I've spent a LOT of time on the internet, but the vast majority of that time has been consuming. I've watched, viewed, read, and played many, many things. My personal experience with it has reflected the sentiment I've seen spread out across sites like mine:
The Internet is no longer the wild west. This much is true. I mourned flash with the rest of the internet, watched Youtube deteriorate into a husk, seen self expression and community kicked to the wayside in exchange for algorithms.
But I think something that is often overlooked is that while the culture of the old web is dead, it isn't unattainably so. The social media titans have a monopoly only over our attentions, not the ability to create. Sites like mine are easier than ever to create, even without using something like squarespace(Granted, I wouldn't use it but I am immensely snobby where these things are concerned)
What I am more worried about, is the aforementioned algorithms. As silly as it sounds, I think the curent state of the internet is subject to the exact situation that Conan the barbarian philosophised: "Steel isn't strong, boy. Flesh is Strong". That is, we have more tools than ever, but because we cannot control ourselves, they are largely useless in escaping the hole we've dug with them. To put it even more bluntly: The internet has become a vessel for the psychological manipulation of the populace in a more insidious and efficient manner than ever before.
So, what's the point? What do we do? Well, we could accept the reality of our situation, accept constant monitoring and tyranny or we could go full paranoia-fueled mania and do everything possible to prevent anyone from seeing any of our data!
Please note: The latter is a terrible idea and you should in no way follow my example. But if you want to anyway, keep reading because I'll be detailing a bunch of stuff you can do on that front in the future.