Serious Problems of the Internet in Recent Years

I have been using the internet since 2006. I witnessed the early days of YouTube when there was almost no content, the rise and transformation of social networks like VKontakte and MySpace, and the shift toward modern messengers. When old platforms disappeared, I took it as natural evolution. But recently I realized something alarming: we — and especially future users of the internet — are rapidly losing an incredibly vast source of high-quality information.

1. The Death of Forums

Discussions have migrated from public forums into closed Telegram channels. Information about repairing equipment, troubleshooting obscure technical problems, and sharing specialized knowledge is now "passed between users in a Telegram channel" instead of being indexed by search engines for decades. These closed groups are invisible to search. The knowledge they contain is effectively lost to the wider internet.

Forums were imperfect, but they were public, searchable, and persistent. A question asked in 2009 about fixing a particular washing machine model could still help someone in 2024. A Telegram chat from 2023 helps no one outside that group.

2. The Transformation of Social Networks

The old VKontakte stored information openly with convenient navigation. You could browse through communities, find archived discussions, and stumble upon useful content from years ago. Modern platforms — Instagram, TikTok, Telegram — are "transient" by design: content rapidly disappears from memory and feeds. After 8 months, finding anything becomes nearly impossible.

Meanwhile, serious platforms that do preserve information — , Reddit, VC.ru — are losing popularity relative to the ephemeral ones. The cultural center of gravity is shifting toward platforms designed to forget.

3. The Disappearance of Personal Professional Websites

There was a time when dedicated enthusiasts maintained personal websites full of narrowly specialized, deeply expert content. A mechanic might have a site about carburetor tuning. A doctor might maintain pages about specific rare conditions. These have been replaced by "commercial bait websites" — sites whose articles invariably contain plugs urging you to "contact the professionals at our private clinic or auto repair shop."

The content has degraded to "short entries of a few hundred characters" designed not to inform but to capture leads. The depth is gone. The genuine expertise has been drowned out by SEO-optimized marketing copy.

4. The Degradation of Search Engines

SMM marketing has improved the ability to find commercial offerings, but when you search for actual information — how something works, why something fails, what the real trade-offs are — "you drown in landing pages and bait sites." Search algorithms are now oriented toward "results desired by advertisers" rather than toward high-quality, informative content.

The result is a vicious cycle: genuine content creators get less traffic, so they produce less content, so search engines have less quality content to index, so they serve even more commercial results. The information web is being strangled by the commercial web.

5. The Rise of Artificial Intelligence

AI does not generate new information. It performs "analysis and compilation of existing information on the internet." When the underlying corpus degrades (see points 1 through 4), so does the AI's output. The author suspects that powerful interests will use AI systems for "promoting their own narratives through AI when providing information" — essentially weaponizing AI's apparent authority to push agendas.

There is a deeper irony: AI systems trained on the open web are contributing to the destruction of that same open web, as content farms generate AI-written material that further pollutes search results and degrades the training data for future models.

6. Government Regulation of Access to Information

"The World Wide Web was free of any control" in the 2000s. Now governments across the world are restricting access. This is "happening in all countries and will become significantly stricter going forward." While some regulation targets genuinely harmful content, the side effect is that it "also restricts access to useful information that poses no harm to anyone."

Overblocking, VPN restrictions, and content removal demands all chip away at the universality of the internet. What was once a single global information space is fragmenting into nationally controlled zones.

7. The Commercialization of the Internet

In the early days, content was created "by users with good intentions" — people who wanted to share knowledge, help strangers, and contribute to a collective resource. Today, "advertising exists only to keep alternative platforms afloat." Instagram is the poster child: "the entire mobile application is oriented primarily toward promoting advertising."

The economic logic of the internet has inverted. Content is no longer the product; attention is the product, and content is merely the bait. This means that content is optimized for engagement rather than accuracy, for clicks rather than depth, for monetization rather than usefulness.

Conclusion

"The process of data transformation on the World Wide Web is irreversible, and we have no way to influence it." The author recommends looking for information "in other places, for example the old-fashioned way — in books."

This is not nostalgia for a golden age that never existed. The early internet had its own problems — unreliable information, poor design, limited access. But it had one quality that is now vanishing: persistence. Information posted to a public forum or personal website in 2005 was still findable in 2015. Information posted to a Telegram channel or Instagram story in 2025 may be effectively gone by 2026. We are building an internet that forgets, and that forgetting is accelerating.

P.S. I tried to use Instagram three times and could never adapt — that is how inconvenient and commercially oriented it has always been.