So, I was kinda idly thinking about how we’re seeing more and more companies such as Reddit give into peer pressure in favor of profit. As their endless stream of investment dollars with the hope of being profitable eventually seems to be running out. How do you see the web moving forward?
Do you think the best way forward, is to go back? I was thinking about it and back in the old days people would have websites that they would host that would make little to no money, they’d just run them for fun, for the passion of it. Do you see these days returning? Lemmy is kind of an example of that, and other federated self-hosted software. It kind of feels like the way things might be headed. People host their own, smaller scale sites, not in pursuit of profits specifically, but for the passion of it.
I honestly think this way of communicating with eachother is more genuine, more real and honestly more optimal. Communications with others shouldn’t entirely hinge upon the will of one soul entity. And while federation definitely has its issues, I personally think it’s vastly better than being ruled by 1 single entity who’s entire goal is to farm as much mindless doomscrolling as possible in pursuit of profits.
Don’t get me wrong, I am not against making money off of your work, I think if you spent time working on something you should absolutely make money off of it. However, I don’t think it’s the way our communication should work. For original content such as art, books, movies, shows, games or other similar mediums, I definitely think that the creator is entitled to make money off of that work.
But having our communication fueled by that sort of business model doesn’t make sense to me. It incentives more harsh restrictions on speech and discussion, restricting user speech/expression to what’s “advertiser friendly” and of course, for harvesting and collecting our personal data like we’re some sort of crop or cattle.
Might’ve gone on a bit of a tangent there, but I hope my general point still got across.
What do you think is the way forward for the internet, and will it require us to go back?
I think there’s multiple reasons behind the recent social media company avalanche, but one of the main ones has been the ability in the past to use market prominence as a source of cheap money to buy out competition. The recent moneychasing after interest rate increases is just the other end of that faustian bargain for the small actors in all of this, but is still far from sufficient to stop the larger ones.
Taking Reddit, they’ve initially ran as an extremely lean company and were able to make their initial $100k in funding from Y Combinator last a whopping 9 years from 2005 to 2014. Next funding round gets them $50M… and the first things they do with it? acquire a chunk of imgur and the entirety of Alien Blue, then get a scapegoat CEO to make unpopular changes. They would then later use another funding round to buy and snuff out Dubsmash.
During that time, Twitter was much worse and did the same with Tweetie, Tweetdeck, Bagcheck, Summify, Posterous, Vine, SnappyTV, Twitpic(in a particularly hostile fashion), Periscope, Highly, Squad, Breaker, Revue, Sphere and Threader.
IMO larger actors will feel some crunch, but they can achieve enough revenue to survive the meltdown and the only hope of stopping them is a large scale government-mandated breakup that is unlikely to happen because the largest ones are now starting attempts at buying out governments with the intention of making competition too difficult or even outright illegal.
This already happened with other fields, such as software copyright. DMCA Section 1201 makes another IBM PC-compatible watershed moment impossible and trusted computing is being used to stifle other competition avenues. Patents have completely locked out 5G communications. Electronic circuits have a significant regulatory overhead cost with EMC testing mandates. The most recent attempt in this trend is in AI regulatory capture.
So far the main holdout left is the EU. Buying out representatives there has mostly failed so far, but led to a pivot where attempts are being made to break it apart by influencing voters (see Cambridge Analytica and Brexit) and promoting puppet candidates. If the EU fails at defending itself from this, there isn’t much that can be done as technology has evolved to the point civil wars no longer have a chance to be successful without major involvement from other states.
Small-scale independent hosting is probably the best way around feeding such actors on the internet, but is being prepared against by slowing down IPv6 adoption to use CGNAT as an excuse to limit self-hosting, with law proposals undermining encryption and reducing privacy from governments being made as a backup plan. This will require some reduction in capabilities as bandwidth and storage remain expensive for individuals, but i don’t think this reduction will remain forever since these limitations also included compute in the past.