Internet was still an alien thing to a lot of people throughout the 2000s, and if you think about it - that’s only 14 years ago! And look at this article - it’s reflecting on the good old days as though it happened thousands of years ago.<p>Yes, the problem definitely lies in social media and its evil attention-grabbing algorithms, but the fact that people never got to experience the old-school Internet also plays a role in this. People just don’t know any better!<p>For a lot of folks, the web is merely a source of news, a means to pay bills, and to engage in mindless short-form entertainment.<p>I am all for bringing back individual sites and communities back tho!<p>Is money the real root problem of this? Not just from an advertising perspective but also from the perspective of a person.<p>Fundamentally, the Internet provides freedom of communication with the entire world, but these days we can hardly engage with that world because the ability to support oneself financially comes first. As such, you either don’t spend a lot of time online, or you spend your entire time online chasing the cheddar…
Early social media (MySpace, Twitter, Facebook) was a free alternative to paying someone to run, patch, and scale your own website/blog. It gave a lot of people opportunity to create their own communities and engage with them in a more convenient and immediate way than blogs or forums. The fun lasted for as long as free VC money was there and when that ran out they all went downhill. I am removing my social media posts, closing accounts, and going back to a website with a blog. Instagram, Twitter, and the rest of them are the new MySpace near its end days, they can run on fake accounts and bullshit content for a while, but advertisers will eventually learn that the audiences have gone elsewhere. That other place won't be another social media network, because spammers, bot devs, and mass-manufacturers of crap content are so well prepared that they can start flooding any new platform with their digital manure almost immediately.
> <i>instead of passively waiting for social feeds to serve you what to read, you can seek out reading materials</i><p>or even use RSS to get the best of both worlds?<p>Lagniappe: <a href="https://search.marginalia.nu" rel="nofollow">https://search.marginalia.nu</a>
I was surprised the article didn't mention Reddit.<p>The issue with platforms lies in how quality contents are rewarded. Social media algorithms can be "hacked" to distribute unhelpful contents. The democratic voting system used by Reddit and HN solved this problem by quantifying helpfulness. The great thing is this mechanism incentivizes publishers to improve their contents, which is exactly what they are doing with their home pages, as mentioned in this article.
The “home page” is the digital version of the “front page” from newspapers, or the magazine format. It worked then, and it will keep working.<p>In contrast, Twitter and the like is the equivalent to random people shouting on the street.