I wonder if in another 400 years some distant society will look at ours as the "Dark Ages" since all information is locked behind services that have since disappeared like Yahoo Answers, Geocities, AIM profiles, MySpace, and (maybe) Facebook.
And that’s before you include the likes of Wikipedia, which it’s inconceivable won’t be recorded in at least some form. We will have a pretty good record of our civilization to work with - down to the minutest cultural ephemera.
It sort of makes me sad for the internet bygone. I really miss the fact that nearly every product had a half dozen fan pages dedicated to it. Things like https://www.massassi.net/ were amazing back in their hayday. Now everything it consolidated into big social media locations :(
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26654258
Phrases like "the algorithm" have started showing up in all kinds of videos and texts, not just in tech-centric ones. They had to, now that said algorithm is tied to the ability of certain people to make money and survive. The effect that Big Tech has on our lives and on human history is becoming more and more profound.