The wild, wild web

The internet has always been difficult to tame. However, over the last 10 years the large tech giants and the more restrictive governments have tried their best to do so. Large mainstream portals caught users like fish, offering them communication, stay-in-touch, stages for opinions, something like a virtual sociality. Behind all this was one simple business model: Show ads and make money with it.

To improve their ad-showing capabilities they profiled us, clustered us, stalked us. With success: If you today place an ad on one of the large portals the hosting tech companies promise you a proven buy/click-through rate for your money. Because they are able to place these ads where they are needed (from a consumer's point of view).

And so it went. The wild, personal blogs were dropping on the search engine top ten, more and more mass portals that simply manipulated search engine placement got their airtime. And now, with the rise of LLMs, not even finding true content, but also creating good content seems to become obsolete.

But maybe it is the birth of something new - or the return of something old, almost forgotten.

So maybe we see a return of what Anil Dash is calling the human web. That we see the return of personal websites, human-made content and a joyful exploration of the wild internet. If you are interested, you should read about the IndieWeb. It's so much more colourful, so much more amazing and inspiring.