I've been online for a long time now, thirty years as what the kids these days refer to as "terminally online" and while I'm not going to claim to have been here since the beginning (I'm not that old) I was around for MUDs and BBSs, and IRC and ICQ. I lived through the golden age of the internet and now it's becoming increasing clear that we entered a dark age right before the COVID pandemic, how long it continues remains to be seen.
There is a tendency to refer to dead internet theory because of all that's going on, I've posted about that before and I'll link to it if I can find it but the gist of my feelings is that the bones of the internet are still there and still useful, but the capitalists have set it up so that the vast majority of the traffic runs through corporate owned storefronts, and at this point they all look the same.
Back in 2020 I started a few years long period where I was addicted to YouTube and even back then there was a meme that their engineering team only exists to make the platform worse and I wrote it off as a vocal minority hating a team for making necessary changes but now the quality of "the algorithm" has gotten so bad that I've found myself reading more books, a massive L for YouTube but a win for my quality of life.
Unfortunately this drop in quality is across the board, I pay for reddit, ironically, because it allows me to access the original reddit UI from 2010, and it blocks sponsored posts. I find the new UI to be so unusable that if they ever remove access I'll simply unsubscribe.
Update: In the interim between writing and posting this reddit has raised their prices and forced legacy subscribers to unsubscribe, and resubscribe if they want to continue to pay the new, higher price. 🤡
I know this whole post has a bit of an old man shaking fist at the sky quality, but more than that I want to point out how corporate greed has killed yet another golden goose, and how it's another sign that we're getting to the end of the line in this round of late stage capitalism. At least for the visible, user-facing portion of the internet.
The hyper-scalers (Microsoft, Apple, Meta, SpaceXAI, Amazon, etc) have all been focusing on extracting increasingly higher rents for a worse user experience and now everyone has tripled down on AI, a very useful technology to be sure, but it's concerning to me when all of the largest companies in the world are copying each other's homework. I think the big brains call that overleveraging, or putting all of your eggs in one basket.
So either they're right and AI is going to juice the economy the same way computers and the internet have for my entire life, or the music is about to stop and we're all going to have to figure out how to rebuild on top of the bones of the old internet.
I'm betting on the latter.