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AIBU?

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To ask you what you’d miss about the Internet

28 replies

Tillow4ever · 19/11/2025 08:24

After another outage yesterday and lots of websites being unavailable etc, I’ve been pondering this - if you woke up tomorrow and the internet was gone completely with no chance of it being restored, what would you miss about it? And what would you be pleased about? I’m not talking about if the internet never existed, because you wouldn’t know what you were missing in that scenario.

For me I’d miss:

The ease of keeping in touch with friends through WhatsApp, etc
Gifs
Being able to read the news at my convenience without having to buy a newspaper or watch on tv at a designated time
Mumsnet
Online only games
Working out what else I’ve seen that actor in when watching a new show
Streaming tv/music
Being able to work from home

Benefits I can potentially see:

Might make me see friends in person more frequently if we can’t catch up with a WhatsApp anymore
Increased pressures to look and act a certain way might be gone
Online bullying - I won’t miss that!
Trades might see more people studying them as less people will be able to fix things themselves without a YouTube tutorial to show them what to do

I’m sure there’s loads more - but I’d probably then say everyone else’s too!

OP posts:
EnterFunnyNameHere · 19/11/2025 08:31

Well, the total breakdown of pretty much every aspect of life - from health care, to utilities, to food chain, to banking and more - would be a bit of a blow...!

If the practical stuff somehow could magically keep going, I'd probably mostly miss the "information at my fingertips" where you can easily look up more detail about anything that interests you. I would probably initially miss but the best grateful for not spending so much time idly reading stuff online though!

HairOil · 19/11/2025 08:30

I’d miss everything — from online banking and being able to pay bills, book holidays, buy anything and have it delivered, browse houses for sale without physically going to an estate agent, look up directions, sat nav, Teams etc etc to all of the knowledge shared on there, from YouTube videos of performances from decades before I was born to Project Gutenberg/Interned Archive to Wikipedia, and all the serious knowedge repositories like online dictionaries, for free.

randomchap · 19/11/2025 08:29

I'd miss my job, and working from home

The Internet underpins so much of modern life that it's almost impossible to imagine life without it

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