The internet is already over (2022)

I think a big part of it is also the data are poor and people don't know how to take advantage of their walled garden. For example, uber recently added advertisements into their app. You may not know this, because they are only seen when you are riding in your ride already, but you get an ad for Tim Hortons because the car is within a half mile of one.

On paper this looks good for the marketer. Why yes, we can take our captured population and send them ads to local partners who now get these customers patronizing their business. Seems like it would be a great lucrative deal for both parties, right?

Of course logic says it doesn't work like that. Like I said, no one sits there looking at uber ads the entire ride. No one tells the uber driver "hey wait, I know I was trying to get where I was going but all the sudden I am surprisingly hungry, lets divert a half mile and potentially 20 minutes so I could get a $4 bacon egg and cheese." It just doesn't happen.

But the dance must continue of course. Maybe the uber people responsible for this feature don't even care at all that it works, only that their shareholders think it works and their advertising partners also think it works. That is incentive enough to keep up the farce even with no supporting data because the money, in the end, is very real. After all, everyone on earth knows about coke thats sold in every store on earth, but the ads still need to be purchased because the purchase itself is a more important metric than the end result.

A big issue with the internet is the commercialization aspect of it. Any time you get an organic community of actual users, that's just chumming the water. That's a good quality population of users for the marketer unlike a lot of others out there. They are going to try all they can to get into that community and use it for advertising, to make some use out of it versus to leave it be on the table. Entropy favors enshittification. The race to the bottom never ends, the bottom just keeps moving as low as it possibly can be.

Individual incentives have also shifted substantially. Having a post go viral or be of some help to someone else used to be enough of an incentive to post on the internet. Now people want to make a job out of it, which shifts the nature of the posts due to different incentives requiring different optimizations. Also people aren't hosting their own websites that they support out of their own pocket that often anymore. People would rather post their content on other people's websites that are ad supported and therefore have incentives that bias what is posted there or gets traction on that platform.

All these technologies have something in common however. They get coopted for misinformation. I think a lot of fear about "new media" whatever form it might be is simply reactionary from a media literacy perspective. The adult of the radio age might understand that one can have some media literacy with the radio, not believe everything they say, waste their time on it, etc. But their kids who are watching TV all day didn't get that lesson in school, clearly the case from watching TV all day and not playing like a normal kid over the last millenia, and since they are kids they don't understand nuance so its simpler to put the foot down, and say "shut that damn TV off."

I think better lessons in media literacy would help a lot of situations like this, however there is very strong incentive in our world to prevent a high degree of media literacy from taking root, as it would obviate a lot of methods used for controlling subsets of the population.

I would love mailing lists to be a thing again, but the experience of using email is just so bad for me. The sheer amount of unsubscribing I have to do to make it usable - not even taking spam into account - makes email a place I don't want to spend any time.

> Because activity in many communities seems to dropped significantly, at least from what I can see. Yeah, Discord's seemingly doing better than Reddit or Twitter in this climate, but even then, communities that seemed to be booming in the pandemic (or even before) are now far less active than they used to be, and lots of people who used to be there all the time seem to barely show up anymore.

Important to note that this happens every summer. Especially a pre-us-election summer. People are out there living their lives, having fun, and avoiding the constant barrage of politics online. Things will be back in the fall.

Sauce: My email open rates observed over the past 10 years. Summers always see a lull in online activity

Also you may be experiencing your age cohort growing up. I’m mid 30’s and have noticed a significant decline in online activity as people my age juggle kids and career and increasingly have zero time to spend online. The younger folk without these encumbrances don’t hang out where I’m used to looking.

Whenever I hang out (irl) with younger coworkers it’s obvious that people 10 years younger still spend just as much if not more time online than we did at that age.