The internet used to be lovely.

Call it nostalgia, but two of the “former generation” tools that I think made the internet so lovely was RSS and blogs.

Of course, both still exist today, but they’re most definitely not the primary means of sharing and storytelling. So this week when TTThis shared “If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs” and Daniel Miessler wrote “It’s Time to Get Back Into RSS” I felt like I wasn’t alone in those nostaglic feelings.

Feelings that hark back to a time when the internet was inherently beautiful, with some ugly parts; whereas today it feels like it’s inherently ugly, with some beautiful parts.

As guilty as I stand here being the Facebooking, Tweeting, Newsfeeding, Redditing, boy that I am, I can’t help but feel like all those services are just adding to that vibe that WALL-E predicted, where we’re all just fat content absorbing sobs on hoverboards, instead of the intellectual humans we were born to be.