I do think they will essentially die. They will morph into completely different websites, but I think they will be around for a long time, and I think their userbase won’t shrink even a bit.

Big websites are slowly adopting the facebook model: All the content is hidden and requires you login to view it. Creating an account requires some sort of personally identifying information like a phone number, photo of ID, mailing address, etc.

The old model simply turned out to be unprofitable. It was always done under the motto of “bring the people and the money will come” and so they made it as easy as possible to build up a large user base, but it turns out that motto is false on the internet, and investors have finally realized it. There is no point in having a massive user base if they don’t actually generate a profit for you. Anonymous internet users do not do this. They are indistinguishable from bots. If they don’t use adblock, they don’t click on ads. They don’t donate money. Yet they use up the majority of the server resources.

It used to be that you at least needed anonymous users to generate content for you, but (in part thanks to facebok) non-anonymous usage of the internet has become normalized. If anything the best content will come from someone who has their real name, and profile picture attached to the content they submit. The anonymous nobody is much less likely to post anything valuable.

I think the internet as we know it is dead, and tbh I don’t even blame big corporations for this. I blame mass tech illiteracy, and people’s willingness to sacrifice their privacy for some dopamine hits.

  • James
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    10 months ago

    I mostly agree with you, the internet must change, and it’s changing for the good with these non-profit decentralized networks like Lemmy.

    These companies abused the internet too much and it’s hit a breaking point. People are taking the power back. I look forward to a user-owned internet again where the content I see is not entirely controlled by corporate interests.

    I think these websites will genuinely die within the next decade. There’s just never been decentralized social media(of this kind) to compete with them before.

    • Rozz@lemmy.sdf.org
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      10 months ago

      The companies are never going to stop fighting to take part of it back, especially if decentralization gets bigger. They will always want to take over again.