Someone I know was talking about this sort of thing happening on Facebook and Twitter, and it just clicked with me that we may be returning to the wild west/decentralised web.
People are moving away from these sites, and the sites they migrate to are split. Bluesky is pretty popular, but it’s nothing compared to Facebook or Twitter in it’s heyday. Not to mention TikTok getting banned in the US and the EU.
Reddit is still popular, but who knows? It may only be a matter of time before it cannibalises itself, too.
Not really buying this one tbh, I get what he’s saying but I don’t think the web was built on “trust”; the extension of trusted protocols to trust between people is quite a big stretch.
The things people in these kind of spaces eulogize and look for in the future to come were never the “point” of the web according to the groups that actually built it, and they’ll continue to be trafficked by only a very small group of interested weirdos relative to the mass of internet users.
We remember the things we enjoyed from the internet explosion but they were all just byproducts of the technology, almost disconnected from the actual driving forces behind the web’s rise.
The web was built on mountains of government and corporate money and massive and mostly hidden globe spanning infrastructure that is controlled by a very small number of entities. Trust between me and thee had absolutely nothing to do with it.
Nobody ever “trusted” Twitter or Amazon, they used them, because they had the capital to make their presence felt and outperform or kick down their competitors. The average user uses the sites that have the largest presence and that is decided by money and government control, the Amazons and Temus and Youtubes will continue to decline and dominate so long as they have money to burn and a permissive regulatory environment to operate in.
Absent concentrated international governmental intervention these platforms will continue to get worse (and there’s no guarantee intervention would make things better), maybe with some bumps along the way, and small numbers of people will continue to peel off them into non corporate spaces. Great for those that have the time, energy and interest to escape, terrible for those that don’t.
Amazon had actually built up a lot of trust selling books before transforming into a middleman and fulfillment service for third-party sellers. I bet a lot of customers don’t even realize the products they buy through Amazon aren’t sold by Amazon.
The trust Google built up over the years will not be wiped out too quickly either. Relatively few users are going to see anything as shocking as advice to eat rocks or put glue on pizza. Many won’t understand that they’re looking at an AI-generated response.