Is the internet as we knew it, dead?

“Yes, the planet got destroyed. But for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders.”

https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a16995

everything post 2008 was a 0% interest rate phenomenon, now all these tech companies have to find a way to turn a profit rather than running as zombie companies with fake valuations propped up by cheap VC money. It's going to take years for this to all shake out and a lot of "best practices" are now invalid

it's not a coincidence that all these companies are locking down APIs, fighting against scraping, and doing other cost cutting measures at the expense of users, all at the same time. You can't raise money easily anymore, so showing revenue is more important than user count or other fluff metrics

Sort of makes you wonder what the hell the point of all this was. Spend all this time contributing in various ways, under the guise of connecting with others, and in the end it was just all a load of shit that had to destroy itself in a vain attempt to appease shareholders’ insatiable demand for further growth.

Laziness. Too few would want to host and manage forums, mail server... anymore. Big companies made email server hosting more and more difficult and too few raised their voices. Cloud centralized services were just too convenient.

Maybe we can get back to an internet of the people for the people, and avoid the commercial enshitified internet? Maybe we were all just blinded by the bright shouting of the commercial internet, and forgot the rest is still there?

Yes, died over 20 years ago when it was commercialize. Maybe what is happening now is the last nail in the coffin.

I may be an optimist but I think it's just one swing of the pendulum.

The web was riding a wave of monetized eyeballs, and the value extraction from it has become incredibly … bad. With people having gotten used to the internet, ads gotten more aggressive, more people using adblock etc etc the "free content" industry is in a race to the bottom, they long since reached the bottom and are now fighting over shovels.

The LLM explosion is the spark in the powder keg. Now those companies with broken business models have execs pressured by investors seeing the end of the free ride. A lot of money is riding away from this model purely based on (reasonably justified) fear.

What's next? Well, predicting the future is difficult, but IMO it's reasonable to think that high quality human content will now come at a premium. For example, subscriber-only communities (be it pay-gated, or gated in some other way… login-only won't cut it for long IMO).

The pendulum will swing the other way until someone once again finds and popularizes a push for free and open content, and the cycle will begin anew.

As badly as I want to answer this question, the way it's formed is going to ensure that the only answers you get are all cliche's.

So I'll ask you a question:

It didn't simply happen all at once. It's been going on since the inception of the world wide web. Are you really surprised?

This looks like a great opportunity to join some smaller community (or several communities) or even spin up a forum of your own. And look at all free time you'll get for non computer related activities.

I thought about this a while back.

Virtual reality is still reality. The early internet that we experienced in 90s felt so different from real world, because it was a new media and real world powers had not yet expand their influence into it yet, but eventually they will. Censorship, speech control, propaganda, commercialization, etc and etc, everything will be there. To the point the new media/platform/reality becomes no different from outside world.

People are excited about VR technology recently. I am not. It would be the same damn story again.

Well for one, what's the long term strategy of providing something for free, when your user base will simply use an ad blocker to block your one attempt at income?

YouTube in particular simply isn't possible without monetization, a substantial amount of that money at least does go to the creator.

Also for things like reddit and Twitter, lazy users is the real truth. Instead of having to locate the forum for your obscure topic, you just see if there's on on reddit and call it a day.

I think it very much lives, it's just really hard to find. The biggest change is how we navigate the web.

Lobby Capitalism is what went wrong. It turns out that the most effective return on investment isn't to make the best product for the lowest price.

> used to be freely accessible to everyone

This costs money, especially at scale. As much as people hate it, nobody has solved the problem of how news organizations or most digital content platforms can actually make money.

The loss of internet neutrality in some countries only accelerated this phenomena, Hopefully we still have wikipedia

Capitalism destroys everything good in the long run.

Embrace, Extend, Extinguish?