This is an overly wordy article, that I think misses the mark.
The internet _as the Western world knows it today_ will not be the same in a few decades. But then again, it's hardly the same today as it was 30 years ago either.
A few things affect this:
- Advertising. It's everywhere and corrupts every form of media. Content is made to appease advertisers, and web services are built to extract data from users. The internet experience is getting gradually worse.
- Politics. For some reason, it's only dawning on governments now that providing uncensored and unfettered connections to their political adversaries can be used for information warfare. The idea that connecting the world will make it a better place and undo the millennia of tribalism is a romanticized platitude of the 1990s.
- Artificial intelligence. The situation will only be exacerbated by letting AI loose on the internet. Whatever humans can do online, AI can do much, much better—or worse, depending on your perspective.
The outcome of these things will be that countries will have a more restricted and censored version of the current internet. We'll follow China's example, and have a European internet, US internet, etc.
The internet will survive. It will just be very different.
> Politics. For some reason, it's only dawning on governments now that providing uncensored and unfettered connections to their political adversaries can be used for information warfare. The idea that connecting the world will make it a better place and undo the millennia of tribalism is a romanticized platitude of the 1990s.
Or another point of view: Those who call for internet censorship and country-level firewalls are NOT looking for the world to get better and instead are just afraid of losing their control over the population. Which is why you first see those measures being employed in openly totalitarian systems before now being slowly adoped in supposedly free societies whose rulers like to claim to represent the population they rule over.
> The internet will survive. It will just be very different.
The internet will continue to exist, certainly. However, it does become a more hostile and unpleasant place over time. Because of that, it's much less useful to me than it used to be and that trend doesn't appear to be changing.
More hostile as in... you open some random webpage, you get 3 popup windows with porn ads playing at full volume? And when you close them, infinitely more open, like a hydra, until it locks up and you have to reboot.
Or you drop into a public game of CS, and a dozen teens start screaming at you over low bitrate compressed audio streams, to logoff and kill yourself because you sound like an n-word.
This was my internet experience in 1999. I think the derangement has been a constant over time.
Yeah, I think the internet is going to get back to it's roots: a place to publish documents and send emails. Those documents might be videos, but ultimately it looks to me like all the social this and that have been a big, decades long slow motion flop. It's a great replacement for telephones and TV and libraries, everything else that's come out of it seems to be, from inception, perpetually propped up by investors hoping it works out eventually. I think the time is coming now where people are beginning to see that the vision is not materializing.
Ignoring the problems of global interconnectedness doesn't make them go away. Information can be weaponized and used against you in ways that are difficult to detect and prevent. We know that propaganda, like advertising, is highly effective, and the internet is the best medium we've invented yet for broadcasting it. At what point do you prioritize issues of national security that threaten your society and way of life, over your perceived freedom to consume funny memes and dancing videos? It's increasingly clear that an unrestricted internet carries existential risks, but most people also wouldn't want to live under totalitarianism either. So there's a delicate line that "democratic" governments need to walk to ensure their subsistence, and it's on us to voice how far we're willing to sacrifice some of the "freedoms" we're used to.
Needless to say, it's going to be a bumpy ride until we figure this out.
I think what we will also see - are pocket universes. As in- to circumvent censorship, people will download and run an ai, that mimicrys the free internet for them.
The Internet (and especially the Web) is not so much the content, but how it is linked. Without a doubt the way we link (quality) content and hide the drivel should|will|MUST evolve. And that evolution may produce something unrecognizable from the Internet of today.
Honestly I welcome the 'death' of the internet with open arms. Irrespective of the enshittification flavor of the day, the end result is the same - face to face human relationships will be back in vogue again, and the internet will go back to a complimentary role at best.
I would also like people to let go of the idea that the internet is Serious Business. People who live their lives on Twitter, discussing political matters of grave importance, people getting 'canceled' over inane shit is just ridiculous.
It should go back to trash talk and funny memes, and cat pictures and sharing baking recipes.
The "Internet" didn't kill direct human interactions, the engagement economy did. This economy will continue to exist and continue to outcompete direct contacts as long as it remains profitable, with or without the Internet.
> The idea that connecting the world will make it a better place and undo the millennia of tribalism is a romanticized platitude of the 1990s.
This only applies in media that allows censorship, and controls visibility. If it doesn't, the bigots are easy to identify and weed themselves out. If it foes, the bigots can form bubbles, and foster tribalism.
Fully open and uncensored platforms do not force bigots into bubbles, but they do not prevent them from creating them willingly. If it serves the bigots' interests to form bubbles in order to foster tribalism, then they will.
Basically, if there exists a strategy for an ideology to spread under censorship, it is hard to believe that removing restrictions would make it any less effective. Bigots won't out themselves and discredit themselves on an open platform just because they can, they are not idiots.
This is probably an even worse “platitude”. Most people go with the flow so if you’re immersed in a lot of bigotry, you will probably end up being a bigot eventually. Then it just spreads, especially if you couple the bigotry with humor. Bigotry is tribalism and seems naturally engrained so it’s something you have to actively resist.
We got the Internet that advertising built.
This was not how we (well some of us early 90s and before) users assumed it would pan out.
It has been my experience that private Internet communities (groups, forums, messaging chats) are where the quality discussion happens these days. Away from the advertising and the controversy seeking (and anti-tech) mainstream media reporters.
Small private communities are contrary to some of the most important, biggest promises of the Internet (and the web): that it would be open and really big. It was supposed to be a place where some kid in rural Africa with only 8 years of schooling could learn how to be a software developer, or where people could naturally find and join communities too small to have a local presence (eg people really into collecting vacuum cleaners).
I don't think it's just an advertising/cancel culture problem. It's partially a problem with the internet being so decentralized that spammers and scammers can operate with impunity, pushing a ton of work onto people running online communities because countries like India and Russia don't properly go after cybercriminals - even if someone SaaSified forums, this is still a significant burden.
It's also kind of a UI problem: if Google search starts to suck and gets filled with trash, as has happened, it breaks the core pull-model of the web. If Reddit starts to suck and get filled with trash, as has happened, it breaks the core push-model of the web. Together the two kind of Embraced-Extended-Extinguished the web, but maybe something like an RSS reader, different web client (eg a browser that didn't nudge you into making google queries as the main way to operate it), and more capable search engine would be able to fix these.
I'm not sure that GP meant entirely private communities - rather something like, for example, Discord communities, or online forums, where people can still join, but it's not entirely "public" in the sense of Twitter or the like.
> Small private communities are contrary to some of the most important, biggest promises of the Internet (and the web): that it would be open and really big.
The many forums that existed fulfilled both of those. Open to read for anyone, really big in aggregate and mostly small and private communities of participants.
> kid in rural Africa with only 8 years of schooling could learn how to be a software developer
Small and private does not necessarily imply exclusive. There are such communities where you can easily join or lurk.
> or where people could naturally find and join communities too small to have a local presence
And that still works for me like that. They might not be visible on the first results page but once you start to research a topic in depth you can find them.
I think that was the aspiration, but nobody realized there were so many people who thought 5G caused corona (and similar lack of thought process) until it was too late.
> Small private communities are contrary to some of the most important, biggest promises of the Internet (and the web)
I fully agree with you there. This is why I remarked on the private (or perhaps better said, semi-private) nature of forums/chats I use with high SnR today. I’m disappointed it has gone this way, but then the 90s was a long time ago now and I was certainly more naive then.
To draw an analogy, I think distance/privacy brings its own benefits. There’s a reason the corporate giants of the 50s, 60s, and 70s put their research campus away from the main HQ centre of gravity.
In the late 80s/early-90s, it was quite a “hike” to get to the Internet. Either you were at University or as in my case, you had to get modem, cable, KA9Q, terminal emulator, Kermit, rz/sz, etc working together to reach it. Even when browsers became a thing, you may have needed to compile one, or get Winsock working if on a Pee Cee.
I honestly don’t agree with most of the doomsayers of the Internet.
Sure, there is way more advertising and bots these days but there is WAY more content available today than 10 years ago or 20 years ago. Definitely way more diversity of content too.
> Like this site, one of the highest signal to noise ratios on the internet because no one has any incentive to game it.
There's tons of incentive to game it. If it wasn't, why would all kinds of startups and tech companies have alert bots and slack channels implemented to allow their employees to swoop in and participate in HN threads that are relevant to their marketing interests?
IIRC, the one's who've come clean about doing that have been fairly scrupulous about, but I'm sure they're just the tip of the iceberg.
Don't delude yourself. There is quite a lot of stuff being put here for ungenuine reasons.
If you want to find a platform with true signal to noise golden ratio, you either have to find one on the rise, NOT made by a well known name, and place a timer on it, or you have to find one people think is long dead.
In the 90s we dreamed of replicators, holodecks and supportive technologies. The crew of the Enterprise certainly didn't walk around with their head in their tri-quarters all day.
My take on declining online social engagement is; a lot of people like to consume online content passively e.g. just reading Facebook posts or watching a YouTube video without actually liking or commenting. Another thing is; increasing number of people came to realize that privacy does matter and they refuse to participate in online dramas that can damage their reputation or harm their mental health.
99% of my social media engagement is on anonymous social media because whatever I do on real-identity social media is either broadcast to everyone I know by the platform (FB, LinkedIn, Twitter), or becomes indexed by search engines, and unfortunately my firstname+lastname is globally unique.
In fact I would say this is the singular reason why Facebook declined. I just don't want my 8th grade classmate to see that I liked my cousin's wedding photos 20 years later, y'know?
Yep, or a prospective employer when I'm in my 40s to see what my political opinions were in my 20s. The more polarized and politicized everything gets the more careful a watch I keep on what turns up when you Google my name. What's well inside the Overton window today won't be in five years and I'm not willing to risk my career on the assumption that even I will still agree with myself in a few years.
> unfortunately my firstname+lastname is globally unique.
This is why I have never used, and will never use, my real world identity on the internet in the decades I've been interacting on it. Instead, I use consistent internet-only identities. It allows me to communicate honestly and openly.
The biggest single mistake we collectively made online is deciding to engage online at all with our true identities. Privacy is only a real concern because so many things we do online can be tied to our real lives.
Get rid of identities and the fire hose of click bait social media and I'd expect the internet goes back to something much more similar to what we often see people wax poetic about, a smaller web that's people goofing off and writing random stuff on their own site.
IMO, it’s due to burnout due to pathological manipulation. Which is also playing out in politics and the media/advertising, and the macroeconomic fed rate situation. They’re all related.
Business cycle wise:
- it starts out mellow, with lots of positive ROI and few downsides. Few know about it at first.
- as awareness grows, so does competition. While there is a ton of room to grow, this isn’t a problem. Growth doesn’t have to be at the cost of a competitors market share, there are tons of available untapped opportunities.
- eventually, it starts to become crowded. Now competition starts to become more heated and cut throat. Old tricks to stay competitive stop working, and there is an arms race to develop new ones.
- at some point, some/many players don’t feel they can compete based on fundamentals (positively), and it starts to become a race to the bottom. With some/many players starting to scam or commit fraud, be scary/manipulative, squeeze suppliers to a destructive degree, etc. Zero sum game instead of green field.
- this causes demand side restrictions and additional costs as customers start to get scared/overwhelmed, and cut back or get more demanding on quality.
- this causes a downward spiral that worsens the situation industry wide, eventually bankrupting marginal suppliers and maybe even big ones, until things stabilize or change.
On the social side, a lot of people population wide are flat out not doing it anymore. Including women. Similar to dating apps.
Which is why some advertisers, politicians, businesses keep getting even more insane and craven trying to extract even more value from the remaining people - to keep the numbers going up and right. So they don’t have to ‘look down’ and be potentially bankrupt. The loudest players in this type of environment are almost always the ones in the worst position.
This is also playing out in American Politics and Media right now.
It isn’t just engineer or blue collar types, who IMO were already predisposed to not engaging with it.
Pluses: in 20-30 years, there will be a lot of older folks who are very hard to fool or manipulate.
Minuses:
- there are going to be a lot more deeply traumatized people with a profoundly negative outlook on human nature, now and even more in the future.
- society is going to get a whole lot poorer while this plays out.
> Pluses: in 20-30 years, there will be a lot of older folks who are very hard to fool or manipulate.
I disagree. Tech literacy is going down, partially due to an overreliance on dashboard-style mobile apps and phishing scams are still widely effective. I have seen people lose mails and accounts to strategies that have been unchanged for an easily googleable 11 years now. Perhaps the inevitability of exposure is a numbers game, but I'm overall pessimistic, I think a lot of scams will become a lot more "personal sounding" due to AI agents, and a preparedness reset is coming.
This person is just, like many others, mistaking the death of public social media and the open web for the death of being online. All the interesting activity has retreated to Discord, Slack, Telegram, Mastodon, Signal, private and niche boards, game chats, etc.
This stuff is all taking place in private rooms and small silos. If you aren't in them, you don't see it. Reddit still has a bit of a pulse but is probably on the endangered list. TikTok is probably the last big social and has an increasingly negative reputation, meaning it'll probably be "out" pretty soon.
The public Internet is probably dying, a victim of spam and over-commoditization.
I’ve found that ageism is kind of not even a thing. The problem is that the cool parties are not where they used to be but as people age they usually don’t update their priors. Same goes for the internet.
The Internet is TCP/IP, BGP, and other core protocols and the physical wires that carry them.
Public wide open free for all space are a major use case but they aren't a necessity and they may not survive the spam tsunami of LLMs and troll farms.
This had my attention at first but I’m not sure it led me anywhere. For discussion of the fundamental contradictions with the current structure of the Internet (that lead to the problems described herein & more), I highly recommend The People’s Platform by Astra Taylor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_People's_Platform
It’s a decade old at this point & yet continues to be startlingly relevant.
I sometimes suspect the pandemic and lockdowns probably killed a lot of social engagement and internet activity too. Yes, it seems counterproductive, since those times were boom periods for many social media platforms...
But then once it ended, it feels like being stuck online with nothing else to do all day burnt a lot of people out on the internet and online activities. Perhaps they decided it was best to make up for lost time once real life 'reopened'. Or perhaps they took one look at the online panopticon, and realised it wasn't adding as much to their lives as they thought.
Because activity in many communities seems to dropped significantly, at least from what I can see. Yeah, Discord's seemingly doing better than Reddit or Twitter in this climate, but even then, communities that seemed to be booming in the pandemic (or even before) are now far less active than they used to be, and lots of people who used to be there all the time seem to barely show up anymore.
> Because activity in many communities seems to dropped significantly, at least from what I can see. Yeah, Discord's seemingly doing better than Reddit or Twitter in this climate, but even then, communities that seemed to be booming in the pandemic (or even before) are now far less active than they used to be, and lots of people who used to be there all the time seem to barely show up anymore.
Important to note that this happens every summer. Especially a pre-us-election summer. People are out there living their lives, having fun, and avoiding the constant barrage of politics online. Things will be back in the fall.
Sauce: My email open rates observed over the past 10 years. Summers always see a lull in online activity
Also you may be experiencing your age cohort growing up. I’m mid 30’s and have noticed a significant decline in online activity as people my age juggle kids and career and increasingly have zero time to spend online. The younger folk without these encumbrances don’t hang out where I’m used to looking.
Whenever I hang out (irl) with younger coworkers it’s obvious that people 10 years younger still spend just as much if not more time online than we did at that age.
Statistically we actually know this is false, the pre-Covid 6pm internet surge window has actually stuck around as the new baseline normal internet traffic post-covid.
Interesting read. Check out the section "Decline in time spent online". It kicked up for Covid, but is now back to pre-Covid levels:
2016: 6h29
2017: 6h46
2018: 6h48
2019: 6h38
2020: 6h55
2021: 6h57
2022: 6h37
But users are now spending more of that time on social media (about 40%).
To each their own. This rapidly lost my attention due to the meandering, abstract writing style. I ended up skim reading down to the conclusion, deciding it was a nihilistic take on things, and moving on.
Variety is the spice of life though, I’m glad it was enjoyed by others.
This is by far the most common complaint I see directed towards the writings and media that I enjoy the most, both in fiction and in non-fiction. Oblique narratives where nothing happens, nobody is happy, everyone dies, and no message is taught or learned are my favourite. Interstellar. Neon Genesis Evangelion. Full Metal Jacket. Most recently, the latest instalment of EPIC: The Musical.
I can't really explain why I like them so much. They scratch a cosmic itch I don't fully understand, and the answer isn't simply validating negative sentiment toward the world or other trivial possibilities that immediately spring to mind.
I don't disagree with many of his points, but to call him over-dramatic would be an understatement. The article doesn't seem to make any attempt at justifying the hook besides "the internet is already over because all things will end". And it's presented as some sort of revelation, written in the most pretentious possible way, and ends with a statement of how different his writing is from "the internet". Some kind of boogeyman compilation of everything wrong with life in a digital world.
Readit News
The internet _as the Western world knows it today_ will not be the same in a few decades. But then again, it's hardly the same today as it was 30 years ago either.
A few things affect this:
- Advertising. It's everywhere and corrupts every form of media. Content is made to appease advertisers, and web services are built to extract data from users. The internet experience is getting gradually worse.
- Politics. For some reason, it's only dawning on governments now that providing uncensored and unfettered connections to their political adversaries can be used for information warfare. The idea that connecting the world will make it a better place and undo the millennia of tribalism is a romanticized platitude of the 1990s.
- Artificial intelligence. The situation will only be exacerbated by letting AI loose on the internet. Whatever humans can do online, AI can do much, much better—or worse, depending on your perspective.
The outcome of these things will be that countries will have a more restricted and censored version of the current internet. We'll follow China's example, and have a European internet, US internet, etc.
The internet will survive. It will just be very different.
Or another point of view: Those who call for internet censorship and country-level firewalls are NOT looking for the world to get better and instead are just afraid of losing their control over the population. Which is why you first see those measures being employed in openly totalitarian systems before now being slowly adoped in supposedly free societies whose rulers like to claim to represent the population they rule over.
The internet will continue to exist, certainly. However, it does become a more hostile and unpleasant place over time. Because of that, it's much less useful to me than it used to be and that trend doesn't appear to be changing.
Or you drop into a public game of CS, and a dozen teens start screaming at you over low bitrate compressed audio streams, to logoff and kill yourself because you sound like an n-word.
This was my internet experience in 1999. I think the derangement has been a constant over time.
shrug Certainly a better place than a disconnected world.
I'm staying in romantic land, it beats the heck out of the government moderating which information I see for my own good.
Needless to say, it's going to be a bumpy ride until we figure this out.
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I would also like people to let go of the idea that the internet is Serious Business. People who live their lives on Twitter, discussing political matters of grave importance, people getting 'canceled' over inane shit is just ridiculous.
It should go back to trash talk and funny memes, and cat pictures and sharing baking recipes.
This only applies in media that allows censorship, and controls visibility. If it doesn't, the bigots are easy to identify and weed themselves out. If it foes, the bigots can form bubbles, and foster tribalism.
Basically, if there exists a strategy for an ideology to spread under censorship, it is hard to believe that removing restrictions would make it any less effective. Bigots won't out themselves and discredit themselves on an open platform just because they can, they are not idiots.
I don't think it's just an advertising/cancel culture problem. It's partially a problem with the internet being so decentralized that spammers and scammers can operate with impunity, pushing a ton of work onto people running online communities because countries like India and Russia don't properly go after cybercriminals - even if someone SaaSified forums, this is still a significant burden.
It's also kind of a UI problem: if Google search starts to suck and gets filled with trash, as has happened, it breaks the core pull-model of the web. If Reddit starts to suck and get filled with trash, as has happened, it breaks the core push-model of the web. Together the two kind of Embraced-Extended-Extinguished the web, but maybe something like an RSS reader, different web client (eg a browser that didn't nudge you into making google queries as the main way to operate it), and more capable search engine would be able to fix these.
The many forums that existed fulfilled both of those. Open to read for anyone, really big in aggregate and mostly small and private communities of participants.
Small and private does not necessarily imply exclusive. There are such communities where you can easily join or lurk.
> or where people could naturally find and join communities too small to have a local presence
And that still works for me like that. They might not be visible on the first results page but once you start to research a topic in depth you can find them.
I think that was the aspiration, but nobody realized there were so many people who thought 5G caused corona (and similar lack of thought process) until it was too late.
I fully agree with you there. This is why I remarked on the private (or perhaps better said, semi-private) nature of forums/chats I use with high SnR today. I’m disappointed it has gone this way, but then the 90s was a long time ago now and I was certainly more naive then.
To draw an analogy, I think distance/privacy brings its own benefits. There’s a reason the corporate giants of the 50s, 60s, and 70s put their research campus away from the main HQ centre of gravity.
In the late 80s/early-90s, it was quite a “hike” to get to the Internet. Either you were at University or as in my case, you had to get modem, cable, KA9Q, terminal emulator, Kermit, rz/sz, etc working together to reach it. Even when browsers became a thing, you may have needed to compile one, or get Winsock working if on a Pee Cee.
Sure, there is way more advertising and bots these days but there is WAY more content available today than 10 years ago or 20 years ago. Definitely way more diversity of content too.
There's tons of incentive to game it. If it wasn't, why would all kinds of startups and tech companies have alert bots and slack channels implemented to allow their employees to swoop in and participate in HN threads that are relevant to their marketing interests?
IIRC, the one's who've come clean about doing that have been fairly scrupulous about, but I'm sure they're just the tip of the iceberg.
If you want to find a platform with true signal to noise golden ratio, you either have to find one on the rise, NOT made by a well known name, and place a timer on it, or you have to find one people think is long dead.
lots of bots, and lots of spam, esp. in specific threads.
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Dead Comment
In fact I would say this is the singular reason why Facebook declined. I just don't want my 8th grade classmate to see that I liked my cousin's wedding photos 20 years later, y'know?
This is why I have never used, and will never use, my real world identity on the internet in the decades I've been interacting on it. Instead, I use consistent internet-only identities. It allows me to communicate honestly and openly.
Liking a video makes your feed piled up with a semi-relevant crap for a week.
Sometimes (increasingly often) I have to dislike an otherwise good video because I don’t want to screw up my recommendations.
Get rid of identities and the fire hose of click bait social media and I'd expect the internet goes back to something much more similar to what we often see people wax poetic about, a smaller web that's people goofing off and writing random stuff on their own site.
Business cycle wise:
- it starts out mellow, with lots of positive ROI and few downsides. Few know about it at first.
- as awareness grows, so does competition. While there is a ton of room to grow, this isn’t a problem. Growth doesn’t have to be at the cost of a competitors market share, there are tons of available untapped opportunities.
- eventually, it starts to become crowded. Now competition starts to become more heated and cut throat. Old tricks to stay competitive stop working, and there is an arms race to develop new ones.
- at some point, some/many players don’t feel they can compete based on fundamentals (positively), and it starts to become a race to the bottom. With some/many players starting to scam or commit fraud, be scary/manipulative, squeeze suppliers to a destructive degree, etc. Zero sum game instead of green field.
- this causes demand side restrictions and additional costs as customers start to get scared/overwhelmed, and cut back or get more demanding on quality.
- this causes a downward spiral that worsens the situation industry wide, eventually bankrupting marginal suppliers and maybe even big ones, until things stabilize or change.
On the social side, a lot of people population wide are flat out not doing it anymore. Including women. Similar to dating apps.
Which is why some advertisers, politicians, businesses keep getting even more insane and craven trying to extract even more value from the remaining people - to keep the numbers going up and right. So they don’t have to ‘look down’ and be potentially bankrupt. The loudest players in this type of environment are almost always the ones in the worst position.
This is also playing out in American Politics and Media right now.
It isn’t just engineer or blue collar types, who IMO were already predisposed to not engaging with it.
Pluses: in 20-30 years, there will be a lot of older folks who are very hard to fool or manipulate.
Minuses:
- there are going to be a lot more deeply traumatized people with a profoundly negative outlook on human nature, now and even more in the future.
- society is going to get a whole lot poorer while this plays out.
I disagree. Tech literacy is going down, partially due to an overreliance on dashboard-style mobile apps and phishing scams are still widely effective. I have seen people lose mails and accounts to strategies that have been unchanged for an easily googleable 11 years now. Perhaps the inevitability of exposure is a numbers game, but I'm overall pessimistic, I think a lot of scams will become a lot more "personal sounding" due to AI agents, and a preparedness reset is coming.
I doubt this. The entire history of humans indicates otherwise.
This stuff is all taking place in private rooms and small silos. If you aren't in them, you don't see it. Reddit still has a bit of a pulse but is probably on the endangered list. TikTok is probably the last big social and has an increasingly negative reputation, meaning it'll probably be "out" pretty soon.
The public Internet is probably dying, a victim of spam and over-commoditization.
Public wide open free for all space are a major use case but they aren't a necessity and they may not survive the spam tsunami of LLMs and troll farms.
It’s a decade old at this point & yet continues to be startlingly relevant.
But then once it ended, it feels like being stuck online with nothing else to do all day burnt a lot of people out on the internet and online activities. Perhaps they decided it was best to make up for lost time once real life 'reopened'. Or perhaps they took one look at the online panopticon, and realised it wasn't adding as much to their lives as they thought.
Because activity in many communities seems to dropped significantly, at least from what I can see. Yeah, Discord's seemingly doing better than Reddit or Twitter in this climate, but even then, communities that seemed to be booming in the pandemic (or even before) are now far less active than they used to be, and lots of people who used to be there all the time seem to barely show up anymore.
Important to note that this happens every summer. Especially a pre-us-election summer. People are out there living their lives, having fun, and avoiding the constant barrage of politics online. Things will be back in the fall.
Sauce: My email open rates observed over the past 10 years. Summers always see a lull in online activity
Also you may be experiencing your age cohort growing up. I’m mid 30’s and have noticed a significant decline in online activity as people my age juggle kids and career and increasingly have zero time to spend online. The younger folk without these encumbrances don’t hang out where I’m used to looking.
Whenever I hang out (irl) with younger coworkers it’s obvious that people 10 years younger still spend just as much if not more time online than we did at that age.
Interesting read. Check out the section "Decline in time spent online". It kicked up for Covid, but is now back to pre-Covid levels: 2016: 6h29 2017: 6h46 2018: 6h48 2019: 6h38 2020: 6h55 2021: 6h57 2022: 6h37
But users are now spending more of that time on social media (about 40%).
Variety is the spice of life though, I’m glad it was enjoyed by others.
I can't really explain why I like them so much. They scratch a cosmic itch I don't fully understand, and the answer isn't simply validating negative sentiment toward the world or other trivial possibilities that immediately spring to mind.