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This is vastly different than the internet’s original promise: a global system that allowed access to knowledge, creativity and collaboration no matter who you are.
The internet feels increasingly broken every. single. day.
How do we fix it?
Look inward.
no, seriously, that's the main thing. nothing about "internet" says you have to let ad-motivated recommendation engines fill your gullet.
let's call it "mindful internet": you deliberately choose what to read, even if that means, gasp, seeking out a few quality sources, checking in with a few worthwhile people. "influencers" are so ick precisely because they are an gross side-effect of doomscrolling.
what you describe emerged from open protocols and standards being intermediated by middlemen because “regular” people don’t want to learn how to run their own fiber.
All the “regular people” took over what was basically a communications experiment by scientists because attention and as a result commerce moved to that experimental space.
I lived through that as a early net user in 1992 and watched any possibility of the dream get eaten.
The crowding out of the “original intent” is an artifact of transactionalism being the driving factor behind the majority of human action.
Anything that would replace it would eventually succumb to the same fate because the constituent parts are still the same: humans who desire abstracted transactional convenience over coherence and sustainability.
The content you want is still out there.
Genuinely a serious problem
This was not the case for the Internet or the World Wide Web;