At this point plenty of people have made the observation that the web is being split up into two parts. In many ways it already is split up. The only question is how far it will continue to be divided, and whether the division will be actively enforced.
Let's start by talking about how the division is occurring. You might split the web into two parts: the "Normie-Web" and everything else. I call it the Normie-Web beecause it consists of everything that a normie will see. You have big sites like youtube, facebook, reddit and twitter, some "trusted source" news sites, sites for doing business with large companies (banks, restaurants, stores) and that's about it. This site, and neocities generally, would not be part of the normie-web, nor would most hobby blogs, image boards, message boards of any type, etc. Personal home pages of all flavors are right out.
Okay, so it is certainly true that a normie will tend to stick to "mainstream" sites and not go beyond that. That's nothing new. Even in the 90's and 00's when a normie used the internet at all, he might just go to something like Amazon to buy something or check out the movie times on a big website. But part of the ideas of the bifurcation of the net is that it is something new and something getting worse over time. Normie behavior largely did not change, so how can we justify this?
One big way that the web has been split is through search engines. At this point we might describe the normie-web as "stuff that will come up in likely search engine results" and the other half the stuff which is essentially invisible to search engines. Here is a video from Luke Smith where he describes the problem pretty well. TL;DW, or if you don't want to go to the normie-web Youtube site, search engines tend to return only three types of results:
Now obivously there is some hyperbole here. You can still sometimes get useful results, especially for unusual search terms. For example, if you search for "Gyoku's Essays" you will get this site at the top on most search engines. (Though how long that will last is unclear; I'm seeing stuff like "How to write an essay" as well as results for "Goku" showing up high in the results. I wouldn't be surprised if in two years you get nothing but AI generated websites with titles like "How to write an essay about anime" and some DBZ subreddits.) The fact that you can still find sites like this means that if you vaguely remember this site, but forgot the URL, you can still get to it. I still am able to find sites like that for things relating to gopher, doom wads, heroes 3 maps, etc. But these are very unusual search terms which most people would not use unless they had a good idea of what site they were trying to find from the beginning. If you take someone who has not encountered sites outside of the normie-web and put him in front of a search engine, he is very unlikely to find any new sites outside of the normie-web.
Things are made worse by smartphones. I'm a weirdo who has never owned a smart phone and thus has always accessed the web through a computer. Honestly I don't give a shit about making things accessible to smart phones. I mean, it's apparent that I don't care much about web design in general beyond having a fucntional website, but I do tell myself that I should experiment with color schemes, backgrounds, frames for link navigation, etc. But if I do this and later hear that it isn't easy to navigate on a smart phone, oh well. I think a lot of the people off the normie-web feel the same way. Smart phone design necessarily puts a lot of limitations on what you can do and encourages bad habits like using infinite scrolling or forcing non-phone users into a narrow column of content surrounded by a void. But the fact is that most people do use smart phones and most smart phone users will not bother spending even a minute on sites not catering to smart phones, assuming that they get to them in the first place.
And smart phones are where we start to see the possibiity for an enforced bifurcation of the web. A lot of people focus on using smart-phone app versions of websites rather than trying to find mobile-accessible versions of websites. There is some bifurcation right there, between smart phone users and people browsing with a computer. But what's more significant is that those smart phone apps are distributed through company stores owned by the likes of Google and Apple. If there is something that they do not like they can remove it from their stores and suddenly it becomes much harder for normies to access. (This is probably the biggest reason why non-mainstream video and social media sites automatically become anti-normie.)
Currently this just affects smart phones. But it's not impossible that this could happen with computers. Microsoft has exerted more and more control over the user through their recent Windows version, with 11 reaching the point where it's hard to say if you own anything at all. Now that they are normalizing the forced creation of a user account just to use your computer, they can easily push computer users into the same boxes that cell phone users are in. I would not be surprised to see Windows 12 (or its equivalent) having a system where users could lose privledges for accessing "non-trusted" websites, and where conversely websites would be able to access information about the user and so deny access to "non-trusted" users. At this point the bifurcation would become official, with the non-normie web being actually inaccessible by users of the new windows. In this situation Apple would undoubtedly follow suit. You could avoid the issue by using linux or something, or even by using older versions of windows, but the only people who would even consider doing that would be non-normies which would further perpetuate the divide.
Will this actually happen? Maybe, maybe not. Probably it won't matter if it does or not. As mentioned earlier search engines are bad and are going to get worse. We are long past the days where you could search for terms relating to some hobby and get dozens of results for fansites, message boards, useful tips, etc. In fact things are getting so bad that I would not be surprised if some search engine companies, even google, stopped offering searches altogether. Oh, they'll still do searches on youtube or their news aggregators, and they'll still offer personalized google search tools for individual websites. But they'll stop doing searches at the web at large because normies will quickly realize that they just need to memorize a few big sites and non-normies will realize that they never get any useful information from the searches.
In many ways things will regress. It's interesting to compare the internet of the 90's. I barely used it during that time, and I imagine many of my readers never have used it, but I am basing my analysis on old "how to use the internet" books I have picked up for fun, archives of sites on the wayback machine, and old internet directory software. During that era there were search engines, but they often were not great (though still probably better than today's engines.) The issue is that there weren't really any effective webcrawler type search engines before Google's launch in 1998, meaning that you were usually searching through curated databases of websites which may or may not have what you wanted. In the first half of the 90's you might not even have that. So how did people cope? A lot of people would use start page type sites, which often included a search engine but also included a static directory of sites. So for example if you were interested in a Star Wars fan site you might not search for anything, but would instead go to Yahoo, click on "Entertainment" which would give you more categories for types of shows, movies, etc. and keep going until you found sites that you were interested in. Not really that different in principle from people who try to find out new information by starting at the front page of reddit or facebook.
However when we are forced into a search engine-less future the situation will be much different from the pre-(good)-search engine past. For one thing, the start pages of the modern internet are not useful for finding anything either. Go to yahoo and click on "entertainment." You get a bunch of news articles on celebrity gossip, unsorted and with infinite scrolling. I didn't check a ton of these articles, but they all look to be artices from yahoo itself. You ain't getting to a Star Wars fansite in this list. Compare to this archive from 1997. CLick on entertainment there, and we get to this page, which has all sorts of categories for web pages. If you go down far enough you'll get to an option for list of Star Wars sites. Unfortuantely, that wasn't archived by the Wayback Machine, but this list of Star Trek sites was. Just look at that list of sites. That's easily more fansites than I saw in a Google search for Star Trek. The Google search largely gave me corporate sites, such as the official twitter or facebook page, with the closest stuff to fan sites being the Memory Alpha wiki and a couple of pages related to the Star Trek Continues project. And it's not like yahoo was just archiving the cream of the crop official stuff here. Most of the links weren't even archived, but here is one which was. It's easy to see how in 1997 even a normie could stumble upon a lot of random fanpages, and once there could follow links to much more content. But this sort of thing is impossible to do from the front page of yahoo, msn, etc. these days.
You also had the general awareness that the web was hard to navigate, and thus the market for guides to the internet. You could literally go to the store and buy a CD that contained nothing but a categorized list of websites with reviews. Since images of things are technically pirated software (though I doubt anyone cares) I won't post direct links to these things, but if you were savvy enough to stumble across this website you should be able to find them easily. I'll even give you some names: Microsoft Bookshelf Internet Directory, IDG Books Internet Directory for Kids and Parents, McKinley Internet Directory. There were also books published with the same general idea (apparently as late as 2009.) I haven't went through all of these, but the ones that I have seen always have some obscure sites. The early ones even have usenet group recommendations. But the chances today of someone selling a CD or book with an internet directory is completely laughable.
So you can't get off the normie-web through search engines, through start pages, or through internet directories. What option is left? Well, once you are off the normie-web you can get further off it through following links and the like. (I realize that I am not pulling my weight in this regard!) I think we may even see a resurgence of webrings since these largely flourished back in the day due to search engines sucking and died out when search engines made them obsolete. But of course, none of this helps if you don't escape from the normie web in the first place. For old fogies like me there are always some sites that stick around for years and years, and which can be used as a starting point. Or you may be part of a forum where people still share this stuff. Imageboards strike me as the most likely place for someone who is unfamiliar with the non-normie internet to strike out, but the obvious ones are getting more and more sanitized each year so that will probably not be much of an option either. When we get to the generation after the zoomers, it may be difficult for even the dissidents among them to find a way to access the obscure side of the web, even assuming that the only obstacle to accessing it is the obscurity itself. They may hear of cool websites to go to from an older relative, they may be accidentally recommended a retro technology video by "the algorithm" or they may stumble across some old book or software and manage to find something in there that isn't dead. But it will be hard, and for normies it will be practically impossible. Thus the web becomes bifurcated, making everything off the normie-web essentially a second "dark web" even though anyone from the normie side could theoretically visit anything from the obscure side at any moment.
To close this out, this breakdown is one reason I bother to update this site, even if it sucks and is unlikely to be of much value to others. It's important that there be something on the other side of the split. It's also likely that the normie side will eventually collapse (which would be a whole different essay) and when that happens if there is nothing left outside of it, the web will likely be abandoned entirely rather than rebuilt in the Web 1.0 style.
September 10, 2022
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10/23/22 EDIT: Out of curiosity I searched for "Gyoku's Essays" on a few search engines. Here are the results: