It's an awkward and elitist thing to say, but I believe it to be true: whatever is embraced by the masses, suffers in some ways.
The expert/nerd internet was pioneering, weird, edgy, cooperative. The internet for the masses is...different.
You'll see the same effect in movies, following "safe" formulas. Every movie must have a romantic side story, no matter how irrelevant. It must deliver to the broadest audience possible. And of course, nothing should be thought-provoking, keep it middle of the road.
Check out musical charts, songs are so repetitive that they seem AI generated.
I've found another recent example in F1 racing. It's a pretty technical sport that used to have a fairly limited following. Now the thing is exploding and there's friction between the "original" fans and the clueless idiots spoiling the well (not my words).
As soon as you have the masses on board, this obviously also invites a heavy commercialization of any space, with goals entirely opposite to the original spirit of the internet.
Concluding, the only way to get it back, is to be elitist. Create well defined spaces, heavily curated in both members and content.
I might phrase it, "whatever is embraced by the masses becomes more appealing to the masses." Broadening in appeal is not necessarily worse, although it's surely worse from the perspective of the initial specialized interest group.
Yes, the Internet of yesteryear was more interesting to our type of people, but it had no appeal whatsoever to anyone else. The world is better off today with an Internet that billions find fun and useful, even if it's way less fun for us specifically.
That's a good point. I'd love to find a small chatroom full of a couple dozen strangers who share my interests, and many thousands of such chatrooms surely exist, but I'd never find one unless I had a friend point me to it.
That weirdness does still exist, whether it's kept up from a long time ago or people making brand-new weird stuff. I got into making a site on Neocities, essentially a modern Geocities equivalent, a while back after a friend told me about it. I didn't end up sticking with it too long, but I found so many gloriously weird personal sites, projects, shrines, zines, and fan pages.
Quick question, what makes Neocities different than Cloudflare/GitHub/GitLab/Codeberg/x Pages?
Its just like any static page hosting right? The selling point is its open source?(Codeberg and GitLab are open source.)
Once you realize you Can choose what you do online and what music you listen to you can get the best of the best. What helped me is deleting Facebook, Whatsup, Instagram, LinkedIn, Apple Music. Im building my new music collection mainly focused on classical music (the best performers). Im reading quanta magazine, harward magazines etc. You can get anything, the only question is what you really want
The expert/nerd internet was pioneering, weird, edgy, cooperative. The internet for the masses is...different.
You'll see the same effect in movies, following "safe" formulas. Every movie must have a romantic side story, no matter how irrelevant. It must deliver to the broadest audience possible. And of course, nothing should be thought-provoking, keep it middle of the road.
Check out musical charts, songs are so repetitive that they seem AI generated.
I've found another recent example in F1 racing. It's a pretty technical sport that used to have a fairly limited following. Now the thing is exploding and there's friction between the "original" fans and the clueless idiots spoiling the well (not my words).
As soon as you have the masses on board, this obviously also invites a heavy commercialization of any space, with goals entirely opposite to the original spirit of the internet.
Concluding, the only way to get it back, is to be elitist. Create well defined spaces, heavily curated in both members and content.