BirdsOfPraise's Guide to the Internet 2025

In the late '90s and early 2000s there were a huge number of books on how to get online and use the web. Typically these books had everything you needed to know to navigate cyberspace - searching, email, newsgroups, a directory of sites and often a primer on creating your own website &emdash; indeed, this kind of book is where I learned my first line of HTML.

As the web matured, search engines became more powerful, and more and more content was published online, the need for this kind of book fell out of fashion. But by the early 2020's people started finding the web was becoming more hostile; search engine results were often littered with useless auto-generated content, social media was becoming agressive and dangerous, and the venture-capital funded companies that ran many of the web's most popular sites started trying to wring as much money out of their services as they could, degrading their usefulness in the process.

But the internet is large, and plenty of people are still sharing information for free and creating communities for the love of it. The question now is how do we find this kind of content? Smaller sites don't rank on search engines, and rarely go viral in social algorithms.

Perhaps it's time for the return of the humble Guide To The Internet?