CULTURE

If one of your New Year’s resolutions was to spend less time doomscrolling, you are not alone. You know the internet has come to a dire state when you can classify most of what you encounter here as either “content” (neutral at best) or “slop” (derogatory). Which makes it wild to think that even 10 years ago, spending time on the internet could feel vital, interesting, and constructive. You could read weird little niche blogs and join forums to talk about your hyperspecific interests, and catch up on pop culture and politics on your social media feeds, and then, sure, waste time doing dumb quizzes or games if you wanted to.

So how did we get from there to here, when the internet feels so overwhelming it’s hard to stop using it, but is so riddled with detritus that it becomes ever more difficult to see what we get from giving it our time? On this week’s Explain It to Me podcast, host Jonquilyn Hill talked to the journalist Max Read about why the internet feels so full of trash and rage bait these days, and whether the problem is us or it. After all, as Read points out, millennials used to be the internet’s main characters. That’s no longer the case — so if you’re a millennial, it stands to reason that it’s started to feel a little weird to you.

—Constance Grady, senior correspondent

How millennials fell out of love with the internet

A frowning face with a single tear emoji on a black background of a smartphone, held in a left hand

Jaap Arriens/NurPhoto via Getty Images

If you feel like the internet is full of slop and rage bait these days, you aren’t alone.

Anger is fueling the internet so much that Oxford decided to make rage bait the word of 2025. But if you were born in the 1980s or 1990s, you probably remember a different time: the days of logging into a computer at your local library or in your family room, printing song lyrics, writing in your LiveJournal, or mulling over your MySpace Top 8.

Those days are long behind us, but Max Read remembers this era too. He’s a writer and has a Substack called Read Max, all about technology and culture. On a recent episode of Explain It to Me, Vox’s weekly call-in podcast, Read says that era was a much different landscape than the one we have online now.

“There were fewer mega platforms — by which I mean these huge sites that became the whole internet for people. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, places where you go and you can spend hours without ever leaving that particular website,” he said.

So what caused this shift in the internet? And was the change inevitable?

Read the full story »