A Bleak Future for the Web
— Spot-on analysis by Alex Pareene, writing for Defector:
The internet’s best resources are almost universally volunteer run and donation based, like Wikipedia and The Internet Archive. Every time a great resource is accidentally created by a for-profit company, it is eventually destroyed, like Flickr and Google Reader.
The implosion of Twitter and recent shenanigans at Reddit are like a livestream allowing us to observe the decline of once beloved platforms unfold in real time. What we know from history helps us better anticipate the future, and it doesn’t look good:
We are living through the end of the useful internet. The future is informed discussion behind locked doors, in Discords and private fora, with the public-facing web increasingly filled with detritus generated by LLMs, bearing only a stylistic resemblance to useful information. Finding unbiased and independent product reviews, expert tech support, and all manner of helpful advice will now resemble the process by which one now searches for illegal sports streams or pirated journal articles.
The internet as an information wasteland is a bleak outlook, but one that isn’t off the charts; it’s likely even, given the track record of those who currently drive the development of major platforms. Just look at who’s building Twitter clones at the moment: Instagram, Substack, and I’m sure others are experimenting with similar ideas.
The alternative, as always, is to build your own place, a website, host it somewhere you control or at a least makes it easy to move, and double down on open standards and protocols.