The Internet Was Better When It Was Weirder
I miss stumbling onto strange, beautiful corners of the web — before search became a storefront and everything started sounding the same.
I used to love getting lost online. Not doomscrolling, not shopping, not checking five links that all say the same thing. I mean really getting lost. Typing something into Google and ending up in a stranger’s world. A dusty old blog. A single-use site that made you smile. Something built out of curiosity, not KPI dashboards.
Once, I stumbled on a site called Passweird. It was exactly what it sounded like: a weird little tool that spat out ridiculous passwords. Bold colors, no frills, just unapologetically strange. I didn’t need it, but I used it anyway. And sent it to friends, just because it was fun.
Stuff like that used to be everywhere. Tiny digital rooms people built for no reason except joy. You never knew what you’d find, and that made it better.
Now? Try searching for something. Anything. A niche tool. An old forum thread. A quiet blog. You’ll hit a wall of sameness. First, the ads. Then, the templated content. The brands. The Medium clones. The SEO machines.
It’s like asking a librarian for something strange and getting handed five copies of the same book, just with different covers.
I think I started noticing it a few years ago. I’d search something simple — like an old app I used to use — and every result was a listicle. Not even helpful. Just rewritten summaries recycled across different sites. I didn’t realize then that it wasn’t just a bad day online. It was a shift.
The web isn’t a forest anymore. It’s a mall.
And it’s not just about the results being bad. It’s what they say about us. About how we search, how we make things, what we’re willing to settle for.
Sometimes I think I’m just being nostalgic. Maybe this is just how things work now. But then I try looking up something — anything — and halfway through the scroll, I feel it again. That same hollowing out.
Now I can predict the first page of Google before I finish typing. The same brand names. The same SEO-optimized structure. The same tone: polished, friendly, robotic. It’s like every result is trying to be helpful without actually saying anything.
And the wild part is: I don’t even want the right answer most of the time. I just want something real. Something someone actually cared about writing.
Instead, I get AI summaries, faceless content farms, affiliate links disguised as opinions. It’s so efficient it’s depressing. I scroll, and scroll, and eventually give up — not because I didn’t find what I was looking for, but because I didn’t find anyone behind the words.
It makes me wonder when we stopped being curious.
Or if we ever really were.
So I’ve started turning elsewhere. Reddit threads. TikTok creators. Random comments under YouTube videos. Messier places, but at least they still sound like people. Sometimes the answers are wrong. Often they’re unfiltered. But that’s the point. They’re alive.
And maybe I’m romanticizing it. Maybe I just miss the early internet because it was weird when I was weird, and I want to feel that way again. But I don’t think that’s all of it.
I think I miss the version of the internet where people built things with their hands and didn’t worry about how it would rank. Where curiosity drove creation. Where someone would spend hours building a page just to share a joke, or a tool, or a theory, knowing it might only be seen by ten people.
Now everything sounds like it was written by the same person. Or worse, by something that doesn’t even care if I am one.
I don’t want a smarter search engine. I want one that shows me the broken stuff. The ugly sites. The half-finished thoughts. The little corners people carved out just for themselves.
Because if the internet stops feeling human, what’s the point of searching at all?
