One of the magic bits of the earlier web(s) is that it was all new, participation involved an element of non-replicable self-selection, and the parasites hadn't had enough time to adapt and colonize it.
I'm not even sure if it's will be possible to have a community of "pseudoanonymous amateurs" in the future. It'll probably get swamped with AI generated garbage, like the crochet groups posted about a week or so ago. The human participants will get overwhelmed trying to figure out what's fake.
Honestly, like many kinds of forest, what the Web probably needs is a good burning, controlled or otherwise.
Yep -- early adopters saw it as just another way to communicate between humans, and didn't aggressively push the envelop on how much anonymity+reach could be abused. Gradually, that envelop got expanded and now we have well-capitalized influence operations (including advertisement) solely focused on exploiting the internet as much as possible for financial+political gain.
The same was true of Usenet, and of the internet in general before Eternal September. Usenet was absolutely glorious - until the spammers moved in. Then it became a never-ending cat-and-mouse game with killfiles, until the tide of spam turned it into a cesspool.
The basic problem: make it easy and cheap to participate, and the scam artists will inevitably gravitate to it, and eventually choke the life out of it. Add enough friction to discourage the spammers, and you drive away real users as well.
Older forums are still around, or the fediverse. If you're participating on them, you're part of the solution.
One of the magic bits of the earlier web(s) is that it was all new, participation involved an element of non-replicable self-selection, and the parasites hadn't had enough time to adapt and colonize it.
I'm not even sure if it's will be possible to have a community of "pseudoanonymous amateurs" in the future. It'll probably get swamped with AI generated garbage, like the crochet groups posted about a week or so ago. The human participants will get overwhelmed trying to figure out what's fake.
Honestly, like many kinds of forest, what the Web probably needs is a good burning, controlled or otherwise.