quxnet - about

About

The old internet was for farmers. The new internet is for cattle.

I've been thinking a lot about what happened to the Internet lately
and what I miss so much about it from when I was young. The original
promise was that it would open the entire world of human knowledge
to everyone, but instead, the internet today is controlled by
algorithms designed to offer suggestions based on things we already
like. One of the greatest losses of the internet age is a loss of
serendipity. It's been overtaken by corporations, so what used to
feel like a magical place of discovery has become a commoditized
service we can't escape.

We've lost sight of the Internet's potential because people have
decided it's easier to eat the fast food of Google, Facebook and
Instagram, rather than put effort into their own creations or go
exploring to find something new. This plays straight into the hands
of advertisers and companies who only want you to play in their
walled garden while they harvest your data.

I can remember chatting with people across the world on IRC over our
56k modem, reading forums filled with interesting (human-made)
content, and feeling that magic of escaping into a playground of
possibility. We lost an Internet we could explore and discover in an
organic way for something synthetic, curated, and forced. I miss
that sense of discovery and searching for new ways to connect with
people online. Forums were an obscure and fascinating source of
content, easily searchable receptacles of information on specific
subject matters. I've grown weary of being spoon fed by algorithms
made by tech bro platforms, so that's why I made quxnet. A place
that repudiates all of that, and restores the internet era
counterculture that made the web worth caring about in the first
place.

See you on the boards.

-sysop