I think a lot of developers are carrying a kind of grief right now, but rarely naming it.
Not burnout exactly.
Not simple nostalgia either.
Something quieter.
A feeling that the internet used to feel more human.
Not better in every way. Not cleaner. Definitely not smoother. But more alive.
The old internet was messy. Half-broken. Full of ugly forums, strange little blogs, abandoned tutorials, and personal sites that looked like they had been built at 2 a.m. by someone running on caffeine and obsession.
But that was part of the magic.
You could feel the people in it.
You could feel that someone made this because they cared about something. Not because a content calendar told them to. Not because an algorithm rewarded it. Not because a brand needed a voice.
The internet felt less polished, but more real.
Now it often feels like the opposite.
Cleaner. Faster. Smarter. More optimized.
And somehow flatter.
A lot of what we see now is technically impressive, but emotionally empty.
Everything is content.
Everything is packaged.
Everything is trying to perform usefulness.
And I think a lot of developers feel that loss more than most people, because many of us were shaped by the old web.
We learned from weird blog posts.
We found answers in obscure forum threads.
We followed people who were not trying to become creators. They were just sharing what they knew.
That mattered.
It made the internet feel like a place where people left pieces of themselves behind.
Now a lot of it feels more like output.
Not expression. Output.
And yes, AI has made this feeling stronger.
Not because AI is automatically bad. But because it speeds up something that was already happening:
more volume
more sameness
more polished emptiness
More things that look finished without really feeling alive.
I think that is what a lot of developers are grieving.
Not just old websites.
Not just forums.
Not just blogs.
We are grieving an internet that felt more like discovery than consumption.
An internet with more rough edges. More weirdness. More small corners. More signs that an actual person had been there.
And maybe the hardest part is that many of us are helping build the thing we miss.
We optimize our writing.
We polish our sites.
We think about hooks, reach, growth, engagement.
I do it too.
That is what makes this hard to talk about honestly.
Because it is not just that the internet changed around us.
We changed with it.
We became more polished. More strategic. More legible.
And maybe a little less real in public.
I do not think most developers miss bad design or slower pages.
I think we miss evidence of human life.
And the more the internet becomes polished, generated, and optimized, the more precious that starts to feel.
I miss that.
Top comments (141)
This pretty much sums everything up on the state of the interest and I, too, feel that even on here as well.
I remember back then whenever I go on the internet, I can "feel" the present of a human based on what they post and the content is showing on my feed. Now, it feels like more structured like you mentioned, but I feel like it's too much to the point where it feels mono toned and that a robot is doing the work instead of actual humans. This is happening on Dev.to as well and it feels like that I am just on here by myself and no actual connections. I hope in the future that the AI detector will be implemented just as a indication that it is written by an actual human which @ben is currently working on it based on my reply to this post from @jarvisscript
9 Years on DEV.
Nevertheless, I just hope in the future we can sense that actual human connections again. Missed the old days where you can and now everything feels robotic if that makes sense.
Great post NorthernDev!
Thank you, I really appreciate that.
Yeah, that feeling of being able to sense a human presence is exactly what I think a lot of people miss. Not perfection, just signs that a real person is there.
And I get what you mean about DEV too. There are still real people here, but sometimes the signal gets buried under things that feel a bit too smooth, too structured, too machine-shaped.
I really hope we get more ways to preserve that human feeling too. Without it, the whole thing starts to feel hollow.
Thanks @the_nortern_dev! Yea, I also wish the same as well. I know a lot of products are coming out that claim 100% human and such. I just hope there is a universal solution to this but I guess we never know until we reach there. Thanks for replying :D
without a profile picture or social media videos. The old internet, and, before, the 8bit demo scene, had a human culture while some prefered pseudonym nickname anonymity. If that was Web 1, then came social Web 2.0 and now we experience the dead internet where you don't know if there's a human or a bot (or a dog) on the other side.
AI AI everywhere i go i see AI. websites, app get developed using AI. so many fake videos, fake images. i wish can just go back to 2019
It’s not even just the tools anymore, it’s the feeling of it. Everything starts to blur together after a while.
And honestly, I think a lot of people miss 2019 for exactly that reason. It still felt more human.
2019 is a nice nostalgia target. No AI, no COVID yet, but git and smartphones and fast internet. I thought of the "old internet days" as 2005 (good old Web 2.0 before Google acquired YouTube) or 1997 though.
Yes... The internet used to be better. And services like the Wayback Machine seem to only "rub salt" into the wound of memories.
that’s exactly the weird feeling.
The Wayback Machine is amazing, but sometimes it really does feel like visiting a version of the internet that had more soul in it.
What makes it hit hardest for you, old blogs, forums, personal sites, or something else?
It's like watching a film that you really loved as a teenager again decades later. Don't do it!
Themes of old websites that look like crap were the best, lol.
I think AI being everywhere is filling the internet with fake data that isn't even relevant to what you asked. I believe this hype is just a phase and will eventually end
I think a lot of people feel that too.
It’s not just that AI is everywhere, it’s that so much of it feels thin and disposable. More noise, less signal.
I’m not sure the hype fully disappears, but I do think people will get much less patient with useless AI very quickly.
I think for me, I’m slowly developing a lack of trust and approaching everything with skepticism. It’s like I’m running in a default zero-trust mode, assuming everything might be fake. I’m pretty sure I wasn’t like this a couple of years ago.
That might be one of the saddest parts of all this. The internet used to feel chaotic, but not constantly suspicious. Now it feels like you have to squint at everything first.
The internet is what you want it to be. If you are looking for human content you will find it.
Sure there is a lot of corporate content online, but branding is as old as the streets. Leaders in the oldest societies with written records had stories to praise them.
There was always slop on the internet, conspiracy theories became big on the internet.
AI helps to spread it faster.
Find the parts that don't rely on algorithms, Use platforms that are human-first. Use your own judgment.
In an ideal world new technologies would make life better, but we don't live in an ideal world.
I agree with a lot of it.
I don’t think the human parts are gone. More that they feel harder to stumble into now, and easier to bury under everything else.
AI didn’t create that problem, but it definitely made the volume and sameness worse.
I like your point about being more deliberate though. Maybe that’s part of the shift now — not finding the human internet by accident, but choosing it on purpose.
I can't agree more, I miss too the good old time when Internet was full of authentic people and authentic content. A place for sharing learnings, thougths and ideas, not for getting engagement and benefits :-(
exactly. It felt more like people leaving pieces of themselves behind, and less like everyone trying to optimize themselves into a strategy.
I think that shift is what a lot of us are really reacting to.
What do you miss most from that version of the internet?
What I miss the most are bidirectional conversations and discussions. Now, the "rockstar" streams something and its legion of acolytes follows it without judgement. Contributions are from top to down. You can comment with other followers and rarely discuss with the author.
That is what I miss, the time were everyone that contributes were on the same level, no rockstars, no hierarchies.
I don't know - what is "the old internet" - the WWW of the '90-s, of the '00-s? AOL, Yahoo, MSN, Usenet, GeoCities, dial-up connections? I don't really miss those ...
That’s fair. I don’t mean I literally miss every part of the old web either.
For me it’s less a specific era and more a feeling. Smaller, stranger, less optimized, less performative. More signs that an actual person had made the thing you were looking at.
Did any part of the older internet feel more alive to you, or not really?
I know the sentiment, I've heard it before, but personally, no not really - I'm coming across plenty of content (blogs etc) which feels genuine ...
Take dev.to - to me it feels more genuine than one or two years ago, when these inane "listicle" articles were all the rage on dev.to, you know, stuff like:
"Top 20 Bootstrap themes EVERY developer MUST know!"
I don't know what motivated people to write like that, but that was the kind of 'content' that irked me, and I see a lot less of that these days :-)
P.S. a community like dev.to is far beyond anything I've used in the '90-s or the '00-s - big hand to Ben and the other founders ...
Absolutely feels very "alive", and I'm spending quite a lot of time on it - maybe that's one reason why I'm not really having that "the internet is not alive" feeling? ;-)
Honestly, I’m not just quietly grieving the old internet — I actively miss it.
I’m talking HTML 4.01 era websites, messy personal pages, and those chaotic old-school internet chat rooms where people just… talked. No feeds, no algorithms deciding what you see, no engagement farming.
In a weird way, DEV feels like a small glimpse of that old spirit again. It’s not the same internet we had back then, but it’s probably one of the closest things we still have today.
I love that description.
The messy HTML era had so much more personality to it. It was chaotic, but in a very human way. People were just there, making things and talking to each other.
And I agree about DEV too. It’s not the old internet, but it still has some of that feeling of real people showing up as themselves.
What do you miss most from that era, the personal sites, the chat rooms, or just the overall pace of it?
Geocities, right? I am THAT old, and i loved how anyone was able to spin a web about literally anything. Not for profit. Just for ... the need of having a webpage about knitting or viking songs or whatever. Then google came and put a dollar tag on everything. The internet as we knew it died that day.
Yes, totally! I'm just writing my post which I'll publish tomorrow, about my first "Solar System" website. Back then Solar System had 9 planets🥹
Oww I miss Pluto!
Pluto is a planet and my decision is final. LOL.
I second that! Give us Pluto back!
This hit me right in the chest. It’s not just the old internet we're grieving; it’s the old games, the old life, the slower pace... I swear even the air smelled different back then. Today, as developers, we spend our days building hyper-optimized tools and worrying about perfect architectures, but everything feels sterilized. We traded the raw, messy human soul for metrics and algorithms.
Did you accidentally hit submit before typing your reply, or is this an AI bot confirming that the internet is indeed dead? 😂
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