this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2024
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i dunno. the internet was good for a little while because only a tiny fraction of people were on it and those people deliberately chose to be on it, which also made them much more likely to search out things and form communities.
but now that everybody is always on the internet and it's no longer a place people specifically search out, it has become like any other medium: the vast majority of people just want to be served stuff, they want radio without the talking (and maybe a bit more personalized), tv without the ads (and slightly more convenience), the newspaper without paying for it. The "the whole world at your fingertips" thing was never something the average person has ever had any interest in.
Add onto that the obvious fact that the more savy an internet user is, the less likely he is to get swindled (and seemingly the only viable business model on the internet is scamming your userbase) and its obvious that the part of the internet that is actually kinda good is going to shrink by every passing year.
I disagree. The Internet was mostly good in the early days, not because of the people using it, but because corporations hadn't yet figured out how profitable it would become. Everything was free, the standards/protocols all open, if someone made a thing for the Internet it was because they thought it would be useful, not because they thought it would make them a lot of money.
Look at Wikipedia, one of the last remnants of the early Internet. It's a mostly good tool because it hasn't been overrun by profit motive.
Profit motives are destroying the Internet. Because profit is divorced from the actual value a thing provides. Enshitification works because a worse technology results in higher profits.
There have been companies making profit from the internet a lot longer than you suggest. They've just gotten more ruthless these days as its much easier to collect user data to monetize when theres a requirement that normal people have to use it to function in socisty.
So yes, more people that can't participate in society without internet makes more marks for these vultures and it becomes an oroboros of cringe
To be clear about timeframe, I'm talking early days of the TCP/IP protocol. Like when HTTP was being drafted, the days of BBSs. If you look at the fundamental design of the Internet, it was intended to be regulated by subject matter experts from around the world. Not for and by any one country, but for use by everyone, borders be damned.
Software monetization was certainly happening, but largely not by way of the Internet, software was sold in stores and magazines and by mail via floppy disks.
Like sure, it didn't take long for nerds in their garages to figure out that their lists of URLs could be profitable, but this was not instantly recognized by the ruling class.