[nutshell89]

I think what's missing from a lot of these discussions is how much more commerce-driven the present day internet is over the 90s-00s. Social media is highly addictive and destabilizing in order to get it's audience to eventually pay for something in TikTok Shop, or view sponsored content, for example. Dark patterns were introduced to increase revenue or to get users to dole out their personal information for advertising effectiveness.

I personally think that these sorts of changes were inevitable, especially since the development of internet-native payments infrastructure lagged (and continues to lag) the development of web technologies, as well as humanity spending more of our time on the internet — if the society revolves around accumulation and transfer of capital, the internet would eventually change to facilitate trade