It feels like the web is becoming more closed every year — fewer open forums, more platforms locking away data and communities behind logins. What do you think are the biggest forces driving the decline of the open internet? Are walled gardens like Discord the main problem, or is it something else like artificial intelligence, corporate consolidation, surveillance, or changing user habits?
It’s a little bit of everything, but the main contributor is the financialization of the Internet. Ads went from reasonable banners to ever more egregious and disruptive formats, which led to ad blockers. Then efforts went towards ways to embed ads in ways that couldn’t be blocked or paywalls to keep revenue flowing, which hurts the value of the content. At the same time many companies started viewing the Internet as purely a sales and marketing platform, anything that didn’t drive revenue was a cost center and eliminated. At the same time search engines were slowly getting worse due to increased ad presence and polluted results with seo garbage sites that aren’t actually relevant. Everyone has slowly cannibalized their content to a point where the value isn’t there anymore for actual users.
Things like AI and bot nets were more the final nail in the coffin. Another large contributor was the death of flash, which destroyed a large portion of the Internet at the time.
Whether you like it or not, its censorship. Ppl with opposite political views silencing eachother creating echo chambers of only ppl who align with them politically.
Things are too strict now, every one has a mega phone and wants to shout at eachother and their opinion. The internet has become one big political pile of shit, most actually chill ppl, avoid it as a source of escapism.
Barrier to entry. Not enough laid back open minded ppl. So now, everyone’s separated and closed off. Ppl just want control
It’s not about connection and getting information, it’s all about pushing some fucking agenda.
Whether you like it or not, its censorship. Ppl with opposite political views silencing eachother creating echo chambers of only ppl who align with them politically.
Personally I don’t buy this one as a problem. Pre social media, anarchists weren’t sitting around a table sipping tea with nazis, alt people didn’t have to put up with fkn jocks making the same comments about dyed hair and piercings that grandpa has been making since 1976 daily, if you want to the club and spent your time insulting all the regulars and staff and owner, you’d get your ass kicked out to the curb by the bouncers.
I think the problem is a certain crowd acting like they should have the right to just barge into whatever spaces they want and say whatever they want without any consequences. Life was never like that. And just because you’re free to speak, doesn’t mean that everyone should be forced to listen whether they want to or not.
Sometimes people who believe in jewish space lazers just need to be treated like the deranged fucking clowns that they are and not be given a seat at the table. The world would probably be so much better if these people would go back to whatever fucking holes they crawled out of.
Edit: I’m also going to start assuming that people who think the internet used to be this place where bigots could run wild saying the N word are all 12 years old. Because forum sites pre social media were iron fisted.
While you are looking at them censoring people using slurs on big social media thinking it’s a win, they are also censoring people using ugly words like rape, genocide, suicide, and silencing a lot of important channels about important themes because it’s “sensitive” content.
We went from “I don’t like that shit, so I’m not gonna go to that place/interact with those people” to “I don’t like that shit, so people are not allowed to do it/talk about it”. And this is affecting everyone.Ok? This is actually now a different conversation because someone deciding that they don’t want to spend time with you or be in your company is not censorship, you fucking baby. No one owes you their attention or time. Or a ‘debate’ whenever you feel like it. And expecting, for example, trans people in a trans space to sit at the fucking table and sing kumbaya with people who think they are subhuman is just insane.
Also, who is the “they” that is censoring you? I’ve been on Facebook quite a lot over this last year and my feed is full of people talking about genocide. And feminist pages that don’t shy away from subjects like rape. In fact, here we are using these words right now, waiting for the man in black to come and make it disappear.
Unless you’re making a habit of going into spaces that specifically don’t want these topics and doing it anyway? In which case, you’re the asshole. Which would make you just like a maga that gets banned from a queer page for using slurs, then acts like their rights are being infringed because of it.
“who is the they” - big social media
The biggest social media of all is YouTube, and even mentioning those words screw your reach, get you demonetized and later deplataformed. They killed most critical channels about history and war reporting, and these pages you see on Facebook, ask about their reach any of these days, you will see that they barely reach their own followers.ps: Sorry, the original commenter was talking about people “censoring” each other - if it means just blocking, I fully support it (but usually it means reporting everything they don’t like and getting it banned). I was talking about social media itself censoring everyone.
Corporations. The matter is how: walled gardens, exploiting the commons, EEE, creating new barriers of entry, etc.
100% this. The internet before business/corporations understood how it worked was a wonderfully ugly (by today’s standards) source of information. It was really possible to get global reach as an individual if you created something interesting. Search engines just indexed at that point, no buying key words to get on the front page. If you made the best “something” out there it would organically find its way to the top of search engines.
I was a firm believer that it was going to change the world giving individuals a chance to get their ideas out to the world, give small businesses global reach. It did change the world just not in the way i had hoped.
It was also full of things a few people would love, and most would hate. Eventually replaced by things that are bland, unoffensive, “one size for all”; nobody hates them, but nobody loves them either.
Centralization is one, where only a handful of big corporations dominate the internet. The other part is every platform trying to become everything and cornering all markets.
Take social media for example. In the early days, facebook was for connecting with your friends and family. Instagram was for posting and sharing photos. Myspace and twitter were for microblogging. Youtube was for long form videos and vine was for short form.
Now every social media platform wants to be a website, marketplace, payment processor, microblogging, short form video, music streaming, etc. This of course causes them to enshittify.
Gen X and Millennials in control are killing the internet.
The Baby Boomers had started the process of control. As we know, the left-leaning people have academia, the media, and other big institutions, and the deep state (corporatocracy) will only continue until people start detatching themselves from it.
Read Jack Spirko’s book, Laws of Life: Ditch the System Design Your Life, and listen to his podcast, The Survival Podcast. You’ll thank me later.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for hating boomers for what they did to the economy, but when they got outraged they compromised with simple Parental Advisory stickers and age ratings, putting the responsibility and choice on families. The new batch of entitled little fuckers, however… well, look at all the control they want to exert over everything.
