This seems to be a very common sentiment that is not stated that clearly often, but it makes me very sad to read it.
The magic of the internet, once upon a time, was discovering content in your own time. You stumbled into that cool niche forum, found someone’s personal blog, a flash game page. It didn’t need big centralised services to be fun.
Internet users have become consumers and want to be fed content. I do not understand this sentiment at all. It feels like we are all addicted to the easy dopamine kicks of scrolling Reddit/Facebook/Twitter now.
I think it's correlated to the failure of search engines.
There is no way to discover content anymore, long gone are the days where some expert's blog would appear prominently when searching a topic. Now all the results are people trying to sell you something. Reddit has replaced google (more or less) for a lot of people.
The only functional search engine nowadays is marginalia.
Yeah, I Don't get it personally. People are seeing the results of Reddit and their thoughts still remain: "yea I want all my eggs in one basket". I appreciated that when one forum shut down it didn't take out my entire means a of communication. That if a big forum shut down it wasn't the only big forum for a given community. I Don't know what changed for people to not value that variety, that redundancy.
Also, don't know why no one remembers RSS feeds if they want an aggregator anyway. Even Reddit and YouTube have RSS protocols (for now). I never used them but it's nifty for the best of both worlds.
The problem is that as the Internet has advanced and filled every aspect of our lives, the average technological literacy of users has fallen off a cliff. I understand that in every aspect of life you cannot and will not care about being fully literate with everything, for instance most car owners are not mechanics, but that literacy used to be a requirement for access. I speak as someone who experienced the tail end, and thus one of the lowest bars of entry, but I still had to work to find things. I had to tinker with IRC clients, with port forwarding torrents for my Linux ISOs, for self-hosting servers for me and my friends. To find new communities was a mix of Google plus word of mouth, and took a bit of effort, but that effort was okay. It made finding and joining them more special. If I just click a “subscribe” button then it’s not as interesting to me. Not to mention by making the barrier of entry so low, it means the barrier of quality is lower too.
Preface: I'd like for the fediverse to win, active on both mastodon, and reading lemmy; however, economies of scale in the present Internet does not favor that outcome:
* What we want is high signal/noise ratio.
* In the magic old internet, the bar for signal was relatively low, because it competed with books, and TV.
* The competition over attention has raised the bar over what "good content" looks like.
* Content like that don't materialize out of thin air, but needs an audience to keep it alive, and to grow, and select, and feedback
* The re-fragmentation of internet communities risks loss of economies of scale for the content creators to create or maintain high-quality gems.
Let's take something specific, say furry artists. Their content loop for reddit was: post cute pics on r/furry, if it hits quality bar, gets upvoted, and seen by ~1000s of people; 0.1% of those will commission a new drawing, draw the thing, get paid, post it on reddit, close the loop.
In a re-fragmented Internet: 1, a lot less people will be able to find those "gem forums" focused around a topic, and they won't browse it daily; and 2, the artist needs to spam their stuff to all the communities to get the fraction of traffic they have on reddit.
The outcome from this re-fragmentation _in our present time_ will be the "hallowing of the middle", the "hobbyists scaling towards professional", and people who are just really into the thing, and make some money on the side. In a re-fragmented Internet, you are either a fully professional -with competent marketing team- or you're doing it for the ~20 people sharing the same forum.
I understand that many people are expressing explicit preferences for there to be only that 20 people they chat with, or only the hobbyist / geeks to participate and _I'm happy for them_. What I'm claiming above, is that this will kick the professional ladder out for upcoming people to build - show - get attention for their stuff. And that creates a less magical Internet.
If reddit was the only, or even best place for that I may agree. But reddit isn't Twitter, and in fact many rdddit circles detest OC despite also complaining about rampant reposts.
Ofc you exploit it anyway, but Reddit was never truly good for professionals unless they were eternally on reddit to begin with.
The magic of the internet, once upon a time, was discovering content in your own time. You stumbled into that cool niche forum, found someone’s personal blog, a flash game page. It didn’t need big centralised services to be fun.
Internet users have become consumers and want to be fed content. I do not understand this sentiment at all. It feels like we are all addicted to the easy dopamine kicks of scrolling Reddit/Facebook/Twitter now.