I haven't written anything in almost a year, but I felt like it was time to finally do so. This is a follow-up to a piece to something I wrote last year:

In short, the optimism I had then was soft but directional. I believed that in a world full of slop, we'd retreat to smaller, curated digital spaces. A year later, the internet is pretty damn dead, but the retreat is playing out in ways that are more interesting than I originally thought.

The dead internet theory is a doomer idea that I personally subscribed to quite early. It follows the line that the internet is filled with bots, there aren't any real people left, and it's all just botted interactions that lead you to believe there are signs of life. Honestly, we've hit that point.

A supermajority of accounts on major social platforms are estimated to be automated, multimedia content is increasingly synthetic, and it's getting harder to tell what's happening (war media being a great test of this). The theory isn't wrong and is really playing out as anticipated, but at least there's a bit of hope for some good to come of it. What I've been thinking about since is what happens after the "public square" gets annihilated and looks like a wasteland of slop. Specifically, where people actually go, what they start to use, and what starts to matter as a result.

I touched on this briefly in the original post, but the internet has had a long, messy era of ownership (yes, I call it that even though we could argue semantics). Social media gave everyone a megaphone, but the writerly web is collapsing under the weight of synthetic content and even worse algorithmic manipulation. AI slop, partisan bait, and aggressive advertising have now become dominant much more quickly than anticipated.

What's replacing it can be seen as a regression, but honestly should be welcomed with open arms, is a readerly web defined by passive consumption of curated content rather than active participation. Think Substack and creators you have an actual connection to over Twitter, and passively reading a feed again without the necessity to engage. There's a nostalgia angle to this that I think matters as well. The internet doesn't really yearn for "old Twitter" or "early Facebook," but knowing that the person on the other end was real and brought a bit of their genuine selves to the table.

Engaging with various subculture-driven forums (shoutout GameFAQs), Myspace pages, AIM away messages, and early blog comment sections felt great and worked because they were small enough that trust was ambient. You didn't need verification because the community itself or your personal web of trust was the filter. We're not going back to that specific version of the internet, but the instinct driving that nostalgia is pointing somewhere useful: toward spaces where you can actually trust who you're engaging with.

This is the part I keep coming back to. The only digital social life that survives this shift is one built on verification. Not traditional IDV or some compliance nonsense, but the kind of assurance I wrote about in the original post. Knowing that the people in your group chat, your community, your forum are real humans who were invited or vouched for by someone you trust.

The digital spaces that will matter are gated, human-verified, and small enough to maintain signal. Discord servers with real moderation, subscriber-only communities built around specific subcultures, group chats where membership means something all will continue to grow. These aren't new ideas, but they're becoming the default rather than the niche. Platforms that figure out how to enable this at scale, through subscriptions or transaction volume rather than ad impressions, will be the ones that matter. People will pay a premium to know they're engaging with real people.

As digital spaces lose signal, physical presence also gains a premium. When you can't trust that the person replying to you online is real, showing up somewhere in person becomes the highest-signal thing you can do. That same nostalgia I mentioned earlier applies here, too. People are spending more on experiences to chase the feeling of being around other people in a way that the internet used to provide, and no longer does. Concerts, dinners, bars, and local meetups are returning as core gathering points, and they're growing because they offer something more meaningful than what's online at this point.

A year ago, I said the internet was dying, but it would bring us closer together. I still believe that.

The digital watering hole as we knew it is gone, overrun by bots and stripped of the social contract that actually made it work. But people still want to connect, and the nostalgia everyone feels for an older internet isn't really about the internet at all. The spaces that win from here, digital or physical, are the ones that earn it back.

I haven't written anything in almost a year, but I felt like it was time to finally do so. This is a follow-up to a piece to something I wrote last year:

In short, the optimism I had then was soft but directional. I believed that in a world full of slop, we'd retreat to smaller, curated digital spaces. A year later, the internet is pretty damn dead, but the retreat is playing out in ways that are more interesting than I originally thought.

The dead internet theory is a doomer idea that I personally subscribed to quite early. It follows the line that the internet is filled with bots, there aren't any real people left, and it's all just botted interactions that lead you to believe there are signs of life. Honestly, we've hit that point.

A supermajority of accounts on major social platforms are estimated to be automated, multimedia content is increasingly synthetic, and it's getting harder to tell what's happening (war media being a great test of this). The theory isn't wrong and is really playing out as anticipated, but at least there's a bit of hope for some good to come of it. What I've been thinking about since is what happens after the "public square" gets annihilated and looks like a wasteland of slop. Specifically, where people actually go, what they start to use, and what starts to matter as a result.

I touched on this briefly in the original post, but the internet has had a long, messy era of ownership (yes, I call it that even though we could argue semantics). Social media gave everyone a megaphone, but the writerly web is collapsing under the weight of synthetic content and even worse algorithmic manipulation. AI slop, partisan bait, and aggressive advertising have now become dominant much more quickly than anticipated.

What's replacing it can be seen as a regression, but honestly should be welcomed with open arms, is a readerly web defined by passive consumption of curated content rather than active participation. Think Substack and creators you have an actual connection to over Twitter, and passively reading a feed again without the necessity to engage. There's a nostalgia angle to this that I think matters as well. The internet doesn't really yearn for "old Twitter" or "early Facebook," but knowing that the person on the other end was real and brought a bit of their genuine selves to the table.

Engaging with various subculture-driven forums (shoutout GameFAQs), Myspace pages, AIM away messages, and early blog comment sections felt great and worked because they were small enough that trust was ambient. You didn't need verification because the community itself or your personal web of trust was the filter. We're not going back to that specific version of the internet, but the instinct driving that nostalgia is pointing somewhere useful: toward spaces where you can actually trust who you're engaging with.

This is the part I keep coming back to. The only digital social life that survives this shift is one built on verification. Not traditional IDV or some compliance nonsense, but the kind of assurance I wrote about in the original post. Knowing that the people in your group chat, your community, your forum are real humans who were invited or vouched for by someone you trust.

The digital spaces that will matter are gated, human-verified, and small enough to maintain signal. Discord servers with real moderation, subscriber-only communities built around specific subcultures, group chats where membership means something all will continue to grow. These aren't new ideas, but they're becoming the default rather than the niche. Platforms that figure out how to enable this at scale, through subscriptions or transaction volume rather than ad impressions, will be the ones that matter. People will pay a premium to know they're engaging with real people.

As digital spaces lose signal, physical presence also gains a premium. When you can't trust that the person replying to you online is real, showing up somewhere in person becomes the highest-signal thing you can do. That same nostalgia I mentioned earlier applies here, too. People are spending more on experiences to chase the feeling of being around other people in a way that the internet used to provide, and no longer does. Concerts, dinners, bars, and local meetups are returning as core gathering points, and they're growing because they offer something more meaningful than what's online at this point.

A year ago, I said the internet was dying, but it would bring us closer together. I still believe that.

The digital watering hole as we knew it is gone, overrun by bots and stripped of the social contract that actually made it work. But people still want to connect, and the nostalgia everyone feels for an older internet isn't really about the internet at all. The spaces that win from here, digital or physical, are the ones that earn it back.