I can tell you the exact moment I fell in love with the internet. It was about 2003. I was in my bedroom in Nottingham, probably nineteen, and I'd found a website called del.icio.us. It was a social bookmarking site -- you saved links, tagged them, and could see what other people were saving. That's it. No algorithm. No feed. Just people publicly collecting things they found interesting, and you could browse their collections like you'd flip through someone's record crate at a house party.

I stayed up until three in the morning following links from strangers. Design blogs I'd never heard of. Obscure music magazines from Japan. Someone's entire collection tagged "typography" that sent me down a rabbit hole I'm arguably still in. I remember closing my laptop and thinking: this is what the internet is for.

That feeling -- of stumbling into someone else's obsession and letting it reshape your own -- is the thing I miss most. And I don't think I'm being nostalgic. I think something genuinely broke.

The specific years

There's a window, roughly 2008 to 2015, that I think of as the golden era. Not because the technology was better -- it objectively wasn't -- but because the culture around it was. Twitter was still a place where you could follow 300 people and genuinely feel the pulse of whatever you cared about. Tumblr was this chaotic visual collage where teenagers and designers and weirdos were all sharing the same space. StumbleUpon would literally throw you at a random website and half the time it was brilliant. RSS readers like Google Reader meant you had your own personal newspaper assembled from sources you'd hand-picked.

I had a Google Reader setup that took me months to build. Hundreds of feeds, carefully organised into folders. Design blogs, advertising industry stuff, music magazines, football writing, tech commentary. Every morning I'd open it up and scroll through everything, and it felt like drinking from a really good fire hose. Not overwhelming -- curated. By me. For me. When Google killed Reader in 2013, I felt genuinely angry, which is an absurd reaction to a free product shutting down, but I wasn't the only one. It felt like losing a room in your house.

The old internet rewarded you for being curious. The new internet rewards you for being loud. That's a fundamental shift, and we're still pretending it doesn't matter.

What was actually different

People romanticise the old internet as if it were inherently more authentic. It wasn't. There was plenty of rubbish. What was different was the relationship between effort and reward. Finding good things required work. You had to actively seek out blogs, follow links, subscribe to feeds, maintain your own reading list. The friction was the feature. Because you'd invested effort in assembling your sources, you paid attention to what they produced. You didn't skim. You read.

Twitter in 2011 was the perfect example. I followed maybe 200 people -- a careful mix of advertising folk, culture writers, designers, a few comedians, some journalists. My timeline was chronological. Every tweet appeared in order. If I opened the app during the Super Bowl or during a big breaking news moment, I could feel the collective reaction happening in real time. Not through trending topics or an algorithm surfacing "what people are talking about." Through the actual people I'd chosen to listen to, all responding simultaneously. It was like being in a stadium.

That Twitter is completely gone. The timeline is algorithmic now, which means it's optimised for engagement rather than connection. The people I chose to follow get drowned out by the people the platform thinks I should see. The stadium has been replaced by a shopping centre -- loud, commercial, and designed to keep you walking around rather than actually finding what you came for.

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The curation economy we lost: Delicious had 5.3 million users at its peak, each one essentially publishing a public taste profile through their bookmarks. Tumblr's reblog culture meant good things spread through human judgement, not algorithmic amplification. StumbleUpon served 60 billion stumbles before it shut down. These weren't niche tools. They were the infrastructure of human-powered discovery.

The specific feeling

Here's what I'm actually grieving, if I'm honest with myself. It's not the platforms. Platforms come and go. It's the feeling of being a participant in something shared that was also somehow personal. My internet was different from your internet, but we were all making it from the same raw materials. The act of curating -- choosing what to follow, what to save, what to share, what to ignore -- was itself a creative act. Your bookmarks were a self-portrait.

I used to send links to friends constantly. Still do, actually. "Have you seen this?" was my love language. A really good link -- an article that made you think, a design portfolio that stopped you cold, a piece of writing that articulated something you'd felt but couldn't name -- that was currency. You'd send it to three people who'd appreciate it, and they'd send you things back, and over time you built these informal networks of taste. No platform facilitated it. You just did it through email, through DMs, through Delicious tags.

My Delicious bookmarks were more revealing than my CV. Every tag was a piece of evidence about what I cared about. "Typography." "Tokyo." "Advertising-history." "Things-I-want-to-make." It was a map of my mind that I'd built one link at a time over years. I've never had anything quite like it since.

Can it come back?

I've been building products for the past month or so -- Trove, CultureTerminal, various other things -- and I'd be lying if I said the old internet wasn't somewhere in the back of my mind with every one of them. Trove is basically my attempt to rebuild what Delicious gave me: a personal collection of links that, over time, reveals patterns in what I care about. CultureTerminal is trying to be the curated feed that Google Reader was -- interesting things from interesting sources, presented without algorithmic interference.

But I'm not deluded about it. You can't rebuild an era. The 2010-2015 internet worked partly because of the specific platforms, but mostly because of the specific moment. Social media was still new enough that people used it sincerely. The commercial incentives hadn't fully kicked in. There were no influencers, no content strategies, no growth hacking. People shared things because they found them interesting, not because sharing was a business model.

That innocence, for want of a less naff word, isn't coming back. The internet is a mature industry now. Every platform is optimised for attention and revenue. Every piece of content exists within a system designed to maximise engagement. Even the "indie web" movement, which I'm broadly sympathetic to, can feel a bit like adults playing with Lego and pretending it's 1995.

What I'm actually doing about it

So here's where I've landed, sitting at my kitchen table at half ten at night, which is when I do most of my thinking about this. The internet I miss isn't coming back. But the behaviour it enabled -- active curation, personal discovery, sharing with intention -- that's not platform-dependent. That's a choice.

I still use RSS. I still send links to friends. I still bookmark obsessively. I'm building tools that prioritise human curation over algorithmic sorting. Not because I think I'll recreate 2012, but because the underlying idea was right: your information diet should be something you assemble with care, not something that's assembled for you by a machine optimising for someone else's business model.

The internet I miss taught me that curation is a creative act. That your taste is built link by link, follow by follow, bookmark by bookmark. That the effort of finding things is inseparable from the pleasure of having found them.

I can't go back. But I can keep building as if those ideas still matter. Because I think they do. More than ever, actually, now that the alternative is so clearly not working.