When the internet was in its young glory days, I used to use a little browser called Alta Vista to help me find all the little nooks and crannies that I wanted to go to. Then in May of 1996 Wired magazine published an article about search engines and called my little Alta Vista the best one on the net to that day. Shortly following this review thousands of people started using the once small Alta Vista, thus greatly slowing down the speed at which it could help you find what you were looking for. That's when I first noticed the degeneration of the web. The greatest populace to this day on the web is hormonally driven teenage boys looking for...well you know. This pretty much ruins it for the rest of us; because of overcrowding, no one can get to where they want to go on the internet without waiting for a long time. In my opinion there are more people using the internet for inappropriate purposes than there are using it as an actual source of free collective knowledge.

According to the April '96 edition of Wired, the two sites on the web that had gathered the most money and visitors were Playboy and my little Alta Vista. One of the big reasons that the internet is failing is overcrowding, but it is not the only one. Another significant reason for the internet's failure traces back to money instead of sex. Because of the initial rush to get things up on the internet, many major corporations' sites were improperly set up and had many technical problems; other sites failed because they didn't draw enough attention to themselves or just weren't interesting. It was the gold rush of the nineties, and just like in the fifties, not everyone struck gold. Time president Don Logan began calling the web "the black hole" all the way back in 1995, and it seems today that it has turned out to be just that. As soon as companies and entrepreneurs noticed that they were losing money on the web, they stopped hyping it. Once the hype was gone, middle America lost interest and the internet died. Overcrowding led to slower service which frustrated the average customer and kept him/her from visiting the corporate web sites, and the downfall of corporations was the downfall of the web.

The whole problem with the web has existed ever since the internet was first thought up. You see, the idealists that created the web thought that they could create a place where knowledge reigned, supported by commercial backers. They thought that they could create what essentially would have been a whole new culture in cyberspace. Instead of creating this idealistic new culture, we uploaded our own defected culture onto thousands of microchips and megabytes. Now, there are thousands of pornographic sites on the web. Every valuable part of our cultural diversity that we posted on the net pulled ten disgusting parts up with it. The great oracle of thought that was the web died from the diseases of our society. It was foolish for the conceptual designers to think that they could change people by simply giving them a new tool like the internet. In short, the internet died from sex and greed.

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