I have watched the Internet slowly turn from something that felt like a library into something that feels like a store. And the strange part is that I can’t point to any single moment when it happened.
There was no announcement. Nobody put up a sign saying that the Internet was now primarily a place to buy things. It just happened, one search result, one sponsored post, one newsletter pop-up, and one limited-time offer at a time.
Try looking up how to do something fairly ordinary. Fix a problem with your computer, learn a new skill, or work out which settings to change in an app. There’s a good chance you’ll find a list of products you didn’t ask for, a buying guide disguised as an explanation, and a website that wants your email address before it will show you the answer. Somewhere in the middle of all that, there might even be the information you came for.
I don’t remember it always feeling this way.
I remember finding websites that existed simply because someone cared enough about a subject to write about it. Personal blogs with no apparent business plan. Forums where people spent an unreasonable amount of time helping complete strangers. Pages devoted to obscure hobbies, old games, programming problems, and things that probably interested no more than a few hundred people in the entire world.
Some of those websites were ugly. Plenty were wrong. A few seemed determined to make reading as difficult as possible. But they had a quality that I increasingly miss: they seemed to have been made because somebody had something to share.
You could follow a link from a blog to another blog, end up on a discussion board, read an argument between two strangers about something you had never heard of, and come away knowing a little more than when you started. There wasn’t always a next step. Sometimes the point was simply to learn something.
Of course, nostalgia has a habit of editing out the inconvenient bits. The old Internet had spam, banner ads, pop-ups, scams, and plenty of people trying to make a quick buck. Finding good information could take ages. It wasn’t some innocent paradise that commerce suddenly corrupted.
But I do think the balance has changed.
More and more of the web is now built around the question of what it can get us to do next. Click another link. Watch another video. Sign up. Install the app. Buy the thing. Even when a page answers our question, it often seems reluctant to let us leave with just the answer.
And the change isn’t limited to websites. Open a social feed and notice how much of it is someone selling a product, a course, a lifestyle, or themselves. I used to think of social media as a way to keep up with people. Now, on some days, finding an actual update from someone I know feels like a pleasant surprise.
The particularly odd thing is that we’ve begun to treat curiosity as a form of purchase intent.
You can read about cameras without wanting to buy one. You can look up a city without planning a holiday. You can be interested in fitness without needing a new subscription, or curious about how something works without wanting a list of the ten best products in that category.
Sometimes you just want to know.
I appreciate the irony of complaining about this while running a company that builds websites for clients. We work on search visibility, user journeys, and all the things that help businesses reach people online. I understand why those things matter. Useful information costs time and money to produce. Businesses need customers. And I don’t think there’s anything wrong with earning a living from work that people value.
In fact, one of the best things about the Internet is that it allows a small business to reach people it never could have reached otherwise. I’ve seen that side of it firsthand.
The problem, I think, begins when every piece of information has to justify itself as a way to make a sale.
When we build a page, it’s easy to measure visits, clicks, sign-ups, and conversions. It’s much harder to measure whether someone found an honest answer, discovered a new interest, or simply enjoyed reading something. So we end up getting very good at improving the numbers we can see, sometimes at the expense of the things we can’t.
Search engines didn’t invent this incentive, and social platforms didn’t invent advertising. But when so much of what people discover passes through a small number of feeds and search results, the pressure to make content that performs well becomes enormous. A thoughtful article and a page written solely to attract search traffic can start to look remarkably similar from a distance. The second one is often much easier to produce at scale.
AI adds another interesting complication. It could make it far easier to find a clear answer without visiting six pages full of ads. That would be a genuine improvement. But it also makes it cheaper than ever to fill the web with material that nobody felt was worth writing in the first place.
And if an AI system can give us an answer drawn from someone else’s work without sending a reader to that person, we ought to ask what will encourage people to keep sharing what they know. I don’t pretend to have a neat answer to that. I suspect we’ll be dealing with it for quite some time.
None of this means the Internet has stopped being useful. Far from it. Wikipedia is still there. Open-source communities still publish an extraordinary amount of knowledge. Independent writers, small forums, and people with wonderfully specific interests still make things available for anyone to read.
In fact, I keep finding them, often by accident. A detailed answer on a forum that has been sitting there for years. A personal blog maintained by someone who clearly loves the subject. A page that explains exactly what I wanted to know and then, rather refreshingly, asks nothing more of me.
Those little discoveries remind me why I loved the web in the first place.
I don’t want an Internet without shops. I buy things online, work with businesses that sell things online, and enjoy the convenience as much as anyone else. I’d just like an Internet where not every visit feels like walking into one.
Perhaps the library hasn’t disappeared. People are still adding books to it every day. We’ve just made it much harder to find among all the shops.
I’d like to do my small part to keep it around. Even if, after publishing this, I will almost certainly check how many people read it. (Old habits, unfortunately.)
Cover photos by Dmytro Kormylets and Wojtek Pacześ on Pexels.