There was a time, not so long ago, when the Internet was a pretty fun – and useful – place.
There was silliness aplenty, with sites like The Fish Doorbell. There were absolutely useless sites such as Zombo or The Useless Web that were still, somehow, fascinating. We came together watching iconic videos. And when there was a major news event, there was a wealth of coverage from both professional outlets and eyewitnesses.
Today, though, people describe the Internet with a word that would have seemed insane in those golden years: boring.
It’s not that many of the oddities that made the Internet so fun in the first place have vanished. It’s the things that have come since artificial intelligence (AI) slop and a perceived lack of creativity are turning more people away from the web and back towards the real world.
A survey of 8,400 people across Europe, the US and Latin America by ReverseLookup found that people are spending less leisure time online. Some 61% of the respondents said they want to spend more time in offline or local communities over the next year, while 44% said they are actively trying to reduce passive scrolling.
It’s not that there’s less to do online. There’s more content today than ever. In just one second, an estimated six new websites go live, Redditors post 41 comments, Facebook users post more than 4,000 photos and there are 500 minutes of video uploaded to YouTube.
The majority of that, though, is garbage.
“For many users, [the] sense of discovery has weakened,” wrote ReverseLookup. “The Internet has not become empty. It has become crowded with sameness.”
When asked about the quality of online content today, 57% of the people surveyed said they now encounter more posts, images, captions, comments or articles that feel artificially generated or low-effort. And 49% said online spaces feel less original these days because of the continued spread of “synthetic content.”
They’re bypassing AI and suspected-AI content, too. Some 42% said they have recently skipped or closed content because they suspected it was produced by AI instead of a person with something specific to say.
They’re probably right. Cloudflare reported the number of bots accessing websites outnumbered human web users for the first time. The trend has held, with 57.7% of web traffic coming from bots recently.
That represents a turning point not only for web users, but for how businesses use the web to grow their business.
“By 2030, the web as we know it will be dead,” says Rajiv Garg, a professor at Emory University’s Goizueta School of Business. “We’re moving from human-to-screen to machine-to-machine. It’s a total shift. … The value of local, unique data is about to skyrocket. The companies that win will be the ones holding the best raw ingredients for AI.”
Of course, the Internet isn’t going anywhere. It has woven itself into people’s lives and will remain essential for work, information, support, safety, and connection. But the growing abundance of slop and repetitive content is making more people think of the online world as less of a destination and more of a utility.
They’ll still utilise it, but the fun factor that came with the Internet less than 20 years ago has disappeared. And in its place is a more mundane and often divisive tundra. And that makes the real world a lot more interesting once again.
“The offline revival is not a rejection of modern life,” wrote ReverseLookup. “It is a rejection of the parts of online life that have become predictable, performative and synthetic. Offline life is gaining value not because it is always more exciting, but because it is harder to mass-produce. For many people, the most interesting place left may be the one that does not ask them to scroll.” – Inc./TNS
