We don’t have to think too hard to understand this yearning for a more innocent time online. It is blatantly obvious that the internet today is a tool from which a small monopoly of companies attempt to extract the most attention (and therefore money) out of us as possible. Pretty much, any social media platform that billions of people spend their screen time on has been mired in multiple scandals and has countless complaints from users about the decline in quality of the product.
Interlinked with this is the fact that the digital marketing industry is projected to exceed $1 trillion in value by 2030. This underlines the idea that a large part of being on the internet these days is all about buying things as opposed to information and entertainment sharing.
As for the content we consume outside of advertising, the continuing reign of artificial intelligence is overwhelming. According to the content delivery network Cloudflare, web traffic grew 20% in 2025, with much of that coming from AI crawlers and bots.
Even Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the internet as we know it, has made a plea for change. “Three and a half decades ago […] it was a tool to empower humanity. Yet instead of embodying these values, the web has played a part in eroding them.” He cites the concentration of power and the market for personal data as the key issues making matters worse.
The thing is that this did not come out of nowhere. Many of the common complaints about the internet today are the logical consequence of the way things were in previous decades. In a 2022 Dazed article exploring early web nostalgia, writer Günseli Yalcinkaya opines that the era “spanning Windows 95 to the glory days of YouTube” was “an innocent time where internet forums served as global villages, where like-minded people could gather en masse”.
The experience of being online may have felt more expansive and open, but that doesn’t mean that it was without its drawbacks. A lack of censorship could easily expose users to content that they did not want to see. There is also the issue of more extremist points of view becoming normalized in public discourse, something which can be traced back to the cultural impact of 4chan. The image board was arguably one of the most influential examples of the thriving forum culture that Web 1.0 fans lament the loss of.
While there might not have been so many influencers shilling the latest viral product, annoying pop-up ads were just as much of a feature of the tail end of Web 1.0 as they are these days. At least we have easier access to Ad Blocker plugins now; everything that we experience on the contemporary internet is a result of foundations that were laid beforehand.
This isn’t to say that the desires fuelling these rose-tinted recollections are useless. There is no going back to how things were before, and in some ways, that is a positive thing. However, with a little effort, it is also possible for people to adjust their relationship to the internet of today in a way that reflects their appreciation for the positive side of the vintage version. The ubiquity of mindless scrolling as a favorite pastime has already encouraged a conscientious minority to rethink their relationship to the current internet.
While it might require a discipline that the common understanding of screen time denies, it is possible to make our relationship to everything online work for us, as opposed to vice versa. The key to this is curating the kinds of content that we want to see, rather than letting an algorithm do it for us. This can involve everything from being a part of a group chat that is an offshoot of a favorite Substack to focusing more online activity on recommendations made by newsletters and podcasts, as opposed to whatever social media serves up to you that day.
Some also advocate for the creation of a “digital garden,”’ a kind of scrapbooking of things we find interesting to create a database of what we truly find interesting and entertaining. This requires even more effort, however, with coding involved to create this personal space. While positive, these practices make us work for it, unlike the browsing experience we are currently accustomed to.
It is not wrong to reminisce about the past, but there comes a point where it stops being interesting and prohibits making the best of the present. Returning to Web 1.0 is impossible, and for the majority of us, so is being completely offline. Being more conscientious with how we use the internet and what we consume takes more work, but the reward of having some distance from the doomscroll is priceless. Where we loved the old web for the ability to get lost on it, we can enjoy the new one as a means to focus on what really matters to us: making our lives better.
