Today, Explained - Internet bad

Episode Date: January 4, 2026

Once a place of serendipity and discovery, the internet now thrives on feeding us toxic rage bait designed to piss us off. Can we get the good internet back? This episode was produced by Peter Balonon-Rosen and Hady Mawajdeh, edited by Jenny Lawton, fact-checked by Sarah Schweppe, engineered by David Tatasciore, and hosted by Jonquilyn Hill.  Photo by Fairfax Media via Getty Images.  If you have a question, give us a call on 1-800-618-8545 or send us a note here. Listen to Explain It to Me ad-free by becoming a Vox Member: vox.com/members. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The website stumbleupon.com was Reddit before Reddit. In this AOL chat room. My face just was gone one day, and I wish I could log back in and see how I represented myself on the internet back in the day. If you look over my shoulder while I'm on my phone, you'll see my feed is pretty wall-to-wall food content. Easy rice dishes to upgrade your rice game. Recipes to try. I'm cooking the top 50 near-time recipes of 2025. Dinner party inspiration.

This week I had a friend over for a blueberry-themed dinner party. But in the last year or so, I noticed something that a lot of the food I was seeing was pissing me off. Let's make my grandma's famous McDonald's casserole. Just chop up some burgers layer with ranch, nuggets, fries, and finished with melted American cheese. I'm getting served. the most bizarre stuff. I'm talking disgusting food combinations, unsanitary kitchen practices.

Oh, you put this pasta right in an aluminum pan. Don't even take the paper out, because you want all the seasons. And it turns out, making me mad is the goal. This stuff is rage bait. Rage bait to me is, in a way, it's kind of like an engine that makes the internet work in some ways.

Craig Silverman is co-founder of Indicator, a website that, investigates digital deception. But in a strict kind of definition, it's to me it's kind of content that elicits a very strong emotional reaction, typically anger. I'm John Glyn Hill.

This is explaining to me from Vox. This week, the internet's just gotten so freaking mean. But does it have to be this way? Is it possible to bring back the kinder, weirder internet we fell in love with? To start, we have to understand how we got here in the first place. It's been sort of figured out that, oh, yeah, the more I can create content that gets a very

powerful and often enraged emotional reaction, the more power I have potentially over people. And so to me, like, Rage Babe is kind of the currency or the power that's behind a lot of the content we might see. Are there, like, particular videos you've seen online and you're like, ooh, that just raised my blood pressure a little bit? Because I admit I see that. Some of those pop the balloon, a lot of the dating content stresses me out. Yeah, the pop the balloon and the dating ones, this sort of, you know, the cringe.

Welcome in. We can have your name. Rayland, why did you pop your balloon? Initially, I saw I thought the shoe was beautiful, but the toes hanging off the shoes for me. There's a whole, I think, genre of streamers who go around in public doing outrageous things to people and getting them to react and then getting them on camera. If he keeps recording, I'm going to have to play the camera. I don't care.

Then you're going to get kicked out of school and you're going to have to watch your pass on. I'm not going to get kicked out of shit. You're just playing your parents. Don't touch me. Like the dude is walking around. He's got three or four bodyguards with him. And he just does really offensive, gross, obnoxious things to people.

And then it's like hiding literally behind the bodyguards. That one drives me absolutely crazy. It's like, okay, if you have to be scared, you're going to get beat up, should you be doing this? Yeah. And here's the problem. Like, it works. If you are uploading that content then to YouTube later,

the people who think you are such a jerk and the worst, they're still going to sit there and watch it. And the people who get enjoyment out of seeing that and think like, oh, man, this is crazy what he's getting away with. Like, they're watching it too. So you kind of win no matter what. And then I think there's a category of a lot of political rage bait that I think people encounter a lot.

What's the problem with xenophobic nationalism? Don't you think that's better for Americans in general? Like xenophobic? Nationalism is better. We should have a coherent culture. Comments that are, you know, particularly racist, sexist, also just, you know, political ideas veering into like Nazism and things like that that were, you know, considered completely unacceptable for a long time.

Suddenly, you know, people are saying them, people are pointing it out there because they kind of win, even if it makes people outraged. And they've said this outrageous thing. It still makes people engage. It still makes people listen. It makes people write. moments, they're getting the engagement and they're building an audience over time by engaging in that kind of political rage bait of the saying the outrageous thing or showing the outrageous thing

that the people from the other side have said or done. What does it tell us about the state of the internet that rage bait is so central to it? I mean, it's Oxford's 2025 word of the year. Yeah, it's funny. We went from brain rot in 24 to race rate. in 2025, for me, one of the things that stuck out with it in 2025 was it was kind of operationalized in certain ways. And what I mean by that is, like, I saw a lot of kind of app entrepreneurs and tech entrepreneurs talking on apps and talking in other places about how this is, this is the way to get customers. This is the way to build your business. And so like an example of that would be a guy named Roy Lee who launched a product called Cluley in 2025.

I think I remember this. Yeah. Cluelly was a program you could use to cheat during job interviews as a coder. He really advertised it and really, you know, leaned into the cheating aspect. His whole thing was enraging people about, oh, I can't believe this product. Cluelly, it's so unethical. And he wrote that. And actually, I encountered a lot of marketing.

strategies around that of like staged content and things that were really felt very manipulative. And at the end of the day, weren't even labeled as ads. A story that I worked on was about a bunch of different AI-enabled study apps where you could upload your course materials and get quizzes and tests out of them. And they just flooded these rage-filled classroom interaction confrontations where the professor is yelling at students and the students like, well, I've been using this tool. You read 100 pages in 13 minutes. Yes, I did.

Yeah. No, how did you do that? I asked what I needed to know, and I extract all that, and then I'm good. You need to leave. Go. And it's all presented like these are real classroom interactions. And, I mean, in some cases, you know, they're using AI to do it. They might be using AI avatars.

So the rage bait is not even coming from real people. You know, it's a completely manufactured scene. And I think that was a big piece. Wow. So it's not just, you know, individual people who want to go viral doing this. It's companies who are flooding our algorithms and making us get enraged. Yeah. How are all of these changes to the internet reshaping our emotional experiences of going online? I feel like more people feel bad about the time they're spending on the internet. You know, they feel bad about all of the brain rot that they feel they're looking at. And at the rage bait they're looking at. One of the things that also happened was the big platform started to kind of roll back some of their oversight where Mark Zuckerberg does this to camera video saying,

It's time to get back to our roots around free expression on Facebook and Instagram. Hey, you know, we've been working with fact checkers and trying to do these things over the years to reduce the amount of false and misleading content. And you know what? These fact checkers, they're so biased. We can't do this anymore.

We're going to get rid of fact checkers and replace them with community notes. The same platforms, they also have, you know, systems and algorithms that reward the content that gets the strongest engagement and the strongest reactions, which always goes back, in a lot of cases, you know, to emotion. And so I feel like the average person is probably encountering a lot of this emotion-driven content, this divisive content, content that is a little more titillating, a little more risque. And it's just kind of pushing us more and more. It feels like the internet used to be this place where you could discover anything.

And there have always been dark corners of it. Don't get me wrong. But it felt like there were a lot of more options, like a lot more discovery. It somehow felt bigger and you never knew what you would stumble on. Are there pockets of the internet that still feel that way to you? We definitely have more choices than ever before. But the reality is that because so much of it is mediated by these systems, and algorithms that are really just looking for what is making someone like this person spend

time on our platform. I feel like there's a lot of choice, but it's also kind of flattens it out. You end up in your timeline on social media getting fed a lot of the same stuff, rage bait, brain rot, and so it feels like there's a lack of understanding and it feels like there's a lack of serendipity and of joy of what, you know, we used to get on the internet. Up next, our internet glory days. Is there any way to bring them back? Support for this show comes from Rocket Money. We all have goals that require a little bit of planning in the money department.

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The days of logging onto the computer in my dad's study, printing out random song lyrics, reading fan fiction, and making a secret MySpace account. By the way, my parents eventually found out about it and took away my iPod shuffle for like an entire semester. Max Reed remembers this era too. My first internet connection was with AOL in 97, 98, something like that. Welcome, you've got mail. And I have really fond memories of going to the Mad Magazine AOL page and having to download all the graphics for I don't even know what was on there. But it was a very different kind of internet and experience.

What are some of the websites that you spent most of your time on back then? Well, once I moved off of AOL, I would go to link aggregating sites. Like FARC, when I was a little older, Metafilter was another one, places you'd go and people would have found weird news, interesting news. There'd be discussions in the comments and people would be talking about it. And, you know, you'd get linked out to other websites that you could find and discover web comics and bloggers and whatever else. Max grew up to write about tech and culture. He has a substack called Read Max. That's R-E-A-D. And he says, compared to now, the internet, even just a decade ago, was a happier place.

Yeah, it was obviously very different from now because there were fewer mega platforms, by which I mean these huge sites that become effectively the whole internet for people, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, places where you go and you can spend hours without ever leaving that particular website. It is our mission to try to help connect everyone around the world and to bring the world closer together,

and we're committed to doing that. It's much more likely that you'd go to, what we call a web portal like Yahoo or Huffington Post or even a site like Tumblr, which is sort of located in between what would later be these mega platforms and, you know, this sense of like a landing page that you'd go to and you'd click out to find other things. And one thing about this previous internet we're talking about is most of the content online was just made by amateurs who generally weren't looking to make a ton of money from what they were doing. They were making fan sites, hanging out on message boards, giving home improvement advice. But it wasn't a

world of influencers. It wasn't a world of, you know, engagement turning into money. So there was a little bit less of the sort of slick professional edge to a lot of what you were encountering. What changed? And when did it change? How did the internet get this way? Yeah, I would say there's sort of two big shifts. The first one happened almost 20 years ago. in 2006, Facebook introduced the news feed. The idea was to update the homepage, to make it easier for people to see what was going on with their friends. This one-size-fits-all feed running down the center of the site when you visited,

that just showed you everything that was happening. And it basically looked like a wall of text. And Facebook introduced this in 2006, and people revolted. They hated it. There were all these groups created people saying, oh, we hate this, we hate this. We eventually got an alert from the security team that there was a, protest gathering in front of our office, and that we would need to be escorted out the back. But what Facebook was seeing on the back end was that all of their numbers were up.

Engagement was up, you know, time on site was up, visitors was up. People kept coming back for more. People learned how to use it, and they used it a lot, and they liked it. And the feed has become the paradigm for how we engage with the Internet ever since, right? So I think that's one major shift, right? And then the second change, which is less of a kind of. step change and more an acceleration of something that was already happening. Was the TikTok introducing the FYP as a sort of concept? You go to TikTok because TikTok has this incredibly

dialed an algorithm that's going to show you weird videos as you scroll through it. And so that FYP concept is other people's videos, strangers that you don't know, but that are going viral, that the algorithm, that the sorting mechanisms have determined are for you. And that's, I think that's a that's the other change that sort of created this this really wholly separate kind of unsocial or antisocial internet that we uh that we're on now has the algorithm killed the internet you know yes and no I mean this is a sort of I think it's worth keeping in mind you know the algorithm has also brought in like the internet is what it is today is the size it is today has the engagement it is today because it brought people in I think something that you know is

worth grappling with what Facebook would say, what Mark Zuckerberg would say if he was on this podcast with us, is like, you guys can complain about this. But every single time we've done, made one of these moves, the numbers have shown that people spend more time on Facebook. They want to be there more. They enjoy the time spent. They feel like it was better spent. Are we conflating time spent and liking a thing? Well, that's definitely one. I mean, one thing to think about is like all of the metrics that Facebook is gathering tell us something fairly narrow. But it is also true that when they quiz, when they sort of interview people, people will say they felt like their time was better spent, you know, with the algorithmic, you know, FYP type feeds than with the way Facebook was 10 years ago. I wonder if this kind of trashy, toxic internet, was it inevitable? You know, like can a website grow and make money and be a place that brings in an audience without ruining itself? I think a website that shows us a different path is Wikipedia, which is as big by the numbers as basically any of the platforms we're talking about and is arguably more essential to the web as we know it than even a Facebook.

Wikipedia, on the other hand, begins with a very radical idea. And that's for all of us to imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. And that's what we're doing. And in that sense, to answer your question, well, no, it's not. inevitable, you know, in the absolute sense that a huge, important website turn into shit. But I think the other thing is, I think it's real that the culture of Wikipedia, as formulated by Jimmy Wales and the many people who've worked at the Wikimedia Foundation over the years, and by the volunteers who contribute and edit and monitor and otherwise work on Wikipedia, the culture of Wikipedia has been a really important factor in ensuring that it maintains itself as a free resource for anyone online.

the core aim of the Wikimedia Foundation is to get a free encyclopedia to every single person on the planet. And I think that part of the problem with many of the big platforms we're talking about isn't merely that there's like a set of structural incentives that is pushing them into the sort of darker corners of what they're doing, but that the overall culture of Silicon Valley isn't one that values any of the things we're talking about, isn't one that values challenge and friction and like selflessness, I suppose, in some ways. Max, you and I are millennials Could it be that

We've just aged out of the internet We're no longer the target audience I mean, I hate to break it to you We are old We are middle-aged unfortunately We have reached middle-aged I think I mean I want to believe that I'm right

And that I know everything I know enough about the internet To know that it's fallen from its height In the early 2000s Millennials like us We were the protagonist of the internet for a really long time because we were the people who grew up on it, we were the people who in our offices knew the most about it, we were the people who

created most of the content, were first on most of the social networks, and we're not the protagonists anymore. And some of that is, you know, aging out. Some of that is like there are people who are even more raised by the internet than we were who have been online for an even higher percentage of their lives. And I think the other part of it is that the internet we see on all these websites now is really a truly global internet. And so, you know, in some sense, there's a lot of stuff we don't see. There's also a lot of stuff we see that just isn't for us and that we're not going to understand as cool or whatever else. That's maybe slightly separate from the question of like, are the structures of the internet

worse off than they were 20 years ago? Because I think it's true like they are. But the old internet's gone. It's not coming back. So I think people are aged, the best you can do is retreat to your group chats, you know, keep a bunch of group chats handy when you need to waste some time and say hi to your friends. Yeah, man, long live the group chat. Coming up, what if the internet is made for you, and you hate it anyway? This is explained it to me. I'm JQ. So, yeah, I'm Nick Plant. a lot of organizing around New York City for people who are trying to resist the current

suite of technology in their lives and build better alternatives together. Nick Plant is 25 years old. He's part of a growing movement of young people who've grown up online and are seriously over it. A couple months ago, he helped organize an event called Delete Day. The idea was that people would come together to release themselves of the shackles of social media. Word spread the old-fashioned way. Flyers, sidewalk chalk. And the turnout was really great. We had between 80 to 100 people, probably at least 10 picnic blankets set up, candles in the middle. Real people in real time together. I got up and did an introduction for everyone, kind of tried to hype them up for what they were about to do. And then it turned

turned into, yeah, a really electric kind of moment where everyone was deleting. People were getting up and, like, shouting the apps that they were getting off. Everything from dating apps like Hinge to someone did Spotify, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter. I actually still had a LinkedIn myself. It was just kind of lingering there, so I decided I was going to do it. It was a final signal in, like, me claiming this lifestyle. I'm not just being critical of these technologies. I'm truly trying to live in a way where my center of gravity is elsewhere

and less about me, you know, chasing some kind of, like, preordained script that I'm finding online. When did you first get a smartphone? I got a smartphone when I was around 10 or 11, I would say. I think when I was in fifth grade, I signed up for Instagram. I remember a friend and I. We told all our friends to join, and we were almost like peer-pressuring them to try it out and to start posting and to follow us and like our posts and we'll like theirs in return. And then I spent a lot of time on Instagram, on Snapchat, on YouTube.

And then by the time I got to college, it did feel at that point like I needed Instagram to stay in touch with people. I needed Snapchat. I needed LinkedIn at that point, too, to start getting internships and share my research that I'm doing as a student. But I did start to think about it, right? That's where like the uphill nature of it really kicked in for me. And I felt the kind of inertia, the gravity weighing against my face. And I started by deleting Snapchat. It felt like this first big step. But the real turning point came his junior year of college.

The pandemic hit. He gave up his smartphone, turned away from his screens. And he went on a road trip with some friends. Three weeks, no devices. Ooh, I still think about that trip. It felt like I was starting to lift that veil that the rationales I was making for staying on Instagram, for keeping an iPhone 24-7, were not quite accurate. Has sort of getting rid of the apps, not doing a smartphone, has it impacted the way you connect with other people? It's only helped for the better

In terms of ways that we're socializing post-social media You actually find that you do truly get a bunch of time back when you quit And we don't have as much trouble scheduling As we did when we were all chronically online And then another thing I do Is just put out like an open schedule to people sometimes Where I'm like, hey, I'm going to be in this place for the next few hours stop by. And then people do, and it's a lot of fun. And it's a lot more seredipitous that way, too.

Do you do lots of, like, more snail mail, more writing letters? Like, is that a way you connect to people now? Some friends and I are doing a snail mail project this winter. My friend Kyle came up with it, and basically it's like we mail one page at a time to each other, and by the end we'll have a zine created. Oh, I love that. When I was in Middle East, school I moved and me and my best friend from the city I used to live in, we would just mail each other a notebook back and forth with like, this is who I saw in class today. This is what's going on. And it's just, I don't know, it's very funny to hear it. You be like, no, we're going back to that. Yeah, I think ultimately we're creating a new life for ourselves. But there are a lot of components

that we're borrowing from previous generations. One of the things that the internet, promised us initially was discovery, you know, that you could learn about new things and niche communities and find new music. I wonder, you know, if you give up spending a lot of time online, how do you get your fix for discovery? Like, what advice do you have for people who are like, I'm curious, I want to learn more about the world around me, but I have to step away from the internet? You kind of reset to a state where maybe you don't need or expect, you don't expect as much information, as much entertainment to come into your mind as you used to. I had a period as like short books only short poetry collections.

I don't have the bandwidth for anything else. And you can actually reach a point where you can like sit with your thoughts for a lot longer and those become more interesting. I, you know, often wake up and leave. my apartment without a phone or anything on me, go for walks, grab some coffee, just kind of like think. And that alone is an experience that is somehow full of like, at its best, connections between different threads in my brain being made, moments of serendipity. Something as simple as like, oh, I was reading about that yesterday and I see it out on the street now, or, oh, my God, you're the person I met a week ago, and now you're randomly on the street corner.

Everything I was experiencing felt, I just felt it more. It felt like more. That's our show this week. If you want something about our world explain to you, call 1-800-618-8-8-5-45, or send an email to AskVox at Vox.com. And if you like the show, become a Vox member. You can listen to our episodes with zero ads. Go to Vox.com slash members to learn more. This episode was produced by Peter Balin-on-Rosen and Hottie Milwaukee. It was edited by Jenny Lawton and fact-checked by Sarah Shweppy.

It was engineered by David Tattachor and our executive producer is Miranda Kennedy. I'm your host, John Blenhill. Thank you so much for listening. I'll talk to you soon. Bye.