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
Smaller communities, where you actually know the screen names of a lot of the active users, are much higher quality in terms of actual conversation.
On Reddit, for example, you’re rarely talking to anybody in specific, just yelling into the void. This is painfully obvious if you ever try to engage someone who only exists on commercial social media. Their ability to have a conversation or entertain another point of view is almost non-existent. Their comments read more like they were written to chase upvotes than in an actual attempt to engage with the human on the other side of the conversation.
The influencer-driven obsession with views/likes/subscribers makes people think that small communities (like this one) are somehow worse. That’s just not true, as long as your goal is more ‘social’ and less ‘media’.