Is the Internet dying?
I remember the old days of the Internet, in the 1990's. The web was a brand new thing. If you could afford a computer, you could create something called Hypertext pages. You had to learn the web language called HTML (HyperText Markup Language) and you could write the code in a simple text editor and then save the file with the .html extension. You would then upload that file to a public web server and the web server would make it readable to a web browser.
Here is an example of a basic web page in HTML code:
<!DOCTYPE html><html><body><h1>My First Heading</h1><p>My first paragraph.</p></body></html>
When the page is viewed in a web browser, it would look something like this:
My First Heading
My first paragraph
One of the pillars to help build "the web" was the ability to link to other webpages. This could be accomplished with the following code, for example:
<a href="https://www.w3schools.com/">Visit W3Schools.com!</a>
This was a great thing! People could then share information with others and by linking to other websites the information could expand. This is how the web was built in the early beginnings. Actually, Geocities, where this website is hosted, has a great article called Making the Web Fun Again.
Today we know that there are thousands, maybe billions of websites on the Internet. But times have changed and the web looks very different than it did 30 years ago...
I was watching a video on Youtube today called The Internet is Dying: AI, Bots, and The End of Human Content which paints a bleak picture of the web today. A summary:
The internet was once a vast digital frontier of endless human created content. The World Wide Web connected us, until corporations decided their profit margins mattered more than Tim Berners-Lee's vision of an open web. Now we're trapped on the same few websites, force fed algorithmic content and AI generated slop. Anonymous users predicted this years ago with what they called Dead Internet Theory. From bot armies manipulating conversations to AI generated content flooding every platform, the internet we once knew is disappearing.
This is where we are today. The video is around 20 minutes long and very much worth watching.
So in true inspiration, I remembered this old website that you're on right now, the "Back to basics" website. I want to get back to a more reasonable time, when webpages was the main content on the web. My website now looks different, it has a "terminal" old school PC theme. Very basic, very scaled down.
So I'm going to use this website, posting when I feel like it. Kinda like a diary or just thoughts. Anyway, living in the present but remembering the past, is important. That's what I'm trying to do here.
- By the way, did you notice the links on this page? Did you click them? If you did, you probably realized the power of building a linked "web" this way.
- Maybe you're a beginner and want to learn to create websites using HTML? Check out the Neocities HTML course!
- Want to learn even more? Well, check out this Neocities page for some great resources!
- Neocities.org is free to use where you can create your website. In fact, this website is hosted on Neocities (as you can see in the website address). It's a great place to be!
(Note: While talking about web code, this website has been created with the free tool called Publii and the theme is also free, called "Terminal"