I feel old. This article begins by pining for the good, old-fashioned 'net of 2012. I know that I'm not the most attentive person on this topic, but honestly I don't feel like the big picture has changed much in years. Services like Twitter started up, grew wildly, and then looked for some way to make money for pretty much that whole time. Social networks sprout up; some make it, some don't. Big companies do some cool things and some cruddy ones. Lean new browsers burst onto the scene and then gradually bloat. Advertisers find new ways to intrude into formerly pristine conversations. (The rise of clickbait sites isn't even remotely as disruptive today as the rise of spam and sporge posts was to Usenet, just for instance.)
So I suppose my point is that I don't see any reason to think that the sky is falling today. Yes, some beloved sites and valuable modes of interaction are changing. But it's not the end of the internet: this has been going on since the beginning. We'll adapt, as we always have, especially if folks who care about creating vibrant communities and rich flows of information keep finding ways to innovate.
You're right, author has rose-colored glasses. I almost thought it was a joke at first—2012 as the good ol' days? The internet ruined in the last three years? Come on.
I would argue that new users on a forum that have already used other forums will be easier to integrate than those who have never been online before. And those that have used multiple forums will be easier still as they will be used to the idea that different communities have different rules.
Yeah except it hasn't changed more quickly. Back in the early 90s we had Eternal September, the NSFNet stopped running the backbone which led to SPAM (there was a time on the internet before SPAM), then the web was invented and someone wrote Netscape. That probably all happened within a period of three years or so. A few years later there were a thousand crappy Geocities sites and Yahoo and Amazon were founded.
I think part of the problem is that services now start without a way to monetize themselves immediately - they rely on external money reserves to support growth. People get used to getting quality content for free. At some point said services finally need to make money, at which point they fuck up (from the user's point of view) their product, and so the users move to another party who has fresh investor money reserves.
You know, I'm actually OK with this in the medium term as a global wealth recycling scheme. Just as many of the private investors who built railways lost their money but gave us a useful network.
We just need to keep promising vast wealth to investors as a result of global dominance while never letting any particular one take the whole cake.
The problem here is that there isn't too much recycling being done. In the process of trying to become profitable companies seem to destroy their products so thoroughly that there isn't much left to salvage by the end.
It's like railway investors deciding that selling off all the metal from the left side of the track is the best way to recoup their losses. By the time that's done, there really isn't much of value left for anyone to pick up and use.
Just reeks of being a whiny niche webfotainment consumer.
> I've really loved listening to SoundCloud over the past couple years since mainstream radio sucks, for the same reasons that mainstream TV used to (needing to target the lowest common denominator so as to not upset advertisers.)
Boohoo, now my favorite sites are going mainstream since I spend hours on their sites/consuming their bandwidth and they need to cover costs.
> There have to be business models that allow the creativity of sites like XKCD, Reddit, SoundCloud, and Tumblr, to flourish. There has to be a way to save the walled garden of bland banality that the internet is becoming.
But you're still going to these sites despite the banality.
I know you're trying to be helpful by pointing out what's wrong with the author's perspective, but I think you're missing the main point--that there is no business model today that aligns well the needs and "digital rights" of the individual. Eventually, all of the good intentions of internet startups are subsumed by their business models (usually an advertising model), which only incidentally aligns with some of the needs of human beings.
I don't read it as a violin story, nor as a complaint--more of an attempt to define the problem and serve as a banner calling like-minded people together.
Sure there is. People can pay for the products made by a business. Individuals don't have a right to the products that others make; if they want to have those products and don't want ads, then they need to ante up and pay money for the product and that money needs to be enough that the creator of the product can keep creating more products and support the customers who've already bought.
This is definitely a valid problem for anything strongly driven by a network effect. If you buy your widget and pay for it, it's not a problem, but if the product is only cool when many people produce content on it, then it get many people by being free-at-first.
It's just a combination of pessimism with a few random anecdotes. Reddit being "ruined" has so little to do with The Verge having a lot of ad tech in its pages they could really only be grouped together in the category of, "Things I don't like."
Constantly have to adapt and change or build services because commercial incentives will turn each and every successful service to shit feels like a problem to me.
It doesn't feel sustainable, and a backlash seems to me to only be a matter of time.
So I suppose my point is that I don't see any reason to think that the sky is falling today. Yes, some beloved sites and valuable modes of interaction are changing. But it's not the end of the internet: this has been going on since the beginning. We'll adapt, as we always have, especially if folks who care about creating vibrant communities and rich flows of information keep finding ways to innovate.