The Internet Feels Broken

Welcome to a new publication on the internet's decline and one person's attempt to mitigate the fallout.

Illustrated by Stephanie Vee

My impetus for starting this newsletter stemmed, funnily enough, from a Reddit post¹ “written” by a bot on r/millennials. This woebegone bot lamented — in relatable prose that could fool most AI detectors — that the internet felt “broken.”

The post resonated with me and my fellow Millennials, who flocked to the comments section by the thousands. I didn’t realize the OP was a bot until someone pointed out that an Amazon affiliate link had been quietly added to the post once it started hitting trending feeds. After taking a closer look at the OP’s brief posting history, it became quite obvious that the OP was not, in fact, another jaded 80s kid like me, bemoaning the hustle-fication of the internet. The account had been accused of being a repost-bot by multiple Reddit users multiple times over the last month.

At first, all I could do was laugh. Of course we have bots on Reddit complaining about the internet’s decline while simultaneously tricking real people into clicking on shady Amazon affiliate links. Why would I expect anything different in 2025?

At 19k upvotes and counting, the bot did precisely what all Reddit bots are created to do: farm karma², farm user engagement, and farm clicks.

The Internet is Unrecognizable Today

However frustrating it was to have my thoughts echoed by a bot, of all things, the post articulated something I’ve wanted to write about for a long time. The internet does feel broken — especially to those of us who are old enough to remember its early beginnings in home computing.

To provide some personal context: I created my first rudimentary website on GeoCities in 1999, and cut my blogging teeth on LiveJournal in 2001. A significant chunk of my teenage years were spent hanging out in online spaces like chat rooms and discussion forums. In those days, Google was just a search engine, Amazon sold books, and YouTube didn’t even exist. Words like “monetization,” “influencer,” and “social media” had not yet entered our cultural lexicon.

I don’t remember when, precisely, I first noticed that something was amiss. Was it around the time when I realized my Facebook feed didn’t feature a single update from my friends? Did it happen when I found myself scrolling mindlessly through unrelated videos that were all trying to sell me the same VPN service?

Whenever it happened, my last few years online have been punctuated by a profound feeling of wrongness, by a sense that I am losing precious days, months, and years of my life to something that increasingly gives me nothing in return. I’ve realized that the internet is no longer something I use; the internet is instead something that uses me.

What Can We Do About It?

As tempting as it would be to simply reminisce about the early internet and vent about what it has become, nostalgia is seldom productive. The thought “what are you going to do about it?” kept popping into my head while skimming through the comments on the aforementioned Reddit post. What I’m going to do about it is dust off that part of my brain that was once devoted to regular blogging and document my attempts to reestablish a healthier relationship with the internet.

To that end, what you can expect from this newsletter is a personal take on what the internet’s doing wrong, what it’s getting right, and what’s working (or not working) for me as I try to eliminate its more-troublesome aspects from my life. Rest assured that I will never gate my writing behind paywalls — nor will I subject you to affiliate links or product sponsorships.

I believe the internet is at its best when we use it primarily to learn from and engage in respectful dialogue with one another. If you are of a similar mindset and want to follow this publication, please consider subscribing or adding my feed to your preferred RSS reader. (Uh … people still use RSS readers, right?)

Until next time. 👋

1. I won’t link to the post here, as I don’t want to give it any more traffic than it has already received.

2. For the blissfully uninitiated, karma refers to the “fake internet points” Reddit users award to (or deny) one another via the upvote / downvote system.