Developers rarely pay for their dev tools - except if it is far more expensive to replicate and it being closed source.
Hence why we keep seeing the likes of Astral, Bun and Tailwind CSS struggle in keeping afloat and have to seek an exit, especially when they are open source and have raised money from investors.
I run very small models locally for code completion and writing boiler plate. I still use Claude in a web browser on occasion since it's free, but the second that goes away, I'll be done with it. They get none of my money.
this does not matter from the business perspective.
microsoft does not care that your company forces you to use their products. google does not care that your school forces you to use their products. TSMC does not care that you are forced to use their products when purchasing ~any electronics. etc.
If parents don't want their kids on social media, get them a dumb phone, or use the parental control features. Maybe some parents don't care, and that's their prerogative. None of this is about protecting children, it's about "protecting" adults from "bad ideas".
The problem is many parents will not do that. Do those children then deserve to be taken advantage of by social media corporations?
Generally, things that are harmful and addictive such as alcohol, cigarettes and casinos require age verification. We dont just put the onus on parents because a child with bad or absent parents still deserves to be shielded from alcoholism at 12 years old.
So are gambling and cigarettes. As a society we've decided a reasonable compromise is that you can get the freedom to harm yourself at a certain age where you're assumed to understand that you're harming yourself.
The WWW was at least created with egalitarian ideals, even if it failed to meet those ideals (despite succeeding far more than people want to credit.) It was available to everyone, it ostensibly allowed anyone to publish and communicate freely. It wasn't intended for only a single culture or subculture.
Whatever comes after will either be entirely controlled by corporate and government interests or gatekept against "normies," and thus be a homogeneous cultural bubble doomed to wither into self-referential senescence and die, and will be far less free, less powerful and less capable than the web. We'll never get anything with the transformative potential of the web again.
A world where your only options are GovNet or EliteWhiteHackerDudeSpace. I don't look forward to that at all.
I would rather go back to when the web was useful, and everything wasn't either paywalled or plastered with ads too. The web will never die, but this version of it is on borrowed time.
I don't think WWW will ever die but I can see a hard split coming eventually. Most people will just put up with the current state of the internet for a long time yet.
Neither does the normal web. It became this way. The ability to run decentralized is not what is preventing enshittification.
I would argue eg. a LoRa based Reticulum network is enshittification resistant, because of physical bandwidth and range limitations. It enforces decentralization and abuse/advertisement/... inherently doesn't scale, is not worth the effort. It favors authentic, low reach human2human information sharing.
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