I don’t know when it happened exactly, but one day I woke up and realised the internet stopped being funny. Like, not “haha memes” funny. I mean the kind of stupid, delirious laughter that comes from staying up until 3AM talking to strangers about nothing and everything. The kind of laughter that feels like community, like magic, like being weird together in the dark.

Now everything feels like it’s been pressure-washed by a brand consultant. All the corners sanded down. Every post, every joke, every image perfectly optimised to fit into a square. You can feel the algorithm breathing down everyone’s neck, whispering “more engagement” like a needy demon. The whole place smells of reheated content and self-conscious irony.

I scroll through my feed and it’s just… sludge. People pretending to be human for metrics. People pretending not to care while caring so much. Everyone’s selling something, even if it’s just their personality. The vibes are gone. The ghosts have moved out.

Sometimes I miss 2006 so bad it hurts. I miss bad graphics and glowing text and stupid quizzes like “which obsolete operating system are you?” (I was Windows 98, obviously. Crashing constantly but with charm.) I miss the chaos, the anonymity, the messiness. You could be anyone back then. You could reinvent yourself nightly. Now, everything’s archived forever. Every bad joke is a scar that never fades.

The internet used to feel like a haunted house built by weird little goths with too much HTML and not enough sleep. Now it feels like a shopping mall haunted by influencers. There are still echoes, though. You hear them in the margins sometimes. In a forum that somehow hasn’t died. In a meme that’s too niche to be monetised. In someone’s blog post where they accidentally sound real.

Maybe that’s why I still write here, yelling into the void with my whole chest. Because sometimes, if you scream long enough into the static, someone screams back.

And for one fleeting second, it feels like 2006 again.