. I’m still on them, for practical reasons. But this space is mine. I own it. I decide what gets shown on it. I designed it for myself, to talk about the things I care about. Maybe others will stumble in and feel the same.
The Future of the Internet
Maybe the web should be more like that: genuine, messy, personal. The best things in life aren’t monetized. And if they were, they’d probably be worse for it. I don’t think that small websites like this one are gone, they’re just buried under a mountain of content that is fighting for your attention, and winning. The infrastructure to elevate this part of the web to your consciousness has long shifted in favor of corporations and profit. But if you’re like me, you’re digging around and still finding gems.
That’s where my optimism lies. In the fact that, despite all the automation and homogenization, there are still people on the internet, building their spaces and browsing every day. People with a wealth of experience to share and enjoy together. All it takes is creating a way to find one another, outside of the scope of influence of big tech platforms. We need to make the web accessible again.
There are some cool projects out there, like webri.ng, which is providing open source software to revive the long-forgotten webring pattern, where websites link together by forming a club of sorts, opting into a hand-curated list of similar sites to form a community to browse. There are search engines like wilby, which index a web of pages built in the style of the early internet. There are also niche online movements like the Web Revival that are pushing for this kind of shift.
I want fewer ads, fewer corporate feeds, and less AI-generated slop. I want to talk to real people about real things. I want to wander the web, not be force-fed it through a fire hose.
And I want to find websites that exist just because someone loved making them.
So here’s mine, now you should go make yours.