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this post was submitted on 14 Jan 2024
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I definitely think there's room to invent some other social websites like Lemmy; things that can A) Monetize themselves in some way other than ads, B) Formulate the way users use them so that they're resistant to bots, C) Promote well-thought discussion points instead of just regurgitation.
I'm seriously considering something like say, a site that requires users to record a short webcam video introducing themselves before they can post. Obviously, that wouldn't be a good venue for anyone very privacy-focused, but perhaps you get the idea.
Monetizing through ads isn't the problem: The problem is that the companies keep getting greedier and seeing the new ways they can exploit the userbase.
Remember when ads were just those animated gif boxes on either side of the content you actually consumed? Pepperidge Farms remembers.
Then they became annoying popups, to the point that EVERY browser ships with popups blocked by default. Now it's all javascript occupying your screen everywhere. Plus all those invasive "Notifications"
Greed isn't the problem, per se -- it's that outside of the biggest sites, which could hoover up ad targeting data of hundreds of millions to billions and sell that data through their own internal ad platform -- the model was never viable to begin with. Notice that the enshittification really took off all soon as interest rates jumped? Tech startups have all been floating along on easy money, but now that loans aren't basically free, VC dollars are drying up. Companies that could previously offset their capital burn with yet another round of investment now suddenly need to make money on their own merit, and are finding that they have to cut service to the bone and monetize the bejeezus out of what's left if they have any chance of survival.
Many leading shittifiers don't match your explanation. Google, the owner of YouTube, is not a small start-up VC toy.
And this is exactly why we won't actually get any new special projects, because anything which can't be easily monetized will be treated as competition and ruined deliberately, and anything which can be easily monetized will be purchased and worn like a skin suit by greedy corpos the way the current Internet is being used.
I miss forums. Not that they disappeared completely but that used to be the go-to for good info. Still is maybe, cause I've read through a lot of garbage trying to learn about something pretty simple and then hit a forum post that's like "well it depends if it's early- or late-season blight". What? The twenty garden blog posts I studied never mention such a distinction. But there's Jimmy in Mt Carmel Indiana breaking it down.
One thing that's actually better for all that's worse is the Discord means one login for everything. Back then you had to register to every forum even if you only needed one file and never came back again.
It is trivial to replace them. The only difficult part is killing them because they're sucking all the air out of the internet.
There cannot be a facebook replacement as long as facebook exists. There will not be more than one center of the internet.