For years, the internet has been shrinking. Not in size, not in data, but in ownership. A vast, decentralized network of personal blogs, forums, and independent communities has been corralled into a handful of paved prison yards controlled by a few massive corporations. Every post, every “friend,” every creative work—
Everybody who says this assumes they wouldn’t have been barred from entry were they to try and get in now.
I was speaking more to the early days of the internet. You had to be relatively smart, and determined to get on it.
I’ll never forget when the AOLers started showing up.
yeah, they sure ruined newsgroups…
Eternal September
Yup. I’ll admit, I didn’t foresee AI coming along and finding a way to make the quality of discourse even worse
God I feel so bad for people even just trying to learn stuff online now.
10 to 20 years ago we had a lot less content, but when you did find a hit on your search, you could be much more confident it contained meaningful information. Rather than just the official documentation repackaged across 10 different “articles.”
Yeah, no kidding! Plus, in addition to shitty results, the likely inaccurate AI summary to further confuse you.
God yeah, I’ll be like half way through an article before realising it’s just padding out some very surface level details about what I’m looking up. Like the top 3 interesting things about the topic, but never an actual novel, like, human take.