There is talk about privacy, and the lack thereof. There is talk about the algorithms and how they serve up rage bait. There is talk about intrusive advertising in the guise of suggested posts. There is talk about AI and the slop that’s being generated and foisted upon us after it scrapes all of our data.
While all of this is worth talking about one thing I hardly hear mentioned is that is the near complete removal of individuality.
In the past there was MySpace with page after page of gaudy colour schemes and tiled backgrounds. It was a pastime to poke fun at these pages; we all did it as each page was akin to a teenagers bedroom. But you know what? Think back to your teenage bedroom. Think of the posters on the walls, the piles of stuff, the other random decorations. That was who you were and that is what the MySpace pages were: glorious. And the web was a better place because of it. People were allowed to express themselves and learned a little HTML along the way.
YouTube also used to allow page customization. Same deal, there were some god awful profiles out there but fuck, so what? Again, this was people making something their own.
I signed up for Facebook when it was brand new to people outside of colleges (2006), and I remember being a little surprised at the near complete lack of personal customization on the platform. Sure, you could add a banner and an user picture and some info about you, but that was pretty much it. You got blue and white as your colour scheme and the layout was what it was.
And slowly, but surely, the old services shrank or died off and the new services followed Facebook’s idea by not offering any real personalization and now it’s just the way things are. Status quo.
Even the platforms that still exist follow this model. MySpace is a grey slate of boring. And YouTube is a stale grid of videos in either white or dark mode. This is because, of course, Google doesn’t want you to express yourself. They want to serve you ads.
Facebook, Xitter, et all have web interfaces you can’t change in any way past a user and header picture. Ditto Reddit and Substack. And Medium. And Bluesky. And Twitch. And don’t get me stared on LinkedIn1. (Although I’d fucking LOVE to see what LinkedIn would look like if people could customize their profiles a la early 2000’s MySpace. Holy shit, how awesome would that be?)
And the apps, well… apps are notoriously non-customizable.
Like YouTube, none of these platforms want you to express yourself past a profile and header picture. They want your data and they want to serve you ads.
So yes, these platforms are scraping and selling our data. Yes they’re practically, openly abusing privacy laws. Yes, their algorithms are feeding us rage bait nonsense and AI Slop. Yes, they’re all part of the Great Enshittification of everything.
And along with all of that, they’ve also made the Internet look like a North American suburb.
Today, if you want any type of customization you’re stuck on the fringes with WordPress2 which has a never ending supply of themes or, if you can code, you can create your own look and feel (or even your own website). Of course, the tradeoff is that hardly anyone will read your shit because it’s not on a major platform. And you won’t spend hours and days of your life arguing with total nutters.
And you know what? that’s totally more than ok. At least you’re not fucking boring.
- LinkedIn is the single worst website on the Internet. Words cannot express how much I loath LinkedIn. It’s a corporate cesspool. The fact that LinkedIn is now considered the standard for networking, “resumes”, and applying for jobs makes me physically ill. ↩︎
- There is Tumblr which is still around and looks like a half assed Xitter/Instagram/Wordpress mashup. I think. I don’t know. It does apparently support themes that, from what I can see, are suspiciously WordPress-y. Turns out Tumblr is owned by Automatic which is, essentially, WordPress. So, yeah. ↩︎