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The ever retreating internet

Article referenced throughout this post

This article proposes two really interesting points that seem to counteract each other: point one is that people will retreat to the most convenient place on the internet while still holding on to the previous places they were a part of, and point two is that people desire like-minded communities and will skip out on the bigger internet in order ot find that. This idea of the dark forest and cozy web is interesting because it is both new and old (like most of this concept, it fits and yet is self contradicting). Historically, people in the 90s did a lot of stuff on the federated internet, like browsing forums for specific topics (a lot of this still remains in car forums), IRC was the discord/slack of that era, and personal blogs were all the rage (even my dad had one!)

Now, people moved to less federated services that still provide the middle ground, but not without first passing through the eye of the beast. In the early 2000s to mid 2010s, much of the internet started to move to friendster, then myspace, then facebook, and then away from all of those (with the other ones like twitter, tumblr, etc mixed in at varying points) because they began to realize that they didn't really want everyone they know to see what they do.

Now, most people maintain 3 distinct layers of what they do on the internet:

  • Public facing, or 'the dark forest' -- facebook, twitter, linkedin as social networks, and Google and email as services, all of which are owned by one or many massive conglomerates that decide literally everything about the platform and sell your information. Littered with bots and advertisers/advertising networks

  • Semi-public -- personal blogs, posts on nice forums, video game communities (mainly because these sites are often not crawled/crawlable or are not commonly searched up), and stuff like your browsing habits on netflix/hulu etc that matter to advertisers, but fit into the scope of "does it really matter if xyz ad company knows I watched 'Good Girls' last night on netflix?"

  • Private, or 'the cozy web' -- a place where individuals mod other individuals and you are only 1 layer removed from the owner (easily in direct contact). Discord, slack, all of your DM type social media (snapchat, whatsapp, messenger technically, texting), specifically places that are gatekept.

So now that we have our robust definitions, why does this matter? Well, what is the similarity between discord and IRC? Well, other than discord adding DMs, emoji, and voice calls, they're essentially identical. It is strange to me that we collectively were on IRC, saw facebook and went "wow, that is awesome and so much better than IRC!" so we swapped, then later went to IRC 2.0 IE discord. Will we eventually see facebook 2.0 and swap to that in favor? Will it repeat?

Moreover, what consequences does the current atmosphere of the internet hold for society? I am a firm believe in, and am often found rambling, about how cell phones are awful for society at large. My reasoning is that pre-smartphone, the only people that were chronically online were smart people that were either losers, had a weird schedule, or lived way the fuck out there in the boonies, so they had somewhat of an excuse to chat online. Now, with instant gratification only seconds away, IRC 2.0 is profoundly harmful to society in a way that OG IRC was not. What does the future have in store? Will society realize that constant contact with others is bad and instant gratification is causing societal incontinence? I sure hope we realize before it is too late.