Technology

That was an excellent if somewhat overwrought read (it's Medium that's almost expected). And it's hitting on a fear I've had about the current state of the internet for a while now.

I think we do need to acknowledge, though, that a lot of this has to do with people. The "average users", they simply don't care enough about any of this. I don't like the farm animal comparisons because it's dehumanizing and mean, but it really is very unfortunate how many patterns of user behavior reveal a majority of users that are just as easy to corral.

We can talk all we like about the corporate machinations of Zuckerberg, but at the end of the day, Facebook killed Myspace for one very simple reason: people follow other people. Centralization is the end result of humans searching out the social part of social media, which means they gather, and tend to stay put unless everyone else moves as well, at the same time.

Platforms gain incredible power if the herd settles in their lands, and become virtually immune to pushback from poor decisions until they hit Musk level insanity. It should not have taken this long for people to seek a Twitter alternative, or a Reddit one for that matter. Once the herd settles, they'll suffer just about anything to avoid having to move.

And I don't know if there's a good answer to this problem. Especially now that competition is so sparce and alternative platforms barely see a trickle of active use compared to the giants.