The giving-up internet

One of the other things I like to do toward the end of each year is review & clean up my saved logins & passwords for things. I’ve accumulated a lot of logins over the years, and having resisted the temptation to Sign In to everything With Google has made this a bit of a sprawling problem.

So I go to review Apple Passwords’ security recommendations, and there are over 250 warnings - some of these are cases where I reused the same or a similar password before the advent of randomly-generated strings, but in most cases the site suffered a security breach in the last few years.

And on top of that, there is a surprisingly large number of the websites on this list that are dead. Either they’ve been acquired & shut down by a larger company, replaced by a blog-looking thing of AI slop content, or are fully dead dead (like Cloudflare can’t even resolve the url). This is what remains of a free service I guess I signed up years ago for called LaunchKit.io:

This is what happens when I go to perfectfitprotein.com, a website my wife bought some protein powder from once (note how it seemed to redirect to a “mancavepictures.com”???):

There are some sites that are still around but they’re barely recognizable, or I suspect the crew maintaining those sites are akin to a skeleton now. I think that’s the real shame of the Dead Internet Theory – not that most activity is by bots & for bots, but that the bits run by humans are gradually giving up & shutting down, leaving the giant conglomerate platforms in their wake (and the few independent websites fighting to keep it alive).