The Mysteries of the Hidden Internet
by Tim Tepatti
tim@tepatti.com

The Internet today feels very open and
accessible. But the Internet seems to have lost
its mystery and charm. Before, you never knew
what you would run into - you could search a
new term and find a fan site completely dedicated
to the topic. Search “canadian owls”
and you might find a website created by a
researcher, someone who had spent years of
their life perfecting their research and knowledge,
someone who had spent hours and
hours creating this Internet-accessible portal
into their depth of knowledge. But today, that
feeling and mystery is almost completely gone.
Search “canadian owls” and what are you
greeted with? Many large websites operated by
foundations and companies. Sure, they have
encyclopedia-like information on the topic, but
there’s no personal touch. There’s no author
to contact, there’s no one you could have an
email correspondence with, asking them questions
about owls. Instead, you’re presented
with plastic-feeling template websites with
information collected from various sources
and papers. If there’s an author’s touch, you’d
never know because none of the pages are
signed.

While this is optimal for getting information
out of the Internet, you’re missing the
human touch. You’re missing the personalization
that made you say, “Wow, I’m on Dr.
Orton’s owl website!” You’re missing those
strange owl gifs that Dr. Orton seemed to
insert in the background of all of her pages -
the patterned backgrounds that never really
seemed to fit the design of the site, but you
would miss them if they were gone.
It’s like going to a McDonald’s instead of
your local family eatery. Sure, you may be
able to read their menu a bit clearer, and you’re
able to receive your food more efficiently,
but there’s no personality. You don’t have a
favorite McDonald’s cashier. You don’t get
to know the owner, and you don’t get to taste
the personal cooking of the guy running the
kitchen. There are no types of food from the
owner’s country, and there are no recipes that
have been passed down for generations. And
let’s not forget the reason McDonald’s is like
that: they’re trying to make a profit. They’re
not expanding due to their love of food and
need to share it with the world; McDonald’s
is expanding and opening new stores because
people think “I bet people in this area would
buy McDonald’s - I think I could make money
by owning a franchise here.”

Let’s switch back to websites. Many of
them aren’t driven by a love for what they do;
they’re driven by a love for profits. Perhaps
owls weren’t the best example - let’s do the
total opposite and look at some anime. If you
Google search for Sailor Moon, an extremely
well-known anime from the past decade,
you’ll get a lot of search results. Wikipedia,
IMDB, Anime News Network, Hulu, Amazon,
Kotaku, Crunchyroll. All of these are huge
websites that care little about Sailor Moon as
a series - to many of them, it’s simply another
news story to discuss so they can make money
off ads, another show to stream and run
commercials on. There are no fan websites
in the first few pages of Google. Sure, you’ll
eventually find a few Wikias, and Wikipedia is
an obvious omission from the “companies that
just want to make money off of you” list, but
we run into the same problems. These Wikias
and whatnot have no personal touch - sure, you
can find a list of Sailor Moon episodes. Sure,
you can find a summary of the plot of the show.
But will you find Shriya Patel’s analysis of the
plot? No. Will you find someone’s blog post,
talking about which of the cast they think is
the best girl, and why they believe that to be
true? No.

I think the first creation that started to
strip these sites from the Internet was forums.
Many people simply discussed these things on
forums, since it was free and didn’t require you
to create your own website. Now, this obviously
wasn’t the only reason - don’t forget that
Usenet has been a thing since the 1990s, and
telephone BBSes since long before that. But it
was still a large catalyst.

These forums create walled-in communities
whose knowledge becomes off-limits to
the rest of the Internet. Chances are there have
been dozens of popular forums over the years
that have discussed Sailor Moon. Hundreds,
even. But many probably required an account
to read threads, and as such weren’t indexed
by Google. Or perhaps, as their membership
dwindled, they slowly went offline, never to be
archived or remembered. Users on that forum
probably had valid opinions on the show that
would seem like a treasure trove to fans of
today - what did people think, in real-time, as
the first season of Sailor Moon aired? What
were people posting about the show online?
But now, we’ll never know.

Forums were bad, but at least the ones that
were indexed by Google are still searchable.
You’ll find many of these relics while looking
for programming questions on the Internet -
rarely answered questions in a ten-plus-yearold
thread that has somehow achieved the
highest SEO rating for your search on Google.
But social media has stepped in to change that.
Now, websites like Facebook and Twitter are
transforming the future of live Q&As. Let’s
say you want to learn about how to make your
Honda Civic faster. You log onto Facebook and
search for groups with “Honda Civic” in the
name. Perfect! A group specifically for Civics
of your exact generation, and it has thousands
of members! You join, and ask “Hey guys, I
have a 2001 Honda Civic. How can I make
it faster?” You’re immediately flamed off the
group, insulted into oblivion, and your post is
deleted by the moderators. You see, the people
of this group are sick of answering the same
questions over and over, but it’s because of the
layout of Facebook’s groups that this occurs.

Let’s roll it back five years.

You want to make your Honda Civic faster.
You search “How to make my Civic faster”
on Google and are directed to the Honda-Tech
forums. There, you see they have all sorts of
sub-forums about different model Civics, so
you choose your generation. From there, it’s
even more granular - sub-forums about engine
tuning, chassis modifications, tire choice,
paint jobs, interior, etc. You click the forum
for engine tuning, knowing that to make your
car faster, you normally mess with the engine.
You start looking down the list of threads, and
the first one jumps out at you - “READ THIS
BEFORE MAKING A POST!!!!!!!” You
click on the thread, and in it, a user has nicely
summarized a lot of common engine upgrades,
how much horsepower they make, and linked
relevant threads on how to do them. Awesome!
From here, you can research each specific
upgrade more, and then make a thread asking
questions when you have a more relevant question
that shows you’ve put some thought into
it. Of course, this magic didn’t always work on
forums - you would still sometimes get users
who ignored these stickied threads and posted
their generalized questions. But there was a
path to point them to! Something obvious that
they missed!

Back to the present - why did you get
flamed off of Facebook for asking your question?
The blame lands on the platform itself,
Facebook. Users wish they didn’t have to
re-explain how basic tuning works every day,
but there’s no easy way for them to pin relevant
information. There’s no way to tell a user off
for not doing their research because the user
would have to stop using Facebook to find the
relevant information. It’s a proposition which
perfectly breaks Facebook’s “walled garden”
mentality, something that requires a user to
specifically stop using Facebook to find their
answer, something Facebook doesn’t want
users to have to do.

I will admit, that last example got a bit off
topic - it turned into a rant about the low quality
of Facebook as a platform (which is still true),
but that wasn’t its goal. Think of all of the
advice and specific nuanced questions that
have been asked and answered on that Facebook
group. Or on any number of the millions
of groups that exist on Facebook. None of that
information is archived or searchable in any
accessible fashion. None of it is available on
Google, and to even know that the information
is there requires a membership to the group on
Facebook. This is the furthest possible destination
for information, hidden not behind
paywalls like traditional journals, but instead
convoluted networks and free memberships.
This is objectively worse - the information
isn’t made off limits by a single organization
that says whether or not you can access it, but
instead the information is obfuscated and made
almost impossible to find. Even if you wanted
to know how to make your Honda Civic faster,
Facebook as an organization would never be
able to tell you even if they wanted to.

While this article wanders a bit, I want
you to fully consider my wandering train of
thought, and take in a picture of the Internet
as a whole. All is not lost. There are still oddities
on the Internet, and personalized content
as well. YouTube has become the bastion of
creativity - rants and interesting content that
before could envelop an entire website are
now packed into a single YouTube video and
shared with an audience. This is amazing, and
YouTube is an amazing platform for doing this
all for free. Additionally, the oddities of the
Internet are still out there, and they’re waiting
for you to find them. In 2008, I thought it was
cool that I could telnet to a random IP address
and have an entire Star Wars movie play out
in ASCII on my terminal. In 2018, I think it’s
cool that I can watch a channel on Twitch that’s
running defragging simulations 24/7. They’re
both things that I never thought I would find
on the Internet, and never expected to enjoy
either. Things that tickled my brain and made
me think “wow, this is a revolutionary use of
the Internet - more people need to know about
this.” These small creations that didn’t overtly
improve the Internet - no one asked for a defragging
simulator - but were a creative use of the
tools placed in front of someone. They signed
up for a Twitch account not to stream video
games, but to stream things that they enjoyed,
and did it for no one except themselves. And
yet, people have come to enjoy it. More and
more channels on Twitch are breaking the
mold of what people stream, coming up with
creative new things to show the Internet, and
I think it’s an amazing use of creativity, one
that rivals the Geocities websites of the early
2000s. They’re not exactly on the same plane,
but they’re both amazing nonetheless.

Let’s back up a bit: I know I just spoke
highly of YouTube, but it also comes with
issues. Videos are inherently less searchable,
and their content is not easily indexable. The
creation of a system to be able to do so would
most likely result in the loss of freedom of
speech for many on the platform, along with
heavy moderation and micro-manageable
ads. So that is not what I look for. Rather, I
wish for others to take the information taught
and shown within these videos and share it
with the world. Write papers about it, create
websites dedicated to it, cite the videos as your
sources. Many people learn insane amounts
of information from YouTube videos without
realizing it, and later can’t explain why they
know what they do. It’s helped millions of
people access content and knowledge that
was previously hidden behind paywalls, or
tangled in the depths of the Internet. Things
like free YouTube programming tutorials are
revolutionary - you no longer have to buy
hundreds of dollars worth of textbooks to learn
programming, or sign up for classes that cost
thousands. You can now get the same amount
of information from a series of free YouTube
videos, and even skip around and learn other
things in-between if you want to. The flexibility
is second-to-none.

Now, I’d like to hear from you, the reader.
What do you do on the Internet? How many
websites do you use each day? Why don’t you
run your own website? Let’s talk about your
hobbies - I’m sure you’re passionate about
them - why not tell people about them? Give
yourself a platform to speak about them. Don’t
feel dedicated to your audience either - you
don’t need to pump out a blog post a day or
have the prettiest site around. Just put something
on the Internet, exercise the amazing
power in front of you. And then email your site
to me.

I want to check out your hobbies. I want to
read what you think of the latest season of that
show you watched online. I want to know what
you think about your laptop, and how your W
key sticks sometimes.

This is what created the Internet. This is
what I loved about the Internet. This is what we
can bring back to the Internet. It’s up to us to
shape the future of the Internet - we can make
platforms that allow us to voice our opinions
and share our stories while allowing others to
find them and index them and read them. We
can allow the things we create to be accessible
to everyone, not just those with the best SEO
or most keywords in their article.

Do you disagree with me? Don’t close this
article and continue on with your day. Get
mad, email me - I’m a human and I’ll respond.
We can have a real discourse over the expanse
of the Internet. Remember that everything you
read on the Internet was written by a human
who probably feels like they’re throwing their
words into the void, hoping someone will
receive them and be impacted by them. Today,
I’m that human. Next time you read something
on the Internet, think of the author and the time
they spent writing. I bet they’d like to read
some of your words too.