[parpfish]

Years before 2015 “the internet” for most people had been replaced by “social media” and its was pretty well understood that big tech companies now had a means and motivation to monetize our most toxic traits.

The optimism about the internet’s influence peaked when things were highly decentralized with personal websites, mailing lists, web rings, etc. it was hard to imagine an entity big enough that could manipulate “all of the internet”.

Eventually centralizing forces like google/yahoo/myspace made things much more usable, for a while, until their hacker-ethos were overtaken by an MBA-ethos.