It’s not unreasonable to percieve the WWW for the past 20 years, definitely 10 years, to basically being a handful of website with 90% of the users.
I for one miss the smaller internet of days past, but I’ve always assumed I was in the minority here, as most of my peers don’t seem to care about everything being on Facebook these days.
However, as AI slop overruns these platforms, I’ve noticed increased interest in alternatives. As each major platform gets slopified, the sites and communities that are too small to warrant much interest from bots become more lucrative.
And as for the ones who are fine with the slop feeds who think what they’re seeing is actually real, I guess we’re not losing much of value if they stay with InstaFaceTwitterTok
The only downside is normies vote in elections and even if they eventually understand that JPEGs aren’t real life, they will lobby increasingly intrusive governments to ban the internet outright before they ever consider that other websites exist or even just go back to their IRL bubbles to larp the noble savage fallacy and let us all be in peace like before.
They’ve done it with drugs, they’ve even done it with vaping in what are otherwise considered first world democratic countries, they’re doing it with porn and fucking Imgur, they do it with sugar and they do it with salt and they’ll sure as hell do it with the internet and those without self control will be the end of us all and all we’ll have left is the man on TV telling us that all is well, and our eyes are fooling us as always is all, just like it was before.
But I hope I’m wrong.