The Internet Isn’t Meant to Be So Small
defector.com
defector.com
The internet is still vast. People just choose to congregate and use the same handful of apps. People are choosing not to go out and find it. Most people are also choosing not to go out and create it. It's a people problem, not a tech problem, in my opinion.
The problem is that any automated discovery mechanism is quickly ruined by automated spam/ads created to exploit it.
So the most reliable discovery mechanisms are still small communities of real people. But because they're good - they attract more and more people until the quality reverts to the mean, and it's mostly just junk/spam/ads again.
Social media companies are extremely prone to cancer - if you will. A large part of long they survive is in how good they are at fighting off the junk created by their own users.
In a way - the internet (or at least the DNS system) is just the top level social media company that made absolutely no attempt to fight the cancer. It's value died a long time ago, and it's mostly a wasteland of junk now.
It was a problem back then, but we had multiple search engines instead of just Google.
If you optimized for Google, you almost certainly de-optimized for the others. Once Google became the defacto monopoly, websites didn't have to worry about this anymore.
What people need is a search engine that they can tune to themselves. Unfortunately, the net is really big now, and it's not clear how you can index it in a cost-effective manner.
Since search engines are now flooded with automatically generated trash, the solution is probably a return to the old ways this problem was solved before Google.
Hide the alternatives, and it becomes a monopoly problem, not a people problem. I'll burn some imaginary internet points and go further; it's an American problem.
The kind of behaviour that's making this possible is easy in poorly regulated capitalism. We have capitalism in Europe too, but there are sensible guide-rails. That's not socialism, it's just common sense.
And this has always been true, even in "the days when the internet was vast" according to the author. Back when AOL was the largest internet provider, most AOL subscribers thought AOL was "the Internet", just as many Facebook users now seem to believe that Facebook is "the Internet". The AOL subscribers had no idea that they could go anywhere on the Internet, not just to the places that AOL pointed them. (I was on CompuServe in those days, not AOL, and CompuServe users seemed to be at least somewhat more savvy on average--and CompuServe wasn't as insistent on being a gatekeeper as AOL was.)
Tech companies have deployed many billions of dollars, and the smartest minds in the world to ensure that their little fiefdoms are the ones that become the internet.
First, they deploy psychology and tap into basic human behavior knowledge, to ensure people are addicted to their platform and spend most of their time there instead of anywhere else.
Further, companies like Apple originally made it difficult for an open source, or a hobbyist to create an app that can be distributed on iPhones, first by instituting their $100 dev account requirement, and then building an insanely Kafkaesque approval process.
Then there’s the bait and switches. Google went ahead and bought Blogger/Blogspot when it got popular and then stopped investing in it beyond making it easier to insert Adsense. Then Google destroyed the non-Twitter sharing ecosystem by bringing the majority of the RSS ecosystem to Google Reader, and killing it basically overnight.
Apple used to provide simple personal website publishing with their iWeb products, which they pulled.
Then there were the non investment and destruction of Flash, which had become a huge source of internet creativity with no equivalent alternative. Apple famously killed Flash, and probably for good reasons considering Adobe was focused simply on extracting money from it, but Apple didn’t bother creating any authoring tools that made it possible for random middle school kids to create cool stuff with.
Facebook originally presented its pages as something that would be openly accessible to the internet. But once people created a bunch of them started requiring logins.
We rightfully criticize MS for their embrace, extend and extinguish strategy that they’ve deployed against so many of their competitors. The reality, however, is that even “better” companies like Apple, Google, have done the same thing, except they’ve done it to the Open web, and because the open web doesn’t have billions of marketing and lobbying dollars to complain, we didn’t even realize that was happening.
The problem is cultural and will resolve itself when there's just barely enough "cool" people out there who reject the notions of trying to be the next big podcast, instagram star, youtube personality, etc. It doesn't need to be a sweeping change, but enough to make others see the opportunity and creative freedom of being independent.
Those creatives are statistically unlikely, but not because of a lack of talent. Rather it's a lack of incentive. There's always enough talent and interest to support the independent thing away from corporate interests. When things become homogenous enough to piss enough people off in ways that mean more to them than money, it will happen.
EDIT: oh here come the anti-capitalists... hehe that's a clue about where values are today. need to be more brave than that if you want good art to come back. past a certain point, money is pretty damn orthogonal to creativity.
i.e. just make stuff and put it out there for the cultural impact instead of whether you got attribution or got paid; you're not a loser for doing that.
When you have to make a choice between pursuing creativity and eating, I’m pretty sure I know which you’ll pick. There is a path that lets you (possibly) do both: generating revenue from a very large audience. That requires making concessions according to which walled gardens and silos exist, making content with broad appeal or appeases the gate keepers.
And again, that still would be one, not a diverse plethora of really different systems.
I was confused as they lament the loss of google reader. You still have those options available through RSS using other tools. At the same time they prefer a regulated, regimented site with rules and expected behavior. UGC will always have all sides of cultures, viewpoints and opinions, which is what the internet on whole provides.
It was also extremely lightly regulated compared to what we have now. It was generally either chronological by feed or chronological all feeds. you put what you want in the hopper, your friends add a few things here and there, and then that was it, you saw the posts from those people.
It was an actual rss reader and in return they were probably collecting metrics about what people thought was worth the read, who was sharing with who . . .. that's all stuff that I don't know that I minded sharing with the google of old.
I can see why it's easy to feel that way now but it's a completely unrecognizable company to the one that was running g-reader.
It's getting a "skinny waist," a la TCP.
TCP is the "skinny waist" of the internet protocol stack. https://www.oilshell.org/blog/2022/02/diagrams.html
Large websites are becoming the "skinny waist" of the web. A wide variety of users and a wide variety of content, exchanged over relatively few pipes.