We were fooled.

Jekyll, the most popular static site generator, was released in 2008. That’s around the time I registered the alexn.org domain, although I wouldn’t start blogging on it until later. I had another blog before this, it was powered by WordPress, hosted by a local service provider, but it died due to neglect, the articles I had on it lost forever. And before turning it off, I discovered that it had been infested with malware.

That’s how I could see the value in a static website generator like Jekyll: a git repository seemed immortal, I could no longer lose my old thoughts, and the cheaper it is to host, the higher the probability that it would stay alive and kicking, just waiting for me to come back and share new articles. And nothing could be more secure than a static website.

This was happening around 2010, it was right when people were starting to use social media, alongside forums, like Hacker News, Reddit, to distribute and comment on links. So tech blogs stopped having their own commenting widget, and those that continued to have comments, outsourced them to services such as Disqus. Alongside comments, amongst dynamic features of blogs, other casualties were trackbacks and pingbacks (archive), which were the equivalent of seeing who mentioned or quoted you on social media. And yet another was the mailing list, outsourced to Feedburner, then Mailgun. In optimizing my online presence, I achieved what I wanted, but in retrospect, I now realize that optimizing for hosting costs is foolish.

Up until around 2010, it seemed like RSS/Atom feeds were thriving, but then in 2013 Google killed Reader, being perceived as the death of RSS/Atom feed readers. They were trying to create their own Facebook competitor, Google+, and Reader was standing in their way. I can’t tell you how much joy the death of Google+ brought, I’ve never been happier about an online service dying, but I digress. Well, feed readers are still alive and thriving, just with a much smaller audience. The web is dying, and Google Reader proved to be the canary in the coal mine.

It’s 2025, and you’re still posting and commenting on links, but you’re most likely doing it on social media. Facebook, 𝕏/Twitter, LinkedIn are deprioritizing links, which means that posts containing links will have a lower reach. Let me repeat that — social media silos are fighting against web links, the foundation of the open web. They do so to “encourage” content and discussions on their own platforms, noble goals a stakeholder would say, except that now these platforms are filled with politics, rage, and AI slop.

You’re no longer in control of what you consume on the web. Algorithms are now in control, and those algorithms want you to be a mindless zombie that consumes ads, ads that serve malware, scams, or politics. Not to be misunderstood, I recently bought theater tickets to a show via an ad, curated ads can clearly be valuable, but curation is incompatible with the ambitions of these social networks.

I’d rather not leave the original sin out of this discussion, of course: Google Search becoming increasingly filled with SEO spam, and again, index curation was incompatible with Google’s ambitions due to the conflict of interest generated by their DoubleClick acquisition. After that, everything else was inevitable, such as Google increasingly stealing website content to show it directly in results, due to how poisoned the index became.

It wasn’t always like this. I remember a young Google filled with interesting websites, a young Twitter filled with enthusiasts talking about programming, gardening, other hobbies, a young Facebook filled with photos and life updates of acquaintances. And that was the norm, not the exception. But following 100 people on social media, waiting for their status updates, wouldn’t generate much engagement, so the platforms started force-feeding people the status updates of strangers and bots, discussions converging inevitably to politics, sprinkled with rage, and low-quality humor, as that’s what keeps people engaged.

There are still people online with interests other than politics, but I bet that many of you, even if you aren’t contributing political sludge, at the very least you’re engaging in doomscrolling, as that’s what the algorithm optimizes for. To make matters worse, even when there’s no algorithm, people are now so trained on this behavior that it persists, as seen on Mastodon or Bluesky. You could do anything you want, and you could be anyone you’d like when going online, and yet, many willingly choose to be armchair political commentators. In fairness, Godwin’s law was always a thing. And it’s easier to keep your feed curated when there’s no algorithm, but only if you’re willing to unfriend/unfollow acquaintances who have gone off the deep end.

And now social media platforms are being filled with AI slop, with the platform owners providing the tools for it. Meta/Facebook, 𝕏/Twitter, LinkedIn are literally encouraging AI-generated posts, because it’s a cheap way of keeping you active on their platforms, in a zombie state, ready to consume whatever ads they throw at you. For these companies, it’s a good thing if we are getting dumber due to ChatGPT.

We’ve outsourced our voices on the Internet, because it was convenient. We’ve outsourced our minds as well.

But we are people with ideas, feelings, aspirations, lives. We are not machines, we are not automatons, we have souls. And we deserve to own our identity, our voice, and our thoughts. We deserve access to an open web, a web that’s good for connecting with like-minded people, a web good for learning and exploring our passions.

We were fooled, but we can fight back. Don’t let algorithms control your actions, don’t outsource your voice and your mind. Choose wisely, as in the future we may find ourselves completely unable to make choices.