For months, Google has maintained that the web is “thriving,” AI isn’t tanking traffic, and its search engine is sending people to a wider variety of websites than ever. But in a court filing from last week, Google admitted that “the open web is already in rapid decline” (with regard to advertising, kinda-sorta)
I’m from the 90s Internet. Geocities. Tripod. Webrings. My awesome gothy co-worker staying late after work to update her vampire fan-fiction site because hardly anyone had a computer and the boss let her use the company’s windows 95 machine.
We are categorically lazier as a culture now than then. I expect things to enshittify further until we collectively take responsibility and accountability for our own culture, engagement and entertainment online. As we used to. We need more stupid web tricks, this place used to have all sorts of public art and weird monuments to human quirkiness.
Until they take away from us the ability to purchase a 10$ domain, use DNS, and make HTML forbidden knowledge, anyone can be out there contributing. I realize, however, that most will not; I’ve recently started getting wide eyed stares of amazement because I have my own domain and use it for my email address, so we seem to be sliding further…
Not sure how we fix this.
Me too. Even earlier.
But your last described problem is getting more and more obvious with the years. I always had lots of domains since there were domains for purchase. Even when it where very very expensive. Yet, despite all the progress, people so often respond to your own email with “[email protected]?” And you have to explain, no it’s just [email protected] and they don’t understand what you’re talking about and why your email doesn’t end in gmail. And some at least know a world outside gmail, yet struggle with TLDs other than .com or .de (or other local TLDs in other countries probably)…
It hurts. And it got worse. People totally unlearned what the net even is.