Wild is good as long as it's not wild as in battlefield. It's not like you get diverse opinions; no matter what you post, you get warring factions, vulgar insults, and sometimes, death threats.
And bots.
I posted earlier today:
Anil Dash argues [1] that things can be better in not so wide-open communities.
And then there’s someone like Darius Kazemi, a computer programmer and community organizer who has been patiently toiling away building tools that let others build healthy, constructive, human-scale online communities — the sort that are full of acts of kindness and genuine connection, instead of incessant fights about hate speech. There’s been a huge uptick in interest in Darius’ work as networks like Twitter have fallen apart, and a new generation discovers the joys of an internet that’s as intimate and connected as a friendly neighborhood. And this hearkens back to that surprising, and delightful, discovery that often underpinned the internet of a generation ago — sometimes the entire platform you were using to talk to others was just being run by one, passionate person. We’re seeing the biggest return to that human-run, personal-scale web that we’ve witnessed since the turn of the millennium, with enough momentum that it’s likely that 2024 is the first year since then that many people have the experience of making a new connection or seeing something go viral on a platform that’s being run by a regular person instead of a commercial entity. It’s going to make a lot of new things possible.
I have had ideas for a different internet -- a network of networks. Since Stewart Brand and Ted Nelson and Kevin Kelly, technology was meant to empower and liberate people. Only a handful actually do, as in Wikipedia. People have enormous computing power in their computers and mobile devices. It often just liberates cash from their pockets.
Time to reinvent. I'll share ideas later.
No need for this crap: [2]
Well, things changed a little bit in tech of late. Often, the power shifts in the tech world because of a dramatic new invention that solves an old problem a whole lot better. But in the current era, when most of what's getting funded and hyped up are just various attempts to undermine workers and control consumers, we're instead seeing lots of major players lose power because their signature offerings have gotten so much worse. Search engines are becoming far more useless as they attempt to chase AI hype and shoehorn in less reliable results, even as their legitimate search results get cluttered up with AI-generated crap. The most culturally influential social network has had its cultural relevance destroyed by its billionaire man-child owner's tantrum-based managemenet style. And the major mobile phone platforms overplayed their hand so badly in exerting power over their app ecosystems that regulators around the globe have responded by prying open these heretofore-closed markets.
Time for a network of networks, not a network of 4 or 5 castles surrounded by serfs.