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It’s the End of the Web as We Know It
(www.theatlantic.com)
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this post was submitted on 23 Apr 2024
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There's a whole lot going towards ending the web as we know it.
Censorship, consolidation, AI, greed, to name a few.
Why, I couldn't even get into the article before it faded into a paywall.
I get people want to be paid but splashing cash on every page is not the internet as I knew it.
Getting to this article from a social site(Lemmy) was also not how I knew it, that's the consolidation part. After MySpace, in the era of Facebook pages it started. Less personal websites, less websites in general, just get everything from Facebook and Reddit.
And sure, AI is also going to water down content, with prompts written by cheap corporate lackeys that we will still have to pay subs for after a social site sends us there.
And then there's also the censorship and laws coming out to restrict what's available. First to protect the children while they are young, then more to “protect” them as they get older, and eventually they will know nothing but state approved media.
To quote the article,
It’s the End of the Web as We Know It.
And I’m old and bitter about it. It had good promise, but enshittification took hold as was inevitable.
Speaking solely about news, the Internet as you knew it was unsustainable. For the first decade or so of online news, the ad-supported newspaper publishing business subsidized free online news, because they couldn't figure out payment.
Then Google and the other ad-tech companies took the advertising dollars, and the old publishing companies took on debt to try and switch to ad-supported online publications. And failed miserably.
Then the old publishing started running out of money, and slowly switched to online first.
The remaining published are a shadow of themselves, drowning in debt, and low readership.
There are alternative models that sort of work, maybe, but they haven't gone mainstream. They're held back by the belief that content should be free.
If platforms like flattr had taken off then the conversation would probably be different.
That's a given. Every medium of communication ends that way. Start with books, end with propaganda flyers and glossy magazines. Start with radio, end with pirate broadcasts and stations full of ads. TV is about 25% ads and the rest is reality TV. Internet was going to end up that way as soon as things went mainstream.
Absolutely. You can even throw the telephone in there. At the start it was a great way to reach Grandma across the country or the doctor across town. Now most of the traffic on it is robots and extortionists trying to fool Grammy into giving her money for some lie or another.
I don’t even answer my phone for numbers anymore…be on a short named contact list, leave a voicemail reminding me you are someone I should put on that list, or nothing doing. Sucks for anyone putting me down as an emergency contact though…
And I feel TV being 25% ads is being pretty conservative…oh, but streaming! Swap the ads and channels you don’t want for a higher per-channel price and no ads…oh, wait, now you get a higher price and the ads!
To get past paywalls, add "http://archive.is/" to the front of the URL.
So
"http://foo.bar/baz"
becomes
"http://archive.is/http://foo.bar/baz"
It works 99%+ of the time.