Is this another way for advertisers and their collaborators to further lock down the web and mute its approachable nature?
It's not exactly a secret that, when discussing web connected functionalities, there has been a consistent effort throughout the past decade to abstract away the underlying nature to the average person - This allows products to be sold to them that otherwise would have been reserved for enthusiast circles.
Just as an example, let's look at "cloud storage". To the average person 10 years ago, paying $5 per month to get 100GB of storage on a dedicated server with shared hosting was completely outside of their understanding.
But then comes the term "the cloud". It's such an easy concept to grasp. It even has a spatial component for people to grasp onto. Their beach photos get uploaded, and it's stored somewhere, up in the sky, and it will be there "forever"... right?
Just 10 years ago, you could open up Google and search for anything and go down a deep rabbit hole finding cool hidden gems on the internet, small hobbyist websites, and quite literally "surfing the web". But now, the vast majority of internet users never experience this due to the largely SEO filled, censored, and often useless results when using Google Search (this is the de facto standard for the average person).
The concept of "surfing the web" doesn't even exist anymore, and it's because advertisers found a way using SEO magic to beat the system and steal away the notoriety from any website not pushed to the top of the results - And how many people actually move to Page 2 when using Google Search? "Surfing the web" is dead.
So what about the websites that survived? Oh, no, I meant "platform". What is a platform? How do you create a platform? Is it a website? Is it just a website running slightly more bloated code on the backend? (Web application?).
This question will do to content creation what Google Search did to search results once AI tools are used to scrape the web due to search results losing their credibility. The term "platform" seems so gargantuan. It's so contrived. Even creating a website is hidden behind a pay to play "platform" like Squarespace now. Ask any average person how to create a website, and see what they tell you.
15 years ago, even the most inexperienced internet users were buying books to learn to write basic little HTML blogs, but those days are gone, because there seems to be some hidden force that knows the abstraction of our digital playground previously known as "the web" is extremely profitable.
I realize this has been a long read, and I realize this is pretty ranty, but this has been on my mind for a while now. So HN, although I'm very confident in my beliefs, I have to ask.... Have you noticed this trend, or am I just paranoid?
P.S. Don't even get me started on the use of the word "platform" to shame people into moral pigeon holes. "You have such a big platform! How could you say that!?"
We could also call them "businesses", but the people in marketing probably veto that early as they can.
> Don't even get me started on the use of the word "platform" to shame people into moral pigeon holes.
That's not new at all. American zealots used to shame television companies for platforming distasteful content. News companies ridicule each other over platforming the "wrong" stories. Before that, printing presses had overt authority over what was published in the first place. Platform power is real, though not always worth getting angry about.
I don’t think this is true, as surfing (to me) many more than just going from a search engine. It was going site-to-site. Following links and web-rings.