It Is Time To Build A New Internet

A second essay by mrmarket, arguing that the mainstream internet — what the author calls the Obvious Internet — is a dead organism that can't be moderated back to health, and that the honest move is to abandon it and build something small in its place. The opening image sets the tone: "Every morning that we open our phones and laptops, we are staring pitifully at a necrotic digital organism."

The diagnosis

The author does technical and founder writing for a living and still agrees that marketers are, functionally, a virus — not evil, just replicating within an open host system, which is bad for the host regardless of intent. The trouble with fixing this by building new platforms is that it's like generating new cells inside an already-infected body; the profit motive follows you in. As long as companies and their employees use the same internet you do, there's an incentive to ruin whatever you build, and keeping them out is hopeless. Even a tree-like invite-only forum, each trusted member inviting their own interesting friends, eventually admits someone with a profit motive.

The decay catalog is specific. Reddit is full of AI-generated or AI-assisted comments and astroturfed product endorsements in any community that can be funneled toward a purchase. Twitter has decent profiles and threads buried in trolling, bots, and AI slop. LinkedIn as a good-faith networking site is trashed, Google as a search engine is trashed, and Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook have been bad so long the author has stopped checking. Discord, group chats, and certain subreddits are still decent. The surviving good-faith spaces are secret invite-only forums, Hacker News, and corners of bearblog, with Kagi making it easier to find the remnants of a more honest past. There is no true decentralized public commons left.

The framing the author keeps returning to is a stewardship failure. The qualities that made the internet great — democratized access and contribution, a low barrier to entry, ease of use — are exactly the qualities that made it trivially easy to pollute. This is offered as another example of humans failing to be conscientious stewards of an open commons.

The model

The goal is a living, growing archive of knowledge and stories built and studied in good faith. The reference points are deliberately pre-internet: the Talmud, with centuries of carefully preserved commentary and debate; the Buddhist sutras, spanning hundreds of years of contradictions, axioms, and collaboration where commentary is core to engaging the text; and the collaborative scientific tradition, where papers stay in conversation with prior work. None are perfect — each has its politics, failures, and suppressions — but they share three properties: no ads, human-written, and the surviving texts were studied and discussed largely in good faith. The modern examples are Wikipedia and large parts of Hacker News, which stay decently clean because participants treat them as somewhat sacred and understand that polluting them serves no one.

Keeping it un-enshittified

The author admits this would be nearly impossible, then sketches what it would take anyway. Never treat the commons as a market — never see it as another mine to extract and resell value from. Raise the barrier to entry, or add friction; the early internet stayed good partly because its high barrier selected for people whose technical curiosity outran their commercial ambition. Shift the incentive of participation toward something altruistic, optimizing for integrity rather than engagement or any other exploitable metric. This is explicitly a network for a non-median user — someone who values community and thoughtfulness over money or popularity — which means it will necessarily be small. The median user will keep using Google, and that's fine. The closing concession is the thesis in one line: "Some things are more important than frictionlessness and a sleek UI."

Where it fits

This is the essay that grounds the concept page high-friction-commons — deliberately trading scale and frictionlessness for good-faith participation and spam resistance. It is the constructive counterpart to enshittification: where Doctorow describes how open platforms decay, this asks what you'd build if you assumed the decay is terminal. The "virus in an open host" and stewardship-failure framings connect to cory-doctorow's account of the removed regulatory checks, though the responses differ — Doctorow argues the fix is political and collective, while this essay is closer to retreat-and-rebuild. The good-faith-archive target sits near the digital-garden tradition of persistent, interlinked, human-written knowledge. The author's other piece, what-happened-to-nerds, diagnoses the people; this one proposes leaving their platforms behind.