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?
capitalism i guess
Consolidations of forums onto subreddit style systems including Lemmy. They almost completely replaced individual forums with subtopics.
While Lemmy is still open the consolidations really cut down on the independence of a lot of the older forums or even whole sites.
My gut says capitalism. So I would be extremely interested in examples where:
- There was a large open community, hosted not-for-profit
- The community is now thoroughly dead, with no serious capitalist alternative or clear successor
4-chan isn’t dead, is still pretty open, and doesn’t have a real competitor for what it is. Certain forums and chatrooms would qualify if reddit didn’t exist (but reddit really clearly killed several of these).
Social media companies created algorithms to allow people to find content without having to look for it. This drove users and content creators to their sites and off the web.
For social media companies, a user’s value comes from having an account, so they have a vested interest in locking away content. For content creators, it is a lot easier to get noticed if an algorithm provides the advertising and some sites now allow for monetization within their walled garden. For users, they get content that never ends.
services not protocols
Bots and AI. But rooted back to capitalism as someone else already said.
Dead internet theory is real.
Polarisation and capitalism, with algorithms and mass surveillance.
The love of money. Making a profit is not enough, it has to be growing and accelerating all the time.
Yeah, the ideal of the internet was that, ultimately, we would all have our own little box in our house that we would post our stuff to, and our friends would read it and see it, and maybe a few passers by on the internet would observe it, and that would be a way of journaling our lives and sharing them with each other.
Instead of being a global hearth, it has become a global marketplace, a battleground for power in the form of advertising revenue, sales revenue, and tracking every bit of data they can possibly get from you.
This is so that, 1, they can sell more things to you, and 2, so they can sell that information to other people who, like themselves, do not have your best interest in mind and do not care one fuck about you.
Big brands like Google, Microsoft, Facebook
Walled Garden sides, they should be forbidden
Closed source software
Non federated services like chats
Capitalism.
Greed
“economies of scale”
Capitalism. To a capitalist, the internet is another domain to squeeze until the last penny drops. Big corporations like Google don’t care about the internet being useful to people, they have only one objective: make number go up. And if that means smashing the web to pieces, you can guarantee they’ll try.
Highly recommend everyone read yasha levine’s surveillance valley for a lot of the specifics on this, looking at the internet in particular.
Capitalism has squeezed every single person and institution.
Now, everybody needs to bend the rules and purposes to make money. SEO, bots, AI, takeovers, IPO, investments, cash grabs. Everybody’s an exception.
I love the internet. I’ve loved technology my entire life. But seeing it turn into what is has, has been awful to watch. To see family and old friends turn their backs on their morals, to speak to people willing to further a billionaire’s agenda. I knew a person who took a fat salary to be the person for a company who does something truly evil. I couldn’t believe it. I can’t say for who or what, there aren’t many people in their position, but what they do is tremendously evil. And why? Because it’s a job and it pays a fuck ton and previously they were really hard on money with their like five kids.
Capitalism, greed, and ultra weak moral compasses. I wish there were better options, but right now with who’s in power, it’s highly unlikely that anybody is able to learn any lessons without some serious turbulence. Makes me absolutely sick.
As a Brit… Government policy is doing a pretty good job. Everything is making running an independent site completely infeasible. They’re legislating as if the only people who run sites are big tech corporations who have money to burn on compliance.
It’s almost as if that was the entire idea.
Trolling and doxxing are a big part of it. A lot of people (not me, obviously) don’t want to share anything real online if it’s going to be used against them.
What would you do if everyone was live streaming their day to day lives using AI glasses?
Nope. I’d never leave my house.
