Global Information Apocalypse
After its meteoric rise in popularity in the 2000s, commercial interests very quickly caused the internet to become riddled with ads, scams, and misinformation. The rise of primitive AI systems[1] in the 2020s further caused people to lose faith in anything they would see online. This process kept escalating until one particularly devious misinformation campaign left millions dead.
Search engines got worse, rankings corrupted by undisclosed ad buys. Social media sites were overrun with "Slop"[2] designed to enrage and engage as much as possible with no real substance. Trust was fundamentally eradicated, and people realized they could just leave.
Online Philosopher Heather Flowers was among the first to predict what would take place on the internet over the following decade.
Starting in the mid 2030s, most non-commercial services and websites, as well as places mainly reliant on user generated content, shut down due to lack of traffic, funding and general enthusiasm. The data hosted by those services and sites was largely preserved by rogue archivists and is now stored in private collections.
With the rise of MeshNets, internet traffic plummeted and was mostly relegated to automated processes, computer-to-computer communications, and the occasional business transaction. (Turns out people still hate going to the bank more than they hate The Internet.)