Technology

It's probably either waiting for approval to sell ads or was denied and they're adding more stuff. Google has a virtual monopoly on ads, and their approval process can take 1-2 weeks. Google's content policy basially demands that your site by full of generated trash to sell ads. I did a case study here, in which Google denied my popular and useful website for ads until I filled it with the lowest-quality generated trash imaginable. That might help clarify what's up.

Here's the summary for the wikipedia article you mentioned in your comment:

The dead Internet theory is an online conspiracy theory that asserts that the Internet now consists mainly of bot activity and automatically generated content that is manipulated by algorithmic curation, marginalizing organic human activity. Proponents of the theory believe these bots are created intentionally to help manipulate algorithms and boost search results in order to ultimately manipulate consumers. Furthermore, some proponents of the theory accuse government agencies of using bots to manipulate public perception, stating "The U. S. government is engaging in an artificial intelligence powered gaslighting of the entire world population".

^to^ ^opt^ ^out^^,^ ^pm^ ^me^ ^'optout'.^ ^article^ ^|^ ^about^

A search engine that displays only human created content, and hides AI.

Counterpoint: the Internet still exists as it did back then, but relatively smaller compared to what it's become.

You just need to find the right people and content to interact with, which is harder now because there's so much more garbage. I'd say they have grown in absolute numbers.

I hope you remember the amounts of spam and machine-translated text back then.

Being not an English speaker, you'd basically expect most of what you find to be machine-translated and badly at that.

Pirate localizations of games were basically translated the way that you'd get some basic idea sometimes somewhere, but in general it was probably worse than the English version, which would at least make some sense if you knew some English.

It's people and IT companies which were better.

There is value in verifying and quantifying opinion, even if your sure this opinion is true.