Why Has The Internet Become So Boring?

What it feels like to grow up online and slowly realize it's been hollowed out.

Although I was born during the era where everyone still had cable TV, I was too young to experience the web of the internet that previous generations experienced, where they treated the internet like a jungle with so much to explore. My earliest memories on the internet consist of playing Papa’s Pizzeria and girlsgogames.com on my elementary school Chromebook, watching slime and Rainbow Loom tutorials on Youtube, and memorizing Harry Potter in 99 Seconds.

For my generation, the internet is more of a place to stalk your crush and post the most aesthetic story on Instagram. People don’t even use VSCO anymore. We’ve downsized to the same three websites: Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube.

I realized the culture of the internet had slowly shifted before my eyes when my millennial debate teacher told me about how when he was younger, the internet was a crazy place. It was truly a web where you would discover random websites, make SoundCloud mixes, and troll on random forums. There was no TikTok or Instagram Reels consuming all your screen time.

These social media platforms didn’t kill human creativity, they just swallowed all the attention and made everything else hard to find. The internet in 2010 was primarily “search-your-query-and-discover”, meanwhile today it’s “let’s-search-it-and-then-just -read-the-AI-overview-or-ask-ChatGPT-to-give-you-the-answer”. The wonder of exploring, making mistakes, and stumbling across websites you would’ve otherwise never found has a unique beauty to it.

Google now ranks as the #1 most visited website in 2026. But they weren’t always the search engine king. 

According to Hosting.com, “In 1995, the top websites by total global visits were AOL, Yahoo!, GeoCities, Netscape, and WebCrawler. GeoCities was a revolutionary website founded in 1994 that allowed regular internet users to create their own web pages based on their hobbies or interests. It included a web directory of “neighborhoods” where users could design their own pages. These neighborhoods were themed to particular topics – for instance, the “Hollywood” neighborhood was geared towards film/TV interests and “Silicon Valley” was devoted to computer topics. At its peak, there were at least 38,000,000 pages on GeoCities. GeoCities was acquired by Yahoo! in 1999 and officially went offline in 2009.”

Top 10 most visited websites on the internet (Photograph: Exploding Topics)

What is the 2026 version of GeoCities? Meticulously curating your TikTok reposts to reflect “you”, or shall I say the aesthetic or funny version of you that you choose to display to the world.

GeoCities as a concept was regular people, not influencers with brands breathing down their neck, building their own corner of the internet based purely on what they loved. It was a socialist internet of sorts in the sense that no one really owned it. When GeoCities died, the beginning of the internet becoming a space that meant solely profits for the money-hungry came to fruition. 

The internet of the late 1990s was primarily used as a tool in a world that didn’t completely revolve around it yet. It wasn’t designed to be quite as addictive as it is today. The attention economy of today seeks to keep you online as long as possible (to sell you more stuff), and internet culture has become mostly one of consumption instead of connection. With this shift and the isolation that comes with it, creativity on the internet has plummeted.

Most people are stuck in a spiral of simply curating instead of creating. The majority of people are consumers— that’s the whole point. The internet used to be a space of wanting to add to the web, have your own corner of it. Yes, we have our accounts— but it isn’t the same. As I search, the hollow search bar waits for me yet finds the same predictability. I yearn to get lost and explore the backrooms of the internet, but it’s just not the norm now. When I scroll on my For You page and Instagram Reels, it provides the dopamine boost I’ve gotten so used to and I’m able to scuba and connect with my chronically online friends about microtrends and memes that seem to last a day like the one and only 24k gold Labubu. But, I feel empty inside.  

One of the thousands of Geocities custom website “neighborhoods” (Photograph: It’s Nice That)

There is one space where there seems to be a glimmer of hope, drawing inspiration from GeoCities, fostering a new internet community outside of the big three social media sites.

We’ve been seeing a resurgence in that realm with Substack, the 2026 version of blogging. It’s not just straight news, it’s a way for writers to write whatever they want to nerd out on and get paid for it. You can support any writer directly through joining their paid tiers and subscribing. One of my favorite Substacks is Sh*t You Should Care About which explores news and current events through a lens that resonates with Gen-Zers, and Culture Vulture, a pop culture collection of essays from anyone who wants to submit a piece. Both are run by the same girl from New Zealand, Luce. 

To me, Luce represents a disruptor from the rest of the content I consume. When I read her weekly newsletter, the personalized aspect of it, I feel like as the reader, I matter because I’m one of the people that keeps her corner of the internet alive. That’s the exact opposite of being “just another like” or commenting on a TikTok post for a creator that doesn’t care the same way.

When I log on the internet, I want to find real people with real voices. Not something fabricated to sound good, not a Glow House brand deal, and please not another video seemingly identical to the one before. 

I want variety and diversity and discovery. Long live the old awe of the internet. Let’s bring it back.