[netcan]

Because platforms.

Web 2.0 spent the last 15 years taking over the internet. They made publishing easy enough for your mom. The web evolved from a niche many-to-many medium into a really global, many-to-many medium.

But... In exchange for these great, free publishing tools... most online content got concentrated and funnelled through a handful of companies. Being startups, they had reasonably diverse personas. Family friendly Facebook, anarcho-lunatic Reddit, neckbeard news.yc and pansexual tumblr...

As valuations grew, online advertising exploded and startups aged... they all end up with the same corporate persona.

I care about freedom too. But, I think a lot of liberals/libertarians (like me, this isn't shade) get too caught up in philosopmhical "blackboard freedom" and don't look at actual freedom.

An web where most content is reviewed by a taboo filter (this is what nsfw means, taboo) is not as free as one that isn't.

I'll throw out a reminder that many of the web's first communities existed to discuss taboo topics: drugs, sex, etc.

These were, for example, in my opinion, responsible for the cultural liberalisation that enabled "the great coming out" of gay and other marginalized culture.

[iamdave]

I had a similar thought after discussing this exact topic with a friend last night over beers:

Used to be if you wanted a presence on the web, you did it yourself. You got hosting, you learned what you needed to learn if there was something unfamiliar to you, some trial and error later, a website. You dot com.

The platforms came and soon it became you dot theirplatform dot com. Because they made it easier, faster and cheaper to get your stuff out there and get it seen by many people also posting on 'the platform'...the great tragedy is that it also made it easy for 'the platform' to get rid of 'your' stuff (read: stuff you leased to the platform) if at any point they decide, for whatever reason, they don't want it there.

I remember that being much harder to do that when it was you dot com. We were happy to do the work of putting up a you dot com. Some of us still are, because it's what we came up with, what we cut our teeth on so to speak.

Not sure if I'm really going anywhere with this...just sort of thinking idly at a bygone era I guess.

[kennyadam]

I feel the same way. The more popular the internet becomes, the smaller it feels. I'm sure stats on the numbers of websites would prove me wrong, but it's not my experience in day-to-day usage.

In the past, I would visit dozens of different websites in a day, each catering to their own little niche. Now, it's all moderated-subreddits which have to ultimately bow to the rules of the reddit admins.

It's impossible to have a decent conversation online now. Before, when everything was forums, the conversation in a thread was a single thing. People posting one after the other. Now, it's threaded comment chains where you get so many little conversations going on that it's garbage.

How many forum threads have you subscribed to and been eager to read the new replies the next time you visit? How many reddit posts have you ever returned to after the first visit, assuming you read the comments at all?

I hate the current-day internet. HN, SA and XDA excluded.

[jstarfish]

> It's impossible to have a decent conversation online now. Before, when everything was forums, the conversation in a thread was a single thing. People posting one after the other. Now, it's threaded comment chains where you get so many little conversations going on that it's garbage.

You forgot the gamification of it all with weighted popularity ranking. There's little point in contributing to any conversation unless it aligns with the existing accepted beliefs of the community.

And since have to maintain a minimum social credit/karma/gold/whatever score to function on many sites, why jeopardize it? Best to avoid controversial topics and opinions.

[netcan]

I think besides platforms, a lot of ways the conversations online have changed is down to the number of people now online.

The web was very big, very early in absolute terms, but pretty small in the "number of people from your town" sense.

[iamdave]

How many forum threads have you subscribed to and been eager to read the new replies the next time you visit?

If this is your way of asking if people still visit Fark, the answer is "yes" :P