Screenshot of The Best Page in the Universe, a classic internet rant site.

What killed the internet rant scene?

The death of the internet rant scene is something I’ve wanted to write about for a very long time, mostly because it’s something I’ve spent far too much time thinking about over the years.

Back in the 2000s, rant sites were everywhere. Most of them were inspired to some degree by Maddox’s *The Best Page in the Universe*, though the writers usually denied copying him while using the same black background, white text, crude drawings, and general attitude. Some of us tried to branch out and develop our own styles eventually, but let’s be real, nearly everyone started out biting off Maddox in one way or another.

Just take a look through the old archives of The List and you’ll see how many rant sites existed at the time. Even then, those were only the ones we knew about and decided were worth including. We rejected plenty of sites for being abandoned, unfinished, unreadable, or just complete shit (as if we really had standards). There were probably countless others that never crossed our radar at all.

Some of these websites were run by genuinely talented writers. Others were run by teenagers who had recently learned how to swear and thought posting an article about how much people sucked made them the next George Carlin. Most of us fell somewhere in between. We were young, angry, bored, and convinced that the world desperately needed to hear what we thought about everything. And for a little while, people actually did.

Rant sites came and went constantly, but I feel like 2012 was around the time the scene really began falling apart. Sites that had been regularly updating slowed down, disappeared, or were replaced by placeholder pages when somebody forgot to renew the domain. By 2016, there were virtually no traditional rant sites left online.

So what happened?

Over the years, I’ve blamed a lot of different things. I blamed YouTube. I blamed Reddit. I blamed Facebook and Twitter for destroying people’s attention spans. I’ve also blamed corporations, censorship, political correctness, millennials, and every other convenient target under the sun.

Looking back at it now with older but not necessarily wiser eyes, I don’t think any one thing killed the internet rant scene. It was more like a long series of changes that gradually made the traditional rant site obsolete.

In fact, I don’t think internet ranting ever truly died.

That probably sounds like a ridiculous claim coming from somebody who just spent several paragraphs describing its death, but hear me out.

While the old text-based rant scene is dead as a doornail, the broader idea of people going online and angrily sharing their opinions with strangers is more alive than ever. It just doesn’t look anything like it used to.

The first and most obvious reason the old rant sites disappeared is that most of us simply grew out of them.

A lot of the writers featured on The List were in their late teens or early twenties. Most of us were high school students, college kids, retail workers, and unemployed losers with too much free time on our hands. Writing angry articles on a personal website was a great way to kill an afternoon when your biggest responsibility was showing up to class or pretending to look busy at a part-time job.

Eventually, those people finished school, started careers, got married, had kids, and moved on with their lives. Writing about why some movie sucked or why people who walk slowly in front of you should be executed becomes less important when you’ve got a mortgage and a screaming toddler in the next room.

Except for me, of course.

For some stupid reason, I can’t stop clinging to the past. Everyone else grew up and moved on, while I’m still on the internet writing articles like it’s 2007. I did eventually get a career and a long-term relationship, but apparently nobody told me that I was supposed to stop ranting once I became an adult.

Some writers probably wanted to continue but couldn’t find the time. Others lost interest or became embarrassed by the things they had written when they were younger. A few up and disappeared so completely that I have no idea what happened to them.

That alone probably would have been enough to kill the scene, but the internet itself was also changing at the same time.

Before Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit became dominant, anyone who wanted to share their opinion online had limited options. You could join a message board, post on somewhere like Usenet, or start your own website. There were plenty of free hosting services like GeoCities, Angelfire, Tripod, LiveJournal, Blogger, and Blogspot, so starting your own site required very little money.

I started out on Tripod years before I bought AngryJerk.net. The site looked like complete shit, but so did almost every other personal website at the time. Nobody expected professional graphic design from a teenager posting angry articles from a bedroom computer.

Those of us who stuck with it eventually bought domain names and learned enough HTML to design our own sites. “Design” might be a generous word for what most of us were doing (most of us just repurposed Maddox’s style of light text on a black background), but the websites belonged to us. We controlled how they looked, what went on them, and whether something stayed online.

That was a huge part of what made the old internet fun. Every website felt like visiting someone’s weird little corner of the world. The layouts were ugly as sin, but the sites had personality.

Then social media took over.

Instead of building your own website, you could create a Facebook account or Twitter profile and immediately have access to millions of potential readers. There was no hosting bill, no HTML, and no need to convince other websites to link to you. The platform provided the audience, and all you had to do was start posting. It was easier, faster, and more convenient. Naturally, many people abandoned having personal websites and moved onto the giant platforms.

The problem was that social media changed the way people expressed themselves. Traditional rant articles could run for thousands of words because the writer had an entire webpage to work with. Twitter gave you a tiny character limit. Facebook technically allowed longer posts, but the system rewarded quick updates that people could read while scrolling. People learned to make their opinions shorter and punchier. Instead of developing an argument over several paragraphs, they threw out a sentence designed to generate likes, shares, or angry responses. Context became less important than immediate reaction. Why write a 2,000-word article explaining why something pisses you off when you can write “This fucking sucks” and have 500 people agree with you on the spot?

This didn’t only affect writers, it changed readers too. People became accustomed to consuming information in small pieces while rapidly scrolling past anything that didn’t immediately grab them. Long articles started looking like college thesis papers.

If I absolutely had to pick one single thing though, I’d say that the rise of YouTube was probably the real beginning of the end for text-based ranting.

Video gave online commentators a more efficient way to reach an audience. People could hear the speaker’s tone, watch their reactions, and feel like they were developing a personal relationship with them. A writer might spend days putting together an article that reached a few hundred people, while some guy yelling into a cheap webcam could reach thousands overnight. If you’re trying to convey a strong opinion to a large audience, video will beat text almost every single time simply because emotional intensity is easier to convey through image and sound.

YouTube ranters weren’t doing anything radically different from what we were doing. They complained about movies, games, politics, relationships, work, school, and stupid people. The presentation had changed, but the basic idea was still the same.

Video eventually gave way to podcasting, which allowed people to rant and rave for hours without even needing to look presentable. You didn’t have to write a structured article or edit a video, you could sit your ass in front of a microphone and talk shit until you ran out of things to say.

Today, I think that the closest thing to the old rant scene is probably the collection of podcasters loosely grouped under the “manosphere” label.

Most of them are obnoxious, clout-chasing pricks who make money telling lonely young men that women are evil and the only path to happiness is buying their online course. They spend hours yelling into their microphones promoting some fake ass alpha male image and saying whatever will produce the most outrage clips. We wrote because we wanted to say something and maybe get a laugh out of people. These assholes are running businesses with it.

As much as I dislike most of them, I can’t pretend that what they’re doing now is much different from what we did. They’re still angry people sharing strong opinions online. The biggest differences are the format, the audience size, and the fact that many of them have turned it into multimillion dollar empires.

Part of me wishes I had transitioned to YouTube or podcasting when those formats were still relatively new. I think I could have achieved at least some level of success. I had years of experience, a built-in identity, and enough angry opinions to keep producing content indefinitely.

At the same time though, I probably would have ended up becoming one of those assholes. Maybe I’m better off writing for an audience small enough that I can say what I actually think without worrying about whether it hurts merchandise sales. Once your income depends on clicks and attention, you’re under constant pressure to become louder and more ridiculous. Every opinion has to be more extreme than the last one, and you can’t ever admit that you were wrong because the audience followed you specifically for being aggressively certain about everything.

The rise of influencers drove the final nail deeper into the coffin. The internet stopped rewarding interesting people and started rewarding marketable personalities. Your opinion became less important than your face, your lifestyle, your follower count, and your ability to convince companies that people cared about what razors you used. Even people who had nothing meaningful to say could become famous by documenting every moment of their lives. Meanwhile, some talented writer running a personal website (like yours truly) could spend a week putting together a great article and receive twelve views, four of which came from search engine bots.

That brings us to Google.

Smaller blogs and independent websites already had enough problems competing with social media, video platforms, podcasts, and corporate websites. More recently, Google’s Helpful Content Update and other algorithm changes have made discoverability even worse. Plenty of bloggers have reported losing huge portions of their search traffic after Google suddenly decided that their websites weren’t helpful enough. Apparently, the helpful thing is showing people Reddit posts, corporate media sites, sponsored results, and AI-generated summaries instead of sending them to the person who actually wrote an article about the subject.

Even if somebody wanted to revive the traditional rant site today, how would anyone find it? Search engines barely acknowledge small independent websites, social media platforms bury external links, and the average internet user has been trained to stay inside a handful of giant apps.

Oh, and there’s also the problem of saturation.

In the early 2000s, being an angry person with a website was still somewhat unusual. Most people weren’t publishing their thoughts online every day, so a good rant writer stood out.

Today, practically everyone in the developed world is online sharing their rage-filled opinion. Every news story produces millions of reactions within minutes. Everybody has a podcast, a YouTube channel, a TikTok account, or a Twitter profile. The internet is one giant nonstop rant where billions of people are yelling over each other, and only the people who have enough money to throw at the arbitrary algorithms are able to actually be heard. It’s hard to build an audience when the entire world is doing some version of what made your subculture unique.

There’s definitely a growing interest in decentralizing the internet again, though. People are getting tired of heavy-handed moderation, algorithms, data harvesting, and giant platforms deciding what they’re allowed to see. Reddit has become increasingly restrictive, Twitter changes direction every five minutes, and Facebook feels like a retirement community full of AI pictures and political arguments.

Nostalgia is also a huge market. Younger people who never experienced the old internet are slowly beginning to romanticize personal websites, message boards, and online communities that weren’t controlled by three giant corporations. Once they see what the internet used to look like, some of them might decide to recreate it.

Do I think we’ll ever see a resurgence of old-school internet rant sites?

I don’t know.

I don’t think thousands of rant sites are suddenly going to appear overnight. The conditions that created the original scene don’t exist anymore, and there are easier ways to reach people now.

Still, I could see a small revival possibly happening. A few people might decide that owning their platform is worth the extra work and start writing long-form rants again. Maybe some burned-out podcaster will get tired of screaming into a microphone and discover the power of the pen (or keyboard I guess).

If old-school rant sites ever make a comeback, you can bet your sweet ass I’ll be right there for it (not that I ever really left).

I used to be bitter about what happened to the rant scene. I blamed the audience for losing interest, the writers for quitting, and the platforms for replacing websites with profiles. I wanted to believe that something valuable had been stolen from us. But now I’ve mostly accepted that it was the natural direction for things to take. Technology changed, people grew older, and internet culture moved on.

The rant scene didn’t disappear because somebody killed it. It evolved into videos, podcasts, social media posts, reaction channels, livestreams, and whatever the hell influencers are supposed to be.

The old version is gone, but I’m glad I got to be part of it. It was a small, weird, aggressive little subculture full of amateur writers who thought their opinions mattered enough to build entire websites around them. Most of us never became famous or made any money. Half the sites looked terrible, plenty of the articles aged like milk, and we spent an embarrassing amount of time arguing with each other over complete bullshit.

But even after all of that, it was still a great time to be online.

Originally published to Rantlister, an archival/revival site dedicated to preserving the 90’s/00’s internet rant scene.