The Internet Was More Fun Before Everyone Became a Brand
There was a time when going online felt less like entering a market place and more like wandering into a strange neighborhood where nobody quite knew what the rules were yet. Peop…
That version of the internet has not disappeared completely, but it has become harder to find. Today, far more of what we see online has been polished through the logic of branding. Individuals have content pillars, visual identities, audience strategies, niches, positioning statements, personal brands, posting schedules and analytics dashboards. Even people who are not selling anything sometimes behave as though they are managing a small media company whose only product is themselves.
I understand why this happened because the internet became economically important. Careers are built online, businesses depend on visibility, creators can earn a living from audiences, and professional opportunities increasingly arrive through platforms that reward consistency and recognizable identities. There is nothing inherently wrong with taking your online presence seriously. The problem is that once everyone starts behaving like a brand, the internet begins losing some of the unpredictability that made it interesting in the first place.
Before Everything Needed a Strategy
Early personal websites were often spectacularly impractical. They had blinking text, strange fonts, visitor counters, animated GIFs, unnecessary background music, neon colors and pages dedicated to subjects that interested approximately twelve people on Earth. There was usually no coherent visual identity and certainly no carefully planned user journey. Yet those sites frequently told you far more about the person who made them than a perfectly optimized modern profile ever could.
The same was true of blogs. People wrote posts because something annoyed them, because they had just watched a film, because they wanted to document a trip, because they had an obscure theory or because they simply felt like writing. A personal blog could contain an essay about politics, a review of a terrible restaurant, photographs from a holiday, thoughts about a book and an inexplicable rant about a neighbor's cat. Nobody seemed particularly worried that the topics were inconsistent.
Today, that inconsistency would probably be identified as a branding problem. Someone would advise the blogger to define their niche, develop three to five content pillars and focus on the subjects their audience responds to best. The recommendation would be perfectly reasonable if the objective were maximizing reach. It would also make the blog more predictable.
The internet became more professional, but professionalism came with standardization. Once people began studying which formats performed well, those formats began spreading. Once platforms rewarded certain styles of content, creators adapted to those styles. The result is an internet that often looks more polished than it did twenty years ago while somehow feeling less strange.
We Started Treating Ourselves Like Products
The phrase "personal brand" would have sounded peculiar in ordinary conversation not very long ago. A brand belonged to a company, a product or perhaps a celebrity whose public image needed deliberate management. Now, ordinary professionals are routinely told that they need one. The advice appears everywhere: build your personal brand, establish authority, become known for something, optimize your profile and make sure people immediately understand your value proposition.
Some of this is genuinely useful. If someone searches for your name because they are considering hiring you, working with you or inviting you to speak somewhere, having a clear and credible online presence helps. The internet has made reputation more visible, and pretending otherwise would be naïve. There is a difference, however, between presenting yourself clearly and gradually turning yourself into an ongoing marketing campaign.
Once you begin thinking of yourself as a brand, ordinary behavior starts acquiring strategic implications. Should you post this if it does not fit your niche? Should you comment on that subject if it might confuse your audience? Does this photograph reinforce the image you want to project? Is this opinion consistent with how you have positioned yourself?
It becomes possible to live online while constantly observing yourself from outside. You are simultaneously the person having the experience and the communications department deciding whether the experience is on-brand. Something funny happens and part of your brain immediately evaluates whether it could become a post. You visit somewhere beautiful and begin mentally composing the caption before you have finished looking at it.
Everyone Has a Content Strategy Now
One of the clearest signs of how much the internet has changed is how ordinary the word "content" has become. We used to have photographs, articles, videos, jokes, drawings, diary entries, conversations and random things people uploaded. Now they can all be compressed into one strangely industrial category: content. The word is useful professionally, but it also reveals how we have started thinking about creative expression as inventory.
Once something becomes content, it enters a production system. Content needs to be created consistently, distributed, repurposed, optimized and measured. One idea becomes a long-form post, which becomes a carousel, which becomes three short videos, which becomes a quote card, which becomes a newsletter section, which eventually reappears six months later because evergreen content should be recycled. This is efficient, and efficiency is exactly what makes it feel so different from the old internet.
The creator economy intensified this because posting regularly can now be a job. People whose incomes depend on visibility cannot simply disappear for two months because they have nothing interesting to say. Platforms reward activity, audiences expect consistency and sponsors want predictable output. Creativity becomes partly industrial because it has to sustain a business.
The strange part is how these professional habits have spread to people who are not professional creators. Someone with no product, sponsorship or commercial ambition can still worry that they have not posted enough recently. They may think about engagement, hooks, reach and whether their profile has a recognizable theme. The logic of professional media has seeped into ordinary self-expression.
The Rise of the LinkedIn Human
LinkedIn may be the clearest example of what happens when branding logic becomes a personality. The platform obviously exists for professional networking, so some degree of self-presentation is expected. Nobody goes there expecting unfiltered diary entries. Yet even within that context, a recognizable type of online person has emerged who appears incapable of experiencing anything without extracting a professional lesson from it.
A delayed flight becomes a post about resilience. A child's football match becomes seven leadership principles. A conversation with a taxi driver becomes a lesson in customer experience. Losing a suitcase somehow teaches the importance of agile thinking, and buying coffee becomes an opportunity to explain the difference between managers and leaders. Life is no longer merely lived because it is continuously mined for transferable business insights.
The format is easy to parody because it is so recognizable, but the people using it are responding rationally to platform incentives. Posts framed around personal stories often perform well, professional lessons fit the expectations of the audience, and emotional narratives create engagement. The problem is not that anyone uses this format. The problem is that repeated success eventually teaches everyone to speak in the same voice.
The result can be an uncanny internet populated by thousands of apparently different people writing remarkably similar posts. There is vulnerability, but it has been formatted. There is authenticity, but it arrives with a hook and a call to action. There is personality, but it has usually passed through enough optimization to become safe for professional consumption.
The Internet Used to Have More Weird Corners
One of the things I miss most is the sense that the internet contained places you could stumble into by accident. Forums devoted to incredibly specific hobbies, fan sites maintained by someone who clearly loved a television show far too much, obscure blogs that had not been updated in four years, and personal pages containing information that nobody would ever search for intentionally. These places were not necessarily good, but they felt genuinely different from one another.
Modern platforms are better at discovery in many ways, but they also concentrate enormous amounts of online activity inside standardized interfaces. A post on Instagram looks structurally like every other Instagram post. A TikTok video operates within the same basic visual environment as millions of others. A LinkedIn article inherits LinkedIn's design, a Substack newsletter looks like a Substack newsletter, and a YouTube channel must operate within YouTube's architecture.
The old web required more effort because every site could behave differently. That was inconvenient, confusing and occasionally terrible. It also meant that entering a new website felt like entering someone's space rather than viewing another account within a platform. Design itself could communicate personality because people had far more freedom to make objectively questionable decisions.
Standardization made the internet easier to use and dramatically easier to scale. It also turned much of the web into rented space inside a small number of enormous digital shopping centers. We gained reliability, discoverability and convenience while losing some of the weird little independent shops in the alleyways.
Authenticity Became a Strategy
Perhaps nothing demonstrates the transformation better than the fact that "authenticity" is now frequently discussed as a content strategy. Brands want to sound authentic, influencers want to appear authentic and professionals are advised that authenticity helps build trust. The moment authenticity becomes an objective measured by engagement, however, things become philosophically complicated. You can end up carefully engineering spontaneity.
This does not mean everyone online is being fake. People can deliberately communicate genuine parts of themselves, and thoughtful self-presentation is not the same thing as deception. The problem is that platforms create incentives to discover which version of authenticity performs best. You learn which stories get sympathy, which opinions generate discussion and which parts of your personality audiences find appealing.
Over time, you may begin emphasizing those elements more often. The funny side of you performs well, so you become funnier online. Vulnerable posts generate strong responses, so vulnerability becomes a recurring format. Strong opinions create reach, so your opinions gradually become sharper and more frequent.
At that point, the boundary between personality and performance becomes difficult to locate. You may still be completely sincere, but sincerity itself has been shaped by feedback. The audience does not have to tell you explicitly what person it wants you to be because analytics can do that quietly.
Even Hobbies Need to Perform
The branding of everyday life becomes particularly strange when it reaches hobbies. Someone starts baking and soon there is pressure to create an Instagram account for the cakes. Someone likes books and wonders whether they should start reviewing them publicly. Someone begins running and suddenly there are times, photographs, apps, leaderboards and progress updates attached to something that could simply have been a run.
The internet encourages us to turn private interests into public identities. This can be wonderful because communities form around shared passions, people learn from one another and obscure interests become less lonely. A person obsessed with antique maps no longer has to hope that somebody in their immediate neighborhood shares that obsession. They can find thousands of people who care just as much.
The problem appears when sharing becomes inseparable from doing. You stop asking whether you enjoyed the hobby and begin asking whether the post about the hobby performed well. The activity acquires a second audience-facing layer that can eventually change how you experience it. What began as recreation develops deliverables.
This is particularly visible in travel. The difference between taking photographs because you want to remember somewhere and taking photographs because you need content from somewhere can be surprisingly large. The first records an experience while the second can quietly reorganize the experience around producing the record. A beautiful place becomes both a place and a backdrop.
We Became Our Own Media Departments
The modern internet has given individuals extraordinary power over how they present themselves. We can publish without editors, reach audiences without media companies, build businesses without traditional advertising and communicate directly with people all over the world. That shift has democratized communication in ways that are genuinely important. It also means ordinary people now perform tasks that once belonged to entire communications departments.
We manage photographs, biographies, public statements, comments, reputational risks, search results and audience expectations. Professionals are advised to consider what appears when someone Googles them, which photographs are public and whether their profiles tell a coherent story. None of that advice is irrational. It is simply remarkable how much unpaid reputation management has become part of ordinary life.
The result is a subtle increase in self-consciousness. You are not just speaking but publishing, not just sharing but creating a permanent searchable artefact, and not just expressing an opinion but potentially attaching it to your professional identity for years. This encourages caution, which can be useful. It can also make the internet feel less playful.
Play requires a certain freedom to be inconsistent, embarrassing, experimental and occasionally wrong. Branding discourages all four because brands are supposed to be coherent. Human beings are not.
Optimization Made Everything Look the Same
Once people began treating online presence strategically, they naturally started copying whatever worked. YouTube thumbnails became more exaggerated because exaggerated thumbnails attracted clicks. Headlines became more formulaic because certain structures produced stronger engagement. Short videos began using similar hooks because creators could see exactly which opening seconds retained viewers.
This process is not unique to the internet because every media industry develops conventions. Newspapers learned which headlines sold copies, television developed familiar formats and radio stations organized programming around audience expectations. The difference online is the speed and precision of feedback. Creators can see almost immediately which choices produced results.
That makes optimization incredibly powerful and slightly dangerous. If a particular style works 15 percent better, rational creators adopt it. Once enough people adopt it, the platform fills with optimized versions of the same thing. Every individual decision makes sense while the collective result becomes boring.
This is why so much online communication now has a vaguely familiar rhythm. Videos start with "You need to stop doing this." Posts begin with dramatic confessions. Articles promise a specific number of lessons. People are not necessarily copying one another deliberately; they are responding to the same incentives and arriving at similar solutions.
The Cost of Being Consistent
Branding values consistency for good reason. If you follow an account because it discusses architecture, you probably do not want the person to spend three weeks posting exclusively about cryptocurrency and then suddenly become a food critic. Consistency helps audiences know what they are getting. It also helps creators become associated with something.
The difficulty is that people are naturally inconsistent. Interests change, opinions evolve, obsessions appear and disappear, and somebody can care deeply about politics in the morning and spend the evening watching videos about restoring old furniture. A human personality is not a niche. It is a collection of overlapping, occasionally contradictory interests.
The old personal internet made more room for this messiness. A blog could simply be named after the person writing it, which gave them permission to write about almost anything. Today, creators are often encouraged to narrow themselves because specialization makes audience building easier. The advice works, but something gets lost when every curiosity has to pass a relevance test.
One reason I still like personal blogs is precisely because they can resist this. A personal blog does not necessarily need to know exactly what it is. It can contain an essay about AI next to a travel story, a political observation next to a complaint about technology, and a memory from childhood next to an argument about modern work. The person is the organizing principle.
Virality Changed the Way We Speak
The possibility of virality also changed online behavior. In the early internet, much of what people posted was intended for a relatively small number of people. A forum comment might be read by fifty members, a blog post by a few hundred visitors and a photograph by friends. The potential audience existed, but mass visibility was not always hovering over every interaction.
Today, any public post theoretically has the possibility of escaping its original context. A joke intended for a small group can reach millions, an awkward sentence can become a screenshot and an ordinary person can become briefly famous for something they wrote in ten seconds. This encourages users to imagine a larger invisible audience even when that audience is not actually present. We perform for the possibility of being seen.
The platforms reinforce this because visibility is quantifiable. Likes, views, shares, impressions and follower counts turn attention into numbers that can be compared. Once measurement appears, it becomes difficult not to notice it. A post you enjoyed making can suddenly feel disappointing because only twelve people reacted to it.
The old internet certainly contained popularity contests, traffic counters and attention seeking. The difference is that metrics were not always integrated into every interaction. Now the scoreboard sits directly beside the thing you made, quietly teaching you which versions of yourself the internet prefers.
Not Everything Needs an Audience
I sometimes wonder whether one of the healthiest things we can do online is make something without asking how it will perform. Write a post because you wanted to write it, not because a keyword tool says people are searching for it. Share a photograph because you like it even if it does not match the visual identity of the rest of your profile. Pursue an interest without immediately turning it into a channel.
This sounds almost embarrassingly simple, but it has become strangely difficult. Once you understand how online distribution works, it is hard to unknow it. You know that a better headline could generate more clicks, that a shorter video might perform better, that posting at another time could improve reach and that a particular subject is unlikely to interest your usual audience. Strategy quietly enters the room even when you did not invite it.
There is nothing wrong with using that knowledge when there is a reason to use it. A business should think about its audience, a creator who depends on income should understand distribution and a professional trying to communicate expertise should present ideas clearly. But personal expression does not always need to operate according to the logic of maximum reach. Sometimes ten interested readers are better than ten thousand distracted ones.
The internet becomes more interesting when people are willing to make things that are slightly too specific, strange or personal to have obvious mass appeal. Those things create texture. They remind us that not every page exists because someone identified a market opportunity.
Maybe We Need More Bad Websites
I do not literally want the internet to return to flashing banners, broken links and websites that automatically play music when you open them. There are many things about the modern web that are objectively better. Websites are more accessible, mobile devices work properly, security has improved, information is easier to find and people can create remarkably sophisticated experiences without knowing how to code from scratch.
What I miss is not the technology but the attitude. The older internet felt like people were building things first and wondering whether anyone would care later. The modern internet often feels like we determine what people will care about first and then manufacture the thing. One is chaotic and wasteful, while the other is efficient and scalable.
Efficiency, unfortunately, is not always entertaining. The weird website built by one obsessed person may be less useful than the optimized platform serving millions, but it can have a personality the platform cannot reproduce. It can surprise you because it was not designed around predicting what you already wanted. The internet needs both.
Perhaps we need more digital spaces where the objective is not growth. More websites that do not need a funnel, more newsletters without monetization strategies, more blogs that occasionally wander off-topic and more people posting things they genuinely find interesting without asking whether those things reinforce a positioning statement. In other words, perhaps we need a little more unprofessionalism.
People Are More Interesting Than Brands
Brands are useful precisely because they simplify. You know roughly what Coca-Cola represents, what IKEA sells and what type of experience you expect from Netflix. Consistency reduces uncertainty, which is valuable when someone is choosing between products. People become less interesting when subjected to the same requirement.
Human beings should be allowed to contradict themselves, develop inconvenient interests, change their minds and occasionally talk about things they know will not perform well. Someone can be serious professionally and ridiculous with friends, deeply interested in technology and also suspicious of it, ambitious in one part of life and completely unproductive in another. None of these contradictions requires fixing.
A personal brand inevitably compresses some of that complexity because an audience cannot absorb everything about another person. The danger is forgetting that the compressed version is only a communication tool. You are not supposed to become the brand. The brand is supposed to make one part of you easier to understand.
When that distinction disappears, people begin policing themselves on behalf of audiences that may not even care. They avoid certain subjects, repeat successful formats and slowly become more recognizable but less surprising. Recognition is valuable in marketing. Surprise is valuable in people.
I Miss the Internet That Did Not Know What It Was For
The early internet was exciting partly because nobody had completely figured out what it was supposed to become. Was it a library, a shopping center, a newspaper, a social space, a television network, a diary or a giant collection of strange people arguing about Star Trek? The answer turned out to be all of those things and several others nobody had predicted. That uncertainty produced experimentation because there were fewer established templates to follow.
The modern internet knows exactly what it is for. It is for engagement, conversion, retention, monetization, discovery, community building, personal branding, audience growth and content distribution. Those purposes created enormous industries and opportunities that did not exist before. They also made much of the internet feel like work.
Even leisure platforms are now full of people working. Someone is building an audience, selling a course, promoting a newsletter, developing a reputation, testing formats, optimizing a thumbnail or turning today's post into tomorrow's business. The line between hanging out online and performing labor online has become surprisingly difficult to see. We turned the playground into an economy, and economies inevitably bring spreadsheets.
I do not want the old internet back in its entirety because nostalgia conveniently forgets dial-up connections, terrible interfaces, pop-up ads, viruses, spam and spending twenty minutes downloading a low-resolution photograph. What I want is some of its spirit back. I want more spaces where people can be interesting without needing to be strategic.
The internet was more fun before everyone became a brand because brands are designed to be recognizable, consistent and scalable, while fun is often none of those things. Fun is messy, unnecessary, specific, unpredictable and occasionally embarrassing. It does not always convert, and it definitely does not always fit neatly inside a content pillar.
Maybe the internet does not need fewer creators, businesses or professionals. Maybe it simply needs more people willing to occasionally forget they have an audience.
And post something weird.
