The internet is arguably* terrible today. There are about four websites that most people visit each and every day. And of those four websites, they're most likely owned by one or all of the five largest tech companies.
Before social media, people built their own websites just to put their art out there. Now everything runs through a walled garden, and to your point, it's easier to tweet than to go build a website no one will visit.
>Before social media, people built their own websites just to put their art out there. Now everything runs through a walled garden, and to your point, it's easier to tweet than to go build a website no one will visit.
And yet there is more content on the web, of greater variety and higher quality, than there ever was on that old web. Youtube is a walled garden, but some of what's on there is brilliant, and there's certainly plenty of non-commercial "for the love" content as well. Twitter is, well, Twitter, but accounts like TheSunVanished are publishing ARGs on the platform. Streaming music, video, gaming, all sorts of platforms are full of creative expression despite also being centralized.
Is all of that really unarguably terrible merely because everyone putting their art out there didn't first go through the trouble of manually writing HTML pages on a shared host first?
The internet is definitely, and I still stand by this comment, unarguably terrible today, compared to what it used to be. Is that anyone's fault? Probably not.
People used to download MP3s from AOL chat rooms. There were these people that just served up their music libraries using a chat bot for other people to request downloads.
Once you had enough tracks, you could serve up your own bot to let others share in on the fun.
I can't blame progress for killing culture, but I'm glad that back then, something like serving up an MP3 library in an AOL chatroom was a deeply awesome experience.
>People used to download MP3s from AOL chat rooms. There were these people that just served up their music libraries using a chat bot for other people to request downloads.
>Once you had enough tracks, you could serve up your own bot to let others share in on the fun.
And nowadays people torrent. It's not as if piracy and file sharing are dead or anything.
But I think you're really saying the web is terrible for you, because it no longer resembles what you used to enjoy, and because other people use it in ways you don't find interesting. And that's valid for you, but it's a subjective opinion, not objective fact.
Personally, I'm happy giving up downloading random mp3s from the web to have the depth of content and interactivity the modern web offers. But I care more about content than culture.
Before social media, people built their own websites just to put their art out there. Now everything runs through a walled garden, and to your point, it's easier to tweet than to go build a website no one will visit.