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Internet developments have gone from exciting to dreadful. (lemmy.ml)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Idk if this is the right community for this conversation, but it's been on my mind and I want to share it with someone.

In the 00's every new thing we heard about the internet was exciting. There were new protocols, new ways to communicate, new ways to share files, new ways to find each other. Every time we heard anything new about the internet, it was always progress.

That lasted into the early teens and then things started changing. Things started stagnating. Now we're well into the phase where every new piece of news we hear is negative. New legislations, new privacy intrusions, new restrictions, new technologies to lock content away and keep us from sharing, or seeing the content we were looking for. New ways to force ads.

At one point the Internet was my most favorite thing in the world. Now I don't know if I even like it anymore. I certainly don't look forward to hearing news about it. It's sad, man. We've lost a lot. The mega corps took the internet from us, changed it from a million small sites that people created because they had big ideas, or were passionate about small ones, and turned it into a few enormous sites with no new ideas, no passion, just an insatiable desire for money.

We're at the end of an era, and unlike the last 20 years of progress, I don't think most of us will like what the next era brings.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago

There didn't even need to be a deliberate cartel for this to happen either.

Amazon realized it could make money and grow the company by offering cloud services and now AWS runs something like 30% of the internet.

Google turned their leading search algorithms into an extensive tracking and advertising platform that integrates with most of the internet.

Apple decided that people don't need to be allowed to tinker with and repair their own devices so that hardware can be locked into a four-year cycle of planned obsolescence.

A whole bunch of profit-maximizing firms did the hard job of controlling everything for the governments.