Kev Quirk has written a manifesto showing what bothers him about today’s web:

The Internet has been monetised by social media, by big tech, by search engines. Fuck, it’s been monetised by pretty much everyone. The whole concept of netizens and a community around the web, from the late 90s and early 00s, have been lost to the sands of time.

I agree with him for the most part, even though I’ve only been actively using the Web since the early 2010s. But how many times have I been upset in the last few days alone, when I wanted to search for something, but Google only showed me pages and pages of results with SEO spam?

The biggest problem, which I think is now becoming a societal problem as well, is the focus of social media on monetization. Everything is done to keep people’s attention as long as possible. This then leads to particularly polarizing and extreme content being recommended.