If you feel like the internet is full of slop and rage bait these days, you aren’t alone.

Anger is fueling the internet so much that Oxford decided to make rage bait the word of 2025. But if you were born in the 1980s or 1990s, you probably remember a different time: the days of logging into a computer at your local library or in your family room, printing song lyrics, writing in your LiveJournal, or mulling over your MySpace Top 8.

Those days are long behind us, but Max Read remembers this era too. He’s a writer and has a Substack called Read Max, all about technology and culture. “I would go to link aggregating sites like FARK,” he said on a recent episode of Explain It to Me, Vox’s weekly call-in podcast. “When I was a little older, Metafilter was another one. There’d be discussions in the comments and you would get linked out to other websites that you could find and discover web comics and bloggers and whatever else.”

Read says it was a much different landscape than the one we have online now.

“There were fewer mega platforms — by which I mean these huge sites that became the whole internet for people. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, places where you go and you can spend hours without ever leaving that particular website,” he said.

So what caused this shift in the internet? And was the change inevitable? Read tells us on the latest episode of Explain It to Me. Below is an excerpt of our........

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