Post #1479506

@netopwibby the sad part is that it didn't have to be the "old web." It (small/non-commercial websites) stuck around and stayed visible alongside bigger platforms for a long time, up until Google went from trying to fight site owners who tried to game the system to get their sites on page 1, to providing them the tools to do it more than ever before, burying/disappearing huge swaths of the internet that weren't primarily commercial enterprises and therefore had no incentive to play that game in the process. The really sad part is that it didn't just change the ownership of the places we get our information from small+independent to big+commercial, it reduced the quality and reliability of those social spaces and sources of information to an extreme degree, and people are largely still using Google as their default entry point to the internet, and still using Chrome even as they actively reduce the effectiveness of ad blockers. That most of the frogs who finally realize they're being boiled have decided to stay in the pot is the part that makes it all feel so very hopeless.