Everything happens so much
On the fragmentation of the internet.
This point has obviously been made before — more eloquently, too — but man is it strange to live at the speed of the modern internet.
Things happen, and they’re immediately disseminated and digested; by the end of the day you’ve got thousands of riffs, which have a comprehensibility half life of, like, 3 months. Granted, I probably spend a little too much time online, but I do find it all kind of exhausting. New characters are introduced every day. Storylines advance inexorably. And then they’re promptly forgotten — only, of course, to resurface as trivia and remix fodder the next time something reasonably similar happens.
Obviously it’s because everything is content, which means that everything is also entertainment. In the 2010s, virality ruled the ‘net, right? And some of that viral stuff made some people some money — made them influential, too. A lot of that early stuff was made unintentionally, posted without an awareness that it could have a real world, real-life impact on the poster.
In the decade since, the world has reordered itself a bit; now everyone knows that posting good enough can make you famous (if not necessarily rich). I don’t think that’s inauthentic or whatever, but I do think it’s interesting to see the ways that awareness influences people’s posts.
What’s kind of ironic is how a lot of the platforms that made stuff viral are breaking down. Twitter’s ongoing shitfit is empowering brave CEOs to break their own platforms, and it’s breaking millions of people out of their established Content Consuming Habits. It feels like the internet is fragmenting again, reverting to an earlier state. A little like it was before social media apps and their algorithms began deciding what’s popular.
The Reddit stuff feels instructive. You’ve got a guy who needs to pay back investors squeezing his users — who freely donate their time, money, and energy to make content for his site — and it’s not going well because, well, it goes pretty against the users’ wishes. And they are the site. Some of those users also moderate subreddits that get millions of views a day; which means, in real-life terms, they sort of decide whether or not Reddit the company can make money. Anyway: Reddit’s CEO went to war with those people, and it’s getting ugly. But more importantly, the knock-on effects mean something for the rest of the internet. Subreddits going private means that Google search doesn’t work anymore, for example.
Sometime in the last decade or so, everything got connected together in a way that felt very comfortable. And that’s changing. Elon Musk took over Twitter and promptly destroyed its value; that feels like a cue ball shot toward an 8-ball rack. There’s a lot of kinetic energy out there, is what I’m saying. And in response users are retreating to private holdouts like Discord, and reevaluating their use of the platforms they’d gotten used to.
Who knows how it’ll turn out! Not me. The money isn’t free anymore, as far as I can tell1. But I do know that platforms are feeling squeezed. Their leaders are trying to juice their metrics by squeezing blood out of stones. I can’t help but wonder how it’s all gonna shake out.
Love,
Bijan
Do I know anything about what rising interest rates do to websites? Absolutely not!
I just keep thinking about what this will eventually mean for Wikipedia.