20 Years On The Internet

Happy 20th birthday, quinnstephens.com!

My homepage in 2024. Not looking bad for a vicenarian!

On April 27, 2004, I registered quinnstephens.com and took my first steps onto the Internet as a proper content creator. Of course we didn’t have the term content creator back then—in fact, there wasn’t really a term for making your own stuff on the Web at all. Except for nerd. Which I was, and proud of it.

A decade ago, I wrote a post reminiscing about my first ten years on the Internet. And while quite a lot has changed online in the years since—from cryptocurrency, to the threat of misinformation and radicalization, to generative AI, to a whole generation of young people who came of age on their smartphones and have the battle scars to show for it—I’m struck by how much less momentous this past decade has seemed compared to that first one¹. I guess it’s hard to top a period in which, for many of us, the Internet went from a small part of our daily routine to a place we have to actively escape when we need to clear our heads.

From 2014 to 2024, the breakneck pace of online progress eased somewhat. New social media platforms entered the scene and tried to fight their way to thriving userbases, but none of them re-invented the wheel, and few have even tried to. The basic social media rhythm—finding people to follow, posting text/images/videos in the hope someone will follow you, snarkily replying to other peoples’ comments, and maybe getting in big silly fights—isn’t much different on Threads or Bluesky now compared to Facebook and Twitter back then. And of course Facebook and Twitter (now X, a rebrand almost no one seems to take seriously) are still around.

Probably the biggest exception to that rule has been TikTok, the massively popular short-form video app with the most aggressively tuned algorithm this side of a slot machine. TikTok didn’t exactly do anything new—services like Vine and Snapchat had already used short-form video as the crux of their success—but it did it very well, and it created a particularly addictive experience by providing users with an endless stream of content tailored to them with great precision, largely eliminating their need (or desire) to seek out engaging videos on their own. Or so I’m told; I’ve never really used it. And I probably won’t, because as I write this there’s a good chance the U.S. government is going to follow the lead of a number of other countries and ban the app if it doesn’t cut ties with the Chinese Communist Party, with which it has apparently been sharing a great deal of user data. We’ll see how that goes! I imagine YouTube, Instagram and Snapchat will be quite eager to scoop up as many of its dedicated users as they can if it does indeed get yanked from the app stores.

Yet outside of the TikTok drama, and a lot of hubbub about Twitter/X over the last few years, there’s been a quiet shift that has caught my attention: traffic on all social media sites has been trending downward. These huge platforms felt, for years, like the final form of the Internet, but their dominance may not be assured after all. If you squint, it sure seems like Internet users are placing less of their focus on the big noisy attention marketplaces, and turning instead to more intimate spaces where they can talk to their actual friends.

I certainly am; I left Twitter years ago, and my posts on Instagram and YouTube have slowed to a crawl. At some point they stopped feeling like a fun place to hang out and more like a second job—one where I didn’t earn any money. My attempts to carve out a space on newer platforms, like Mastodon, Hive, and Threads, have not been a rousing success. It’s hard to spend the time and effort on these spaces to build any sort of community when you don’t really enjoy it (and it’s even harder when you now have children and way less free time). I get a lot more out of chatting with friends and sharing art in Slack and Discord, with people I actually see face-to-face on a regular basis. There’s still part of me that craves a big audience and wants to be in the middle of the cultural conversation, but if I’m ever going to get there, I’m confident it won’t be by battling the algorithms of the social media giants.

Whether or not this trend holds, it’s nice to see the Internet spreading itself out again. It feels a bit more like the landscape where my site first launched: rugged, largely unmapped, and full of out-of-the-way surprises. When you consider that it’s never been easier to put up your own website than it is right now, with an absolute wealth of free tools, tutorials, and hosting options, the Internet is primed for a renaissance of the kind of weird niche content that once flourished here. I couldn’t care less about the next Twitter—show me the next Homestar Runner.

That’s why I feel a little swell of pride at this 20-year milestone. My website has never been a huge deal; it’s never drawn much traffic, and it’s never made me any money, at least not directly. But it’s my own space, from top to bottom, and I take pride in keeping it functional and lovely to look at. It’s a little courtyard garden: a space that I hope will impress the rare visitor, but at the end of the day, it’s for me. Here’s to more decades to come.

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