As a (very) long-time user of the Internet, I've become increasingly disgusted at what it's become, in particular the rise of the whole "SEO phenomenon" that's basically become a cat-and-mouse game between site owners and search engines. Large corporations and SEO spammers have the resources to play this game, while the smaller independent sites (often managed by a single person) don't, and when they get penalised somehow, it's much harder for them to solve the "problem". The often interesting, unique, and more personal bits of the Internet are being made less accessible.

I think the reason it became this way is entirely due to search engines encouraging this ranking game. Those who want their site to be at the top of the SERPs optimise for that, instead of focusing on what makes their sites' content valuable to actual users. The incentives are all wrong, from the perspective of what the Internet should be, and to fix this I think search engines should, instead of trying to develop more and more complex algorithms that the SEOs will just figure out how to beat, use a (periodically changing) random ranking. This would probably kill off SEO completely, as there would no longer be anything about the search engine to optimise for - everyone who wants visitors would instead focus on that content, so on those times when their site appears near the top of the rankings, they can attract and retain users who will preferably bookmark them and visit again.