It's time to rethink the Internet

How we need to rethink the relationship between the user and content

The internet was supposed to be man’s final terrestrial frontier, accelerating all scientific progress, thus unraveling the unsolved mysteries of the universe until granting us immortality in its wake.

Well, that was the bill of goods promised in the sci-fi version of the internet, a far cry from the current state of affairs.

What did we get instead?

• Vanity-driven FOMO posting on Instagram

• Anonymous shitpost jockeying on Twitter/X

• Paywalls nested within paywalls

• Ad-stricken YouTube videos

• Pyramid-scheme courseware “experts”

While the list above does not represent the totality of the internet, the uglier parts of the internet reflects the messiness of human nature, specifically our desire for instant gratification and wanting. However, the internet has also connected billions of people, fostered bountiful relationships, and enabled people to become leaders in the online communities they both started and further cultivated.

Simply knowing a subreddit exists where like-minded people discuss a similar hobby or share experiences of their particular medical condition does wonders in giving people a sense of community and belonging knowing they’re not alone. What could have been a life of destitute dealing with the challenges of a permanent medical condition, became an opportunity for a community to form from the collective hardship enabling leadership and personal growth that otherwise would not have been possible.

The internet is at its best when it perfectly individuates to the individual, forming to their shape and needs in real-time.

The question becomes, why have most news feeds on the internet become stale? People swipe through their newsfeeds instinctually, almost to give the mind droning background noise until the dopamine hit of novelty comes to color the mind’s attention.

Every moment longer in the newsfeed, the further your sense of self is obfuscated into transcience from the growing “other”, as the self further dissipates in the trance.

How can we change this? We must first ask what is content and how people interact with it.

Rethinking how people interact with content

Content is any form of information encoded in the digital medium of text, video, image, audio, and or any associated combination of the above. When interacting with content, you’re left with three options each time content is presented.

1. Skip right past it

2. Save it

3. Go deeper down the rabbit hole

What might it mean to go deeper into it?

When watching a podcast like the Joe Rogan Experience, a guest speaker may have said something that piques your attention. Following the topic, you go on Google and start shifting between websites and YouTube videos. Depending on the person and their personality, this rabbit hole could have been between twenty minutes or four hours.

Each time someone immerses themselves into content, there’s a universe of derivative content, semantic associations generated from the individual contingent on their experiences. A topic like the great pyramids of Giza might lead someone to think about physics or for another person a meme from a video game they’re fond of.

This is the space in-between the internet seems to have forgotten.

To solve this problem, a “problem” people might not consider to be a problem, the entire internet will have to be rethought.

The problem fundamentally begins where the line is drawn with content, as content must exist separately from its externalities and contextual universe at least in terms of user presentation. The emphasis on distinction via clearly defined limitations seemed to have worked thus far in cultivating viral growth in easy-to-use platforms like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, etc., but now the internet is a different place from when those platforms were brought to the public respectively. (Read here on my speculations for why this happened)

However, it’s time for this prior to be challenged if something better is to be made moving forward.

The internet does not operate by the same rules of the physical world, as once content is made public it is no longer “your” property, it becomes communal to everyone, but the distinction comes with attribution to the creator. This “duality” of the internet, yours but mine, mine but yours will have to be embedded into the “new” internet presenting the meandering contextual universe.

We need to bridge the gap between the person and the internet by treating content as something permeable and integrable to the individual. Rather than treating content as something separate and foreign, it needs to be a first-class citizen within people’s personal universes.

Do you ever wonder how large your screenshots folder has become? All these wonderful snapshots of topics you want to explore later on, only for it to get lost in the void. Why is the internet not part of this tapestry?

These are the types of questions we need to ask if we’re going to solve this problem and build a better internet.

What does this even look like, how will we solve this?

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