Idk if this is the right community for this conversation, but it’s been on my mind and I want to share it with someone.
In the 00’s every new thing we heard about the internet was exciting. There were new protocols, new ways to communicate, new ways to share files, new ways to find each other. Every time we heard anything new about the internet, it was always progress.
That lasted into the early teens and then things started changing. Things started stagnating. Now we’re well into the phase where every new piece of news we hear is negative. New legislations, new privacy intrusions, new restrictions, new technologies to lock content away and keep us from sharing, or seeing the content we were looking for. New ways to force ads.
At one point the Internet was my most favorite thing in the world. Now I don’t know if I even like it anymore. I certainly don’t look forward to hearing news about it. It’s sad, man. We’ve lost a lot. The mega corps took the internet from us, changed it from a million small sites that people created because they had big ideas, or were passionate about small ones, and turned it into a few enormous sites with no new ideas, no passion, just an insatiable desire for money.
We’re at the end of an era, and unlike the last 20 years of progress, I don’t think most of us will like what the next era brings.
Not sure the mega corps have it all, there are still small sites that people run, I my self run some stuff. My lemme instance for 1.
The way I see it, is the mega corps have the budget to make hosting with them cheaper that running at home.
What I meant is that they killed the ways we used to communicate (blogs, forums, etc.) by consolidating everything into a few sites, and then after ensuring the deaths of those platforms, started squeezing the new consolidated platforms for everything they’re worth. Yes, people chose to move to the new platforms, and slowly abandoned the old ones, but this has been a very engineered outcome. This is always where they hoped the road would lead. They offered the bait, and then sprung the trap.
They only killed the old tach off cuz the masses moved in, in the early days (think dialup) you had only the tech savvy online. You had to wait for everything, email, blogs, news the lot. Then the alway on internet landed and all that stopped, now you can reach anyone anywhere. all the non-tech savvy joined and the mega corps saw the rich gold mine.
The real issue is the lack of tech savvy people making small sites, the mega corps have the platforms and thats where everyone went. Its cheap and easy to be on a mega platform then to run your own site, anyone who does run a site will not see much traffic as its hidden by the big names