crowded but empty.

Does anyone else feel like in spite of more and more people spending more time online, that the internet has been turning into an increasing lonely and isolating?

Yes. It's extremely different now than it was in the 90s. People had less time to spare online, but when they were, it was to enter a chat room and try to hold a conversation with 40 other people. It was chaos so people started making topic specific rooms. One name sticks out because I had a laughing fit when I read it. Someone had made a room called Barefoot Gas Peddle Pumping. Then it seemed like message boards kinda took over chat rooms because soon people saw that chatting was like shouting into a void. At the same time social media sites were popping up, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter and they were all fighting for popularity as were the dating sites that were starting to take off like Match and OkCupid. The internet removed barriers, made finding someone who shares something in common with you a lot easier. People were finding partners that seemed ideal across the country, or you know, right around the block for a quick hook up. So then began the decay of "modern dating". Every step was a leap. I think it wasn't so bad before smart phones came out. Having the internet at your fingertips is a game changer. You can access information at any time. So all the people who were addicted to something online, like gaming, or talking, or arguing/debating, or porn, they could now access everything any time they wanted. For all its capabilities, along with it comes heavy dose of neurosis. And now people are interacting with A.I. instead of trying to talk to actual people, lol. It's so incredibly fucking sad. We really are almost at the point of virtual spouses becoming a common thing.

back then only people who could afford a computer would come online, it worked as a filter. Nowadays, there's no filter anymore, everyone can come online with just a smartphone. So in general, maybe nothing much has changed, it's just the walls that came down? Making it waaaay hard for us genuine users to find one another since we have always been a minority

There is this idea called "Dead Internet Theory" where around 2012 or something, bots and people interacting with bots vastly outnumbered the real users and real interactions and it is actually rare to interact with a real person on the internet. I don't totally buy into it, but it is a somewhat scary idea.

As someone who didn't get access till late into the development of the internet I never really had an easy time reaching out to people. At first it was because I just, wasn't good at talking to others, but now it just seems like anyone I do talk to never wants to keep talking.