It feels like the web is becoming more closed every year — fewer open forums, more platforms locking away data and communities behind logins. What do you think are the biggest forces driving the decline of the open internet? Are walled gardens like Discord the main problem, or is it something else like artificial intelligence, corporate consolidation, surveillance, or changing user habits?
The love of money. Making a profit is not enough, it has to be growing and accelerating all the time.
Yeah, the ideal of the internet was that, ultimately, we would all have our own little box in our house that we would post our stuff to, and our friends would read it and see it, and maybe a few passers by on the internet would observe it, and that would be a way of journaling our lives and sharing them with each other.
Instead of being a global hearth, it has become a global marketplace, a battleground for power in the form of advertising revenue, sales revenue, and tracking every bit of data they can possibly get from you.
This is so that, 1, they can sell more things to you, and 2, so they can sell that information to other people who, like themselves, do not have your best interest in mind and do not care one fuck about you.