> This take is always bizarre to me. You're not talking about the internet, you're talking about the websites you choose to use. There are alternatives for every single website/service that you don't like.

Yeah, the problem is that a lot of those are effectively dead, subsumed by Reddit and Facebook.

I've sometimes dug up still existing sites from the 2000s I used to visit, and the results are typically depressing. Such as:

* Site still exists, but is terribly broken. Doesn't render, uses now incompatible SSL, or something. It's a forgotten server in somebody's closet, still chugging, but not being maintained, so whatever remains will probably vanish whenever the disk/PSU/etc fails.

* Last posts from 2015, mostly with "gee, it's kind of dead in here, anyone still around?" comments at the end of threads.

* Discussion is down to 5 people that post once a month, and there's also a thread with obituaries for past well known members.

Indeed. I was trying to sell a loft bed a couple years ago and Craigslist is essentially dead for that sort of thing now, killed by Facebook (I deleted my account in 2021 and I have to say that eschewing that corner of the internet has been a net positive for my mental health). The only replies I got were obvious scams (“I love this! I’ll pay you $100 more than you’re asking for it!”)

Some forums are still alive, although not with the vigor that they had twenty years ago (talkbass.com is one that springs to mind).

I maintain a blog, but I doubt I have many readers (or any). I made a deliberate choice to not put any sort of analytics on the site so that I won’t be tempted to obsess about whether anyone actually visits. Some of the individual blogs that I know don’t get much readership that I read via RSS, I make a point of commenting on the rare posts to encourage the authors to write more. It doesn’t seem to make much difference although I’m sure they appreciate the positive feedback.

A lot of the delightful weirdness is gone. All the tilde sites with hand-made HTML and lots of flashing gifs and blink tags may have been tacky, but they were fun. I don’t get the kind of pleasure from most websites that I did back in the days of worst of the net which often surfaced delightful strange things that were completely unfiltered.

* The site still exists but has been taken over by Tapatalk, snuffing out what little remained of the original community.