The internet is losing its third places

When you’re looking at a thread of social media bots sharing the same five replies to AI-generated slapfights between anthropomorphic fruits, it can be hard to remember the internet used to be a lively place. Enthusiastic message boards, blogs dedicated to any niche you could find in any hobby, news and culture websites as renowned for sharp commenters as their stable of writers. This was a time when your blogroll was nearly as important as your friend list, a period where a well-curated feed on Google Reader (RIP) denoted good taste as much as a co-sign from the arbiter of taste Derek Guy does today. 

The web never quite reached the global utopian vision of its 1990s early adopters, but for about two decades it was a good hang. Like a neighborhood bar or a bowling alley, the internet was a place you could reliably go to have fun and occasionally learn something from semi-strangers who shared your interests. The internet was rife with what sociologist Ray Oldenburg called “third places,” a space separate from home and work that encouraged social interaction and bred cohesion in communities. 

“Third places remain upbeat because of the limited way in which the participants are related. Most of the regulars in a third place have a unique and special status with regard to one another,” Oldenburg wrote in his 1989 book “The Great Good Place.” “It is special in that such people have neither the blandness of strangers nor that other kind of blandness, which takes zest out of relationships between even the most favorably matched people when too much time is spent together, when too much is known, too many problems are shared, and too much is taken for granted.”

Oldenburg was pushing back against restrictive zoning and suburbanization, arguing that fully residential neighborhoods weakened the societal fabric of the United States. For a time, the internet did put a Band-Aid on this problem, bringing isolated communities together and providing the sort of crosstalk they couldn’t hear on the abandoned sidewalks of gated developments.

At the risk of dating myself even more than I already have, I had a few websites that I visited daily from the family room of my suburban home. Often I’d sign on to read the takes of sharp commenters over the writers who provided the digital parlor. 

In the same way I’ll now swing through my local bar or corner coffee shop to see who’s around, back then I’d find time every day after school to give the forums and comment sections a once-over. I’d scroll down and take in a guerilla column from a reader with an unprintable name and profile picture of a crudely drawn yellow Pokemon with a phallus for a nose. A bit farther down, I’d find the poster who spoke only in comments lifted from forums about the mallcore metal act Avenged Sevenfold. Heading over to the Gawker network of websites — prior to its Peter Thiel-backed demolition — I’d find what the nation’s bored lawyers had to say about news from the worlds of gossip, pro sports (Deadspin) and sci-fi (i09). While never quite as gratifying or grounding as a true third place you had to physically visit, these online hubs were the closest thing to cafes and churches that the infrastructure of the internet could offer. 

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The social media age — sometimes dubbed Web 2.0 to distinguish it from the less openly interactive earlier era of the internet — seemed to supercharge this impromptu rezoning of the information superhighway. Without needing to build a website or familiarize themselves with a forum, any netizen could start or join a conversation at any time. It ushered in a new kind of fun that was fresher, busier and airier than past listservs and chatrooms, the dank basements of internet interaction.

All that promise started to wither around 2015, as social media giants gobbled up more and more of the profits that kept earlier hangouts afloat. Facebook’s fraudulent video metrics struck a massive blow against the writers and editors that maintained these digital communities. Blogs and entire media networks shuttered in rapid succession. There were fewer places to hang out, and the ones that remained were less useful due to overcrowding. Facebook’s turn toward spam and fake news, along with Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter (now X), turned the one-time gathering places into crowded bazaars where vendors shouted for your attention. Reddit, once the internet’s premier place to talk about the news, was cannibalized by invite-only chatroom platforms like Discord and Telegram. 

Writers who remained employed on this hollowed-out web were increasingly left wondering where all their favorite haunts had gone. 

Here’s Dan Nosowitz writing for New York magazine in 2018: 

The other day, I found myself looking at a blinking cursor in a blank address bar in a new tab of my web browser. I was bored . . . What I really wanted to do was waste some time. But . . . I didn’t know how. I did not know what to type into the address bar of my browser.

Five years later, New Yorker columnist Kyle Chayka declared “the social-media Web as we knew it . . . appears to be over.” “The precipitous decline of X is the bellwether for a new era of the Internet that simply feels less fun than it used to be. Remember having fun online?” he wrote. “These experiences don’t seem as readily available now as they were a decade ago.”  

This dearth of fun places to gather is nothing new in America, online or otherwise. We’ve seen it happen to our physical third spaces for decades. In his seminal 1995 essay “Bowling Alone,” Robert D. Putnam worried about the erosion of American social life — blaming television and the internet in part — for the decline in civic organizations and club participation. His book-length expansion, published five years later at the dawn of the social media age, worried that lonely entertainment would kill what was left of American socializing, and that collapse would lead to a new age of political extremism.

I don’t dispute that using the internet is a solitary activity. It was then and remained so even at the height of blogs and Weird Twitter. But over the last decade it’s become even lonelier, with algorithms and vertical video platforms like TikTok siloing users into consumption over interaction. Facebook turned from a place to share photos and event invites to a place where Boomers give themselves AI psychosis. Under Musk, X has transformed into a haven of bots looking to start fights for pennies. This era of scrolling alone has, as Putnam halfway predicted, coincided with a rise in asocial extremism.

There is some hope for people who remember those old internet communities, as well as the nostalgic youngsters who never knew a more wide-open internet. The internet as we knew it might have been torn down to the studs by Silicon Valley bigwigs looking to sell the wiring for scrap, but the bones are still good. Many people are already rebuilding. My favorite listservs are likely goners, both thanks to the obsolescence of the technology and the average age of users rapidly approaching “dead,” but you can see echoes of that chattier internet if you know where to look.

Defector, a cooperative founded by former Deadspin staffers, bills itself as “the last good website,” and an appreciative community of subscribers seem to agree. Music publications like Stereogum and Pitchfork have switched to a paid supporter model while fostering their communities of indie music obsessives in robust — and, in Pitchfork’s case, brand new — comment sections. Dinosaurs of Web 2.0 like Digg and Myspace have either relaunched or are considering it, thinking their friends-first model will be welcome in 2026.

Hopefully, I don’t sound as naive as those early internet optimists, who thought new shifts would usher in a golden age of humanity. But the early success of these smaller, people-first models is promising. Internet users have proven they’ll make a habit of swinging by these fledgling new spaces — if the conversation is interesting enough.