I blame "content-aggregator" sites moreso than smartphones. Smartphones suck, yes, but they really only ruined social media. Facebook, twitter, and assorted sites got fucked by the smartphone. Most normies only use smartphones to go on those handful of sites anyway, and that's how it was back in 2008 and 2009 when the iPhone and first smartphones came out. So yes, the inanity on social media, the proliferation of retarded videos, sure yes all of that can be attributed to the smartphone.
But I don't think that explains why the old internet "died". People don't become retards just because they get a smartphone, and all the people that populated the "old internet" presumably would have kept making the same kind of posts over time, it's just that there would have been shit in addition to that. It doesn't explain the near total disappearance of old internet. No, I think what truly destroyed everything were content aggregator websites. First it was Digg in 2005, and then when Digg imploded, Reddit took it's place in 2008 or so. Then there were other smaller content aggregator sites like StumbleUpon and even iFunny and eventually 9gag. The aforementioned sites are what destroyed the internet.
It used to be when you logged on, you had a homepage, and your homepage was fairly important, because you'd navigate to the rest of the web from there. Most people have a news site as their homepage. In addition, most people would have large lists of bookmarks in their web browser that they would consult frequently. When you found a new website you liked, you added it to your bookmarks so you could easily find it again later. And so, browsing the web usually meant clicking on one of your bookmarks, reading whatever was new since your last visit, and then when you got bored you would click on another interesting bookmark and so on.
If you spend a lot of time online in the early 2000s, chances are at least some of your bookmarks were for various web forums that were organized in a way similar to KF with various types of forums and sub-forums, with posters that had avatars and signatures in their posts, etc. There were tons of these forums, for every conceivable interest. My interests centered around Paranormal stuff and Drugs, so I went on paranormalnetwork.net, which got rebranded to paranormalis.com in like 2006 or 2007 (still around), shroomery.org (still around and active) and cannabis.com and the grasscity.com forums. Most of these forums were way bigger and more active than KiwiFarms is today, with some of them like cannabis.com or grasscity having hundreds of thousands of members, and thousands of unique daily posters.
I suppose it goes without saying, but these forums were centered around discussions, like KF is today. People would post various topics, occasionally there'd be a link to a news article or there would be an embedded image, and people would discuss things. There was a lot of interesting content on these forums and a lot of pointless shit, but they were very active at the time. And the search engines worked better, so if you searched on google or yahoo for something related to those topics, you'd find forum posts. Even up until a couple years ago, if you searched something drug related on google you'd find forum posts from bluelight.ru (popular drug site) or drugs-forum.com, or shroomery.org. Since then, if you search for anything drug related that's harder than weed, you only get links to rehab sites. Seriously fuck google. The way they have changed their algorithms over the past 7 years or so has directly contributed to the death of the "old internet" by making it way more difficult to find relevant websites and search results, but that's another topic.
The big change was the content aggregator sites. With Digg and Reddit, you would have these websites where you could go and scroll basically forever and never run out of content. Every single article posted had comments, and with reddit there was a subreddit for every possible niche interest. Reddit and subreddits destroyed a lot of old forums. Why bother posting a question on shroomery.org about how to grow shrooms when you can go to r/drugs on reddit and get more replies in a quicker amount of time because reddit is a massive site and more popular? This happened for all sorts of forums whether it was drug related, car related, video game related, and so forth. Reddit was just easier to use with a larger pool of people to draw from, and so it took over. And so began the migration from forums to content aggregator sites like reddit.
Of course there is a bit more to it than this. A lot of forums themselves had begun to stagnate due to over-moderation and power hungry moderators and admins. That's why plenty of people were happy to leave the forums in the first place for reddit and other sites. And then there is the changing nature of the net brought about due to higher bandwidth. Forums made sense in the 90s and 2000s when most people had slow internet. Once broadband became popular by the early-mid 2000s, new possibilities developed. 4chan became a popular site because of memes and images. Most forums were primarily text based discussions with occasional images, but 4chan incorporated easy ways to post images in almost every reply. Some threads were just memes and no text.
I think it was at that point that the internet changed from primarily being a text-based medium to being an image based medium. The variety of memes created on 4chan also helped drive traffic to reddit, which catalogued and organized the memes on subreddits like r/adviceanimals. Around this time youtube was rapildy gaining popularity as well, and then netflix. In the 2010s, the internet shifted from the image/meme based culture of the late 2000s, to a video-based culture, which is where we still are currently. The biggest sites now are still youtube, netflix, but also TikTok which is built around video sharing. I'll never be on TikTok, I don't really get it, but the video sharing is clearly extremely popular with youngsters.
And so now we have a situation where the internet has started to become more like regular television, at least for the average normie user. There are people who go online and never read anything, they just look at image and video posts on instagram and tiktok.
Anyway that's my rant. The old internet died due to a combination of content aggregator sites, switch from text based to image/video based content, and the manipulation of search engine algorithms for ideological and business reasons.
