It feels like the web is becoming more closed every year — fewer open forums, more platforms locking away data and communities behind logins. What do you think are the biggest forces driving the decline of the open internet? Are walled gardens like Discord the main problem, or is it something else like artificial intelligence, corporate consolidation, surveillance, or changing user habits?
Capitalism. To a capitalist, the internet is another domain to squeeze until the last penny drops. Big corporations like Google don’t care about the internet being useful to people, they have only one objective: make number go up. And if that means smashing the web to pieces, you can guarantee they’ll try.
Highly recommend everyone read yasha levine’s surveillance valley for a lot of the specifics on this, looking at the internet in particular.
Trolling and doxxing are a big part of it. A lot of people (not me, obviously) don’t want to share anything real online if it’s going to be used against them.
What would you do if everyone was live streaming their day to day lives using AI glasses?
Nope. I’d never leave my house.
capitalism i guess
The love of money. Making a profit is not enough, it has to be growing and accelerating all the time.
Whether you like it or not, its censorship. Ppl with opposite political views silencing eachother creating echo chambers of only ppl who align with them politically.
Things are too strict now, every one has a mega phone and wants to shout at eachother and their opinion. The internet has become one big political pile of shit, most actually chill ppl, avoid it as a source of escapism.
Barrier to entry. Not enough laid back open minded ppl. So now, everyone’s separated and closed off. Ppl just want control
It’s not about connection and getting information, it’s all about pushing some fucking agenda.
Polarisation and capitalism, with algorithms and mass surveillance.
As a Brit… Government policy is doing a pretty good job. Everything is making running an independent site completely infeasible. They’re legislating as if the only people who run sites are big tech corporations who have money to burn on compliance.
It’s almost as if that was the entire idea.
Corporate consolidation is the end goal and all of the others are part of the toolkit for accomplishing that. (You can use those tools for other things, but a hammer with blood on it is a murder weapon no matter how many nails are in it’s past or future)
I think that we need more hybrid online/irl communities. Half of these issues at least can be avoided by treating digital spaces as the temporary fever dreams they are.
services not protocols
Consolidations of forums onto subreddit style systems including Lemmy. They almost completely replaced individual forums with subtopics.
While Lemmy is still open the consolidations really cut down on the independence of a lot of the older forums or even whole sites.
Big brands like Google, Microsoft, Facebook
Walled Garden sides, they should be forbidden
Closed source software
Non federated services like chats
“economies of scale”
Greed
