Twitter is bad now.
I mean, Twitter always was bad, but it was bad in the ways that french fries are bad or horse track gambling is bad — it was bad because it was so addictively good, but unhealthy. Now it's just bad-bad. Like a TV show in season 9 bad, where most of the original stars have moved on, the writers are desperately trying to resurrect old villains to juice the ratings, and the whole site's glutted with shady product placement.
Of course, all websites, with time, seem to wither and fade. What's weird is that almost all of the big ones these days are doing it at the same time. The internet kind of sucks now.
Facebook, that site that once bestrode the internet like a colossus, that felled newspapers and kindled romances, has turned nearly unusable.
It doesn't want you to post all your photos in photo albums. It certainly doesn't want you sharing links to interesting articles — good luck getting anyone to click on anything outside of a wedding photo. It's like Mark Zuckerberg had been so defensive about the idea that viral disinformation on his website got Trump elected that he eventually flipped a switch that made Facebook anti-viral.
Google lost its way. It's harder than ever to find relevant results, particularly if they're older than three years. Entire pages, including some of my old articles, appear to have dropped off the site entirely.
Almost the entire culture journalism internet has collapsed. The AV Club was bought by an equity firm and stripped for parts. Gawker was murdered by a tag team of Hulk Hogan and Peter Thiel. Grantland was banished. Deadspin is dead, though its reanimated corpse is still staggering around.
Newspaper websites pivoted to video and then pivoted even harder to bankruptcy. Slate long ago abandoned its counterintuitive hot-take schtick — and now mostly seems to churn out an increasing number of niche absurd advice columns responding to clearly fake questions.
BuzzFeed went from a cat meme distribution platform to an investigative journalistic powerhouse to a mere relic of nostalgia. ("Remember BuzzFeed?" you could imagine Mo Rocco saying in an "I Love the 2010s" VH1 video.) Snapchat's cultural relevance lasted like 15 seconds, and then disappeared.
I understand TikTok is still entertaining people at least, by falsely accusing innocent people of murders or by stoking teen vandalism.
There's an economic reason for much of the internet's collapse, like the dot-com bubble bursting in the '90s: A huge part of the modern internet was built on little but greedy dreams — venture capitalists, buoyed by low-interest rates, had pumped a ridiculous amount of money into websites that weren't making any profit, on the premise that somebody thought somehow, someday, they might. But most sites never found that fabled revenue stream, and with the Fed raising interest rates to combat inflation, that spigot of free investor money is running dry everywhere.
There are a handful of bright spots online. Some of the better Substacks tease a return to the idyllic days when bloggers made provocative and thoughtful arguments. The problem is each one is behind an individual paywall.
The internet connected everyone to everyone — with thrilling and terrifying results. And now, the opposite is happening. It's fragmenting, returning to individual websites, catering to individual customers. In the long run, that's probably good for newspapers like ours.
But for now, we'll have to keep scrolling, scrolling, past "Can You Believe How Ugly This Former Teen Star Turned out to Be," past "13 Hilariously Horrifying Wedding Bloopers" and toward a less viral future. ♦
