"I think the simplest way to understand the techlash is that this was the time period when Silicon Valley started being held responsible for the present instead of being evaluated based on their visions of the future."
You might add the following as examples in the section about this sentence "Antitrust enforcement has been critical to the long history of the Internet." Without the Carterfone decision the wizards in Basking Ridge would never have let those noisy modems on their cherished network. And, without the AT&T decree I feel like we'd never have the cheap backhaul that makes the Internet economically work. And last, in my telecom trifecta, the 1996 Telecom Act (I mean really, have you EVER tried to set up ISDN? I did. Verizon billed me for 8 months though it never ever worked).
In the consumer set up for my ISDN, Verizon made you tell them what rev number you were on. First, you'd have to know what the hell that meant. Then you'd have to know what switch it was, then the rev number. Sadly, I did know. But WTF?!?!?!
Killer summary. I've been forced to deal with the WWW since 1995, and while my knowledge of the history is nowhere as deep, everything you say rings true in my experience. I remember browser sniffing. What struck me about Dixon's deck is that it is a very corporate and server-centric version of history, with users being fairly invisible. Blockchain is a very thin reed to build a "decentralized" web 3.0 on. A corporate initiative like web 3.0 takes on a life of its own that can run long past the point where the original rationale no longer makes sense. It's pretty clear that's where Dixon is at.
“They want to go back to being judged based on their ambitions, rather than their results.” I mean, don’t we all...
I do think that there’s a real fear among people in the Bay Area. It’s not just that technological time has stalled. It’s that nearly all the top tech companies have created horrible negative externalities and their executives have become or been revealed as cardboard villains. It seems as if we’re only one more high-profile disaster away, and a clever political entrepreneur, away from a mass movement against the whole industry.
I wonder what that sort of mass movement looks like, though, when we're so reliant on their products. That's what I found fascinating about the techlash years -- the companies became vilified but their profits soared.
Brian Merchant has a new book on the Luddites coming out this fall. That should provide good food for thought.
I think we’re already seeing that movement in streaming to some degree. It starts with simply opting out of the hype cycle and demanding value for money.
People also seem to be (slowly) realizing that “getting in on the next big thing” often means setting yourself up to be the victim of the next wave of value extraction.
I like your framework. I still recall downloading Mosaic from a gopher server in the school library...
Also, I would consider AOL, Prodigy and Compuserve to be a commercial part of the Web Prehistory era. Ultimately, though, they couldn't keep users trapped in their silos. By the time my family got our first ISP account, the web browser was the only part of AOL that we used.
Thanks, good point. Kevin Driscoll's book (The Modem World) does a great job of covering those sites and their role in internet history.
You're definitely right that they're commercial. I think there's an important distinction that the money was still tiny at that point though. Probably ought to pull together data and make a chart at some point...
Dave!!! I'm so OLD. Though I'm not a real techie, I recall all of those early steps with painful precision. At the 1992 annual conference of the American Theological Library Association, the big buzz was a section that organized ATLAntis -a listserv for theological librarians--and it was advanced and radical and filled up our (really quite new) email inboxes every day. The next year, some of the cool kids were talking about the WorldWideWeb & it seemed exotic & far away -and very wasteful of computer memory by using all those graphical thingies to those of us who had to beg our institutions for an UPGRADE to 512K RAM so we could run WordPerfect.
When MOSAIC came out we couldn't get it to run on our wimpy computers.
But your account is extremely good and accurate. During the 90s the digital infrastructure changed radically. In 1990 microfiche was the state of the art in archiving mass text (& as librarians we were very aware that 19th & 20th c books were crumbling away & had to be preserved) by 2000 even underfunded backwaters like theology had most journals and big backfiles available full text on the Web.
But the big thing, at least since Jeff Bezos reared his predatory head, is, as you say lack of antitrust regulation & enforcement and the domination of big money. And it's not that there are rich guys throwing their weight around, but that all the business are reduced almost purely to a finance paradigm--if you can't get ROI than you have no value. Some people try to redefine the returns away from pure cash, but it's a delusion, we've sold ourselves to the investment bankers and venture capitalists.
May 18, 2023·edited May 18, 2023Liked by Dave Karpf
"we've sold ourselves to the investment bankers and venture capitalists."
And companies have sold themselves to shareholders and investors. We've also given up our rights to own physical objects because of the dDIITiaL ReVoLuTIoN. And now they want to push streaming as mainstream? Do you know who wins with digital and streaming? Companies. The ultimate form of DRM is complete control over user access and the platforms that host the content.
Look what's happening in the gaming space. You can still get physical console releases [Mostly because console players have been extremely stubborn with good reason]. But for PC? No. Digital only. Buy it on Steam, EA App, Ubisoft Connect etc. What does this mean? Oh US gov don't like your country or a random loose canon GOP politician want to demonize a culture to further their political ambitions? You get added to an extra special list where no US company can do business with you. You've now just lost access to all of your "Owned" media.
With digital at least you still have direct access to the files on your pc to modify or backup YOUR OWN PURCHASES. With streaming even that goes away. We have given up everything for the "luxury" of waiting 20 min for a download instead of what? Putting in a disc? For nothing more like it. And it's only getting worse. Corporations are parasitic and they've fooled all of us into giving up physical for their manicured, censored, and curated platforms.
Heya. Very much a fan of your work. But on this: "when WIRED magazine launched in 1993, the magazine made no mention of the World Wide Web" - true, we nearly missed it. But, in the first issue, I wrote a column called Flux, which ran throughout the "front of book". In it I tossed an item about Tim BL and the CERN work called "the world wide web." Lucky break - we managed to get it in there. But most missed it, bc the column was designed in a way as to be basically impossible to read!
Good note, thanks. Much appreciated. I've been anchoring Gary Wolf's October '94 Mosaic piece as the first coverage of the web, but that's only among the feature articles, deserves a clarification.
Spot on. It many not fit neatly into five-year chunks and names, and I hadn't tried to see it as historical phases, but anyone middle-aged can easily verify the main features from personal memory. Obviously Dixon decided how he wanted to characterize his eras and picked out not-particularly-representative moments. The combining of the tech boom and bust years was particularly egregious.
And "open protocols" were not at all characteristic even of the boom years. The profiteers did their best to capture and effectively close the protocols. First, "Enhanced for Netscape" (i.e. using Netscape's HTML extensions and rendering properly only with Netscape) became a badge of honor for websites. Later, websites needed to be designed to take account of bugs in Internet Explorer's rendering of HTML and CSS. Would-be-competing browsers couldn't be designed to Web standards either, or they wouldn't work properly with many big, important websites written for compatibility with IE's bugs. Competing browsers needed to emulate IE, bugs and all.
You missed out the intermediate stage when IE's standard compliance was better than Netscape's - The IE4/IE5 era (late 90s) when IE was just a much better product than the equivalent Netscape (Netscape 3/4). It wasn't until Firefox came out in 2002 that there was anything better than IE for compliance - though IE had stagnated by then, with IE5 being the last version with really big innovations (above all, XMLHTTPRequest, meaning that AJAX starts with IE5).
It was Microsoft's neglect after IE6 that gave first Firefox and then Chrome the space to completely replace IE (and to shut Edge out). But there really was a period when IE was the standards-compliant browser. Around 1998-1999.
It's worth noting that everyone near and dear to Andreessen has a stake in forgetting that he made a fortune because Jim Clark rushed out and went to IPO, not because Netscape lasted as an entity. And it's also in their interest to forget the massive role government investment played in Mosaic's creation--without which there is never a popular web anything-point-anything. Don't even get me started about ARPAnet. And now they want you to grow very sleepy and buy some crypto....
YEP! One of the essays on my to-do list is a retelling of Internet history as driven by three forces: antitrust, copyright, and government money/wall street speculation. You can cover basically everything with just those three.
Great timeline! I appreciated the link to Michael Wesch's video, but his earlier short "Web 2.0: The Machine is Us/ing Us" is the classic distillation of that era's optimism in 4 minutes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gmP4nk0EOE .
Agreed, I've used both in class. I've been digging the longer anthropological lecture recently because of how it reveals a completely different YouTube than we have today.
My wife taught a "Sex and the Internet" class at SFSU's human sexuality department at the beginning of the YouTube era. It would be wild to watch those lectures now.
Nice. The reference to Hacker News was funny. The idea of dividing into 'who paid for what in each period' could be an alternative way with probably comparable results
the Web2 period is : advertisers paying for data about people'
and that came on top of the Web1 period of 'people paying for access'
the new period (on top of 1 and 2) may become 'people paying for content' (including use of AI generated content) and it has already started years ago, I think. iTunes really started it off (remember Napster?) but Spotify, Netflix, etc. are all in the same bucket. All these periods overlap. I would also let this start in the 1980's, for one that was the time that computers got connected en masse, though at that time inside the boundaries of organisations.
Maybe next to periods we also have a stack? Because, the old money making models don't all disappear when the new ones come along. We still pay for internet access, for instance, it still is a sizeable chunk of what citizens pay for in real money regardig the internet.
The other dynamic that needs to be interwoven is "people playing finance games." Uber, for instance, has basically never turned a profit but nonetheless made its early investors fabulously wealthy. My hunch is this relates to the two waves of finance-types moving to Silicon Valley. Financial engineering becomes a major business model that influences which companies get funded and thrive, regardless of whether they have actual, sustainable business models...
Yes - I think of the finance games model as the Underpants Gnomes model. It's predicated on a belief that growth and market share are ultimately more important than actually having a way to make a profit. Netflix is like this too, where they are seen as hugely successful, even though they always spend more for content (and debt) than they get from subscribers. The long-term hope is that they'll manage to 'disrupt' their way to becoming a monopoly and then can force a profitable model (see Amazon).
But is there any actually viable financial model for the internet besides Pay for Content / Pay for Access / Sell Eyeballs to Advertisers? Same as it ever was...
Totally agree. I wrote a bit about this a while back, planning to eventually write more. I think a big part of this is the legacy of/mythology around "blitzscaling." Blitzscaling ultimately worked for Paypal because the payoff was in taking a percentage out of all payment processing. But then it became common wisdom (and thus a social fact) that blitzscaling was ultimately productive for a wide range of other companies where it actually makes no sense whatsoever.
There's a Joel on Software piece from back when Spolsky was a blogger about Amazon vs Ben and Jerrys which is interesting as a view from the semi-inside of blitzscaling and the arguments against it.
Definitely. The finance revolution and the digital revolution are closely related, I think. IT has made lightning speed 'changes' and massively complex 'constructions' possible. Without IT, the structures to hide your wealth, for instance, are not agile (and thus somewhat difficult to hide in the long term). Think Mossack Fonseca ("selling vehicles to avoid taxes").
Being able to create and manage legal and financial constructions at the press of a button are important to enable a lot of 'financial games'. E.g. think huge derivative contracts and the daily huge value changes that are exchanged to minimise risk on either side. Without computers, the financial and legal instrument explosion could not have taken place, and that explosion again provided lots of money looking for returns (which means that each hype is jumped upon and this adds to boom/bust cycles). IT has fed finance and finance has fed IT. Potentially the boom-bust cycles are ripples on an undercurrent of much bigger boom-bust (and we're still in boom). Because bust or not, the amount of 'bank money' keeps on exploding.
There is an interesting dichotomy between how IT itself is petrifying society because actual IT is so hard to change (adding is somewhat easy, changing what is there is becoming harder until we end up in a complexity crunch), the data in those structures have become almost infinitely fluid/agile. And as that data represents elements that have real consequences in human society (like legal and financial) those have become fluid, variable, unpredictable, unstoppable, etc. as well.
The worst part is, platforms like Facebook, Reddit, and YouTube are community driven despite massive cash incentives. For every Logan Paul there are 1,000 smaller creators who create genuine content without a focus on monetization.
If any of these massive centralized platforms fail, entire sections of internet history and resources will be erased. Facebook can go fuck itself and reddit mods wield god like power with the ability to censor anyone based on the assumption that something could potentially violate an obscure rule or create backlash for the sub, or even the entirety of reddit. There is also a lot to say about YouTube and violence porn, with animals fighting and police chases and click driven rabbit hole videos with poorly researched copy and paste information from Wikipedia, and a generic "top ten this list".
But at the end of the day there is still a lot of genuine resources that are stuck to these parasitic platforms and cannot be moved unless users create their own sites and catalog all of their positive contributions such as guides, videos on specific topics, images, tools, papers, documentation. Or even shows on Netflix/HBO. The list goes on.
All of these things explode when degenerate platforms like Facebook disappear. It will be like Yahoo destroying GeoCities but on a scale 100,000 larger for EACH platform. The power of the internet is swinging, the internet is in a crisis and few people even realize the extent of the damage a platform collapse will have on everyone's lives.
"I think the simplest way to understand the techlash is that this was the time period when Silicon Valley started being held responsible for the present instead of being evaluated based on their visions of the future."
Man this is so extremely correct.
To the extent that a16z, Coinbase, and others decided to fund their own tech media to get back the glowing coverage. By coincidence, published today: https://www.theverge.com/23697708/andreessen-horowitz-a16z-investing-tech
Nice, thanks. I hadn't seen this one yet.
"The Future" was such a sloppy publication. a16z set it up and then just never committed to the bit.
You might add the following as examples in the section about this sentence "Antitrust enforcement has been critical to the long history of the Internet." Without the Carterfone decision the wizards in Basking Ridge would never have let those noisy modems on their cherished network. And, without the AT&T decree I feel like we'd never have the cheap backhaul that makes the Internet economically work. And last, in my telecom trifecta, the 1996 Telecom Act (I mean really, have you EVER tried to set up ISDN? I did. Verizon billed me for 8 months though it never ever worked).
Thanks, yes, great examples.
Ah yes, ISDN. Where I got intimate with the configuration of the Lucent ESS.
In the consumer set up for my ISDN, Verizon made you tell them what rev number you were on. First, you'd have to know what the hell that meant. Then you'd have to know what switch it was, then the rev number. Sadly, I did know. But WTF?!?!?!
I still have PTSD from that era of fiddly bits.
I work at Cisco, in the group that does IT certifications, so I am often reminded of the dim dark past of the internet.
Killer summary. I've been forced to deal with the WWW since 1995, and while my knowledge of the history is nowhere as deep, everything you say rings true in my experience. I remember browser sniffing. What struck me about Dixon's deck is that it is a very corporate and server-centric version of history, with users being fairly invisible. Blockchain is a very thin reed to build a "decentralized" web 3.0 on. A corporate initiative like web 3.0 takes on a life of its own that can run long past the point where the original rationale no longer makes sense. It's pretty clear that's where Dixon is at.
“They want to go back to being judged based on their ambitions, rather than their results.” I mean, don’t we all...
I do think that there’s a real fear among people in the Bay Area. It’s not just that technological time has stalled. It’s that nearly all the top tech companies have created horrible negative externalities and their executives have become or been revealed as cardboard villains. It seems as if we’re only one more high-profile disaster away, and a clever political entrepreneur, away from a mass movement against the whole industry.
I wonder what that sort of mass movement looks like, though, when we're so reliant on their products. That's what I found fascinating about the techlash years -- the companies became vilified but their profits soared.
Brian Merchant has a new book on the Luddites coming out this fall. That should provide good food for thought.
I think we’re already seeing that movement in streaming to some degree. It starts with simply opting out of the hype cycle and demanding value for money.
People also seem to be (slowly) realizing that “getting in on the next big thing” often means setting yourself up to be the victim of the next wave of value extraction.
I like your framework. I still recall downloading Mosaic from a gopher server in the school library...
Also, I would consider AOL, Prodigy and Compuserve to be a commercial part of the Web Prehistory era. Ultimately, though, they couldn't keep users trapped in their silos. By the time my family got our first ISP account, the web browser was the only part of AOL that we used.
Thanks, good point. Kevin Driscoll's book (The Modem World) does a great job of covering those sites and their role in internet history.
You're definitely right that they're commercial. I think there's an important distinction that the money was still tiny at that point though. Probably ought to pull together data and make a chart at some point...
Dave!!! I'm so OLD. Though I'm not a real techie, I recall all of those early steps with painful precision. At the 1992 annual conference of the American Theological Library Association, the big buzz was a section that organized ATLAntis -a listserv for theological librarians--and it was advanced and radical and filled up our (really quite new) email inboxes every day. The next year, some of the cool kids were talking about the WorldWideWeb & it seemed exotic & far away -and very wasteful of computer memory by using all those graphical thingies to those of us who had to beg our institutions for an UPGRADE to 512K RAM so we could run WordPerfect.
When MOSAIC came out we couldn't get it to run on our wimpy computers.
But your account is extremely good and accurate. During the 90s the digital infrastructure changed radically. In 1990 microfiche was the state of the art in archiving mass text (& as librarians we were very aware that 19th & 20th c books were crumbling away & had to be preserved) by 2000 even underfunded backwaters like theology had most journals and big backfiles available full text on the Web.
But the big thing, at least since Jeff Bezos reared his predatory head, is, as you say lack of antitrust regulation & enforcement and the domination of big money. And it's not that there are rich guys throwing their weight around, but that all the business are reduced almost purely to a finance paradigm--if you can't get ROI than you have no value. Some people try to redefine the returns away from pure cash, but it's a delusion, we've sold ourselves to the investment bankers and venture capitalists.
"we've sold ourselves to the investment bankers and venture capitalists."
And companies have sold themselves to shareholders and investors. We've also given up our rights to own physical objects because of the dDIITiaL ReVoLuTIoN. And now they want to push streaming as mainstream? Do you know who wins with digital and streaming? Companies. The ultimate form of DRM is complete control over user access and the platforms that host the content.
Look what's happening in the gaming space. You can still get physical console releases [Mostly because console players have been extremely stubborn with good reason]. But for PC? No. Digital only. Buy it on Steam, EA App, Ubisoft Connect etc. What does this mean? Oh US gov don't like your country or a random loose canon GOP politician want to demonize a culture to further their political ambitions? You get added to an extra special list where no US company can do business with you. You've now just lost access to all of your "Owned" media.
With digital at least you still have direct access to the files on your pc to modify or backup YOUR OWN PURCHASES. With streaming even that goes away. We have given up everything for the "luxury" of waiting 20 min for a download instead of what? Putting in a disc? For nothing more like it. And it's only getting worse. Corporations are parasitic and they've fooled all of us into giving up physical for their manicured, censored, and curated platforms.
Heya. Very much a fan of your work. But on this: "when WIRED magazine launched in 1993, the magazine made no mention of the World Wide Web" - true, we nearly missed it. But, in the first issue, I wrote a column called Flux, which ran throughout the "front of book". In it I tossed an item about Tim BL and the CERN work called "the world wide web." Lucky break - we managed to get it in there. But most missed it, bc the column was designed in a way as to be basically impossible to read!
John Battelle! Hey!
Good note, thanks. Much appreciated. I've been anchoring Gary Wolf's October '94 Mosaic piece as the first coverage of the web, but that's only among the feature articles, deserves a clarification.
Spot on. It many not fit neatly into five-year chunks and names, and I hadn't tried to see it as historical phases, but anyone middle-aged can easily verify the main features from personal memory. Obviously Dixon decided how he wanted to characterize his eras and picked out not-particularly-representative moments. The combining of the tech boom and bust years was particularly egregious.
And "open protocols" were not at all characteristic even of the boom years. The profiteers did their best to capture and effectively close the protocols. First, "Enhanced for Netscape" (i.e. using Netscape's HTML extensions and rendering properly only with Netscape) became a badge of honor for websites. Later, websites needed to be designed to take account of bugs in Internet Explorer's rendering of HTML and CSS. Would-be-competing browsers couldn't be designed to Web standards either, or they wouldn't work properly with many big, important websites written for compatibility with IE's bugs. Competing browsers needed to emulate IE, bugs and all.
You missed out the intermediate stage when IE's standard compliance was better than Netscape's - The IE4/IE5 era (late 90s) when IE was just a much better product than the equivalent Netscape (Netscape 3/4). It wasn't until Firefox came out in 2002 that there was anything better than IE for compliance - though IE had stagnated by then, with IE5 being the last version with really big innovations (above all, XMLHTTPRequest, meaning that AJAX starts with IE5).
It was Microsoft's neglect after IE6 that gave first Firefox and then Chrome the space to completely replace IE (and to shut Edge out). But there really was a period when IE was the standards-compliant browser. Around 1998-1999.
It's worth noting that everyone near and dear to Andreessen has a stake in forgetting that he made a fortune because Jim Clark rushed out and went to IPO, not because Netscape lasted as an entity. And it's also in their interest to forget the massive role government investment played in Mosaic's creation--without which there is never a popular web anything-point-anything. Don't even get me started about ARPAnet. And now they want you to grow very sleepy and buy some crypto....
YEP! One of the essays on my to-do list is a retelling of Internet history as driven by three forces: antitrust, copyright, and government money/wall street speculation. You can cover basically everything with just those three.
Great timeline! I appreciated the link to Michael Wesch's video, but his earlier short "Web 2.0: The Machine is Us/ing Us" is the classic distillation of that era's optimism in 4 minutes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gmP4nk0EOE .
Agreed, I've used both in class. I've been digging the longer anthropological lecture recently because of how it reveals a completely different YouTube than we have today.
My wife taught a "Sex and the Internet" class at SFSU's human sexuality department at the beginning of the YouTube era. It would be wild to watch those lectures now.
What a delightful walk down memory lane, and you even tickled my memories of running BBS's back in the 80's and 90's
Nice. The reference to Hacker News was funny. The idea of dividing into 'who paid for what in each period' could be an alternative way with probably comparable results
the Web2 period is : advertisers paying for data about people'
and that came on top of the Web1 period of 'people paying for access'
the new period (on top of 1 and 2) may become 'people paying for content' (including use of AI generated content) and it has already started years ago, I think. iTunes really started it off (remember Napster?) but Spotify, Netflix, etc. are all in the same bucket. All these periods overlap. I would also let this start in the 1980's, for one that was the time that computers got connected en masse, though at that time inside the boundaries of organisations.
Maybe next to periods we also have a stack? Because, the old money making models don't all disappear when the new ones come along. We still pay for internet access, for instance, it still is a sizeable chunk of what citizens pay for in real money regardig the internet.
Thanks, I like that idea.
The other dynamic that needs to be interwoven is "people playing finance games." Uber, for instance, has basically never turned a profit but nonetheless made its early investors fabulously wealthy. My hunch is this relates to the two waves of finance-types moving to Silicon Valley. Financial engineering becomes a major business model that influences which companies get funded and thrive, regardless of whether they have actual, sustainable business models...
Yes - I think of the finance games model as the Underpants Gnomes model. It's predicated on a belief that growth and market share are ultimately more important than actually having a way to make a profit. Netflix is like this too, where they are seen as hugely successful, even though they always spend more for content (and debt) than they get from subscribers. The long-term hope is that they'll manage to 'disrupt' their way to becoming a monopoly and then can force a profitable model (see Amazon).
But is there any actually viable financial model for the internet besides Pay for Content / Pay for Access / Sell Eyeballs to Advertisers? Same as it ever was...
Totally agree. I wrote a bit about this a while back, planning to eventually write more. I think a big part of this is the legacy of/mythology around "blitzscaling." Blitzscaling ultimately worked for Paypal because the payoff was in taking a percentage out of all payment processing. But then it became common wisdom (and thus a social fact) that blitzscaling was ultimately productive for a wide range of other companies where it actually makes no sense whatsoever.
There's a Joel on Software piece from back when Spolsky was a blogger about Amazon vs Ben and Jerrys which is interesting as a view from the semi-inside of blitzscaling and the arguments against it.
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/05/12/strategy-letter-i-ben-and-jerrys-vs-amazon/
Oh this is great, thanks.
Definitely. The finance revolution and the digital revolution are closely related, I think. IT has made lightning speed 'changes' and massively complex 'constructions' possible. Without IT, the structures to hide your wealth, for instance, are not agile (and thus somewhat difficult to hide in the long term). Think Mossack Fonseca ("selling vehicles to avoid taxes").
Being able to create and manage legal and financial constructions at the press of a button are important to enable a lot of 'financial games'. E.g. think huge derivative contracts and the daily huge value changes that are exchanged to minimise risk on either side. Without computers, the financial and legal instrument explosion could not have taken place, and that explosion again provided lots of money looking for returns (which means that each hype is jumped upon and this adds to boom/bust cycles). IT has fed finance and finance has fed IT. Potentially the boom-bust cycles are ripples on an undercurrent of much bigger boom-bust (and we're still in boom). Because bust or not, the amount of 'bank money' keeps on exploding.
There is an interesting dichotomy between how IT itself is petrifying society because actual IT is so hard to change (adding is somewhat easy, changing what is there is becoming harder until we end up in a complexity crunch), the data in those structures have become almost infinitely fluid/agile. And as that data represents elements that have real consequences in human society (like legal and financial) those have become fluid, variable, unpredictable, unstoppable, etc. as well.
The worst part is, platforms like Facebook, Reddit, and YouTube are community driven despite massive cash incentives. For every Logan Paul there are 1,000 smaller creators who create genuine content without a focus on monetization.
If any of these massive centralized platforms fail, entire sections of internet history and resources will be erased. Facebook can go fuck itself and reddit mods wield god like power with the ability to censor anyone based on the assumption that something could potentially violate an obscure rule or create backlash for the sub, or even the entirety of reddit. There is also a lot to say about YouTube and violence porn, with animals fighting and police chases and click driven rabbit hole videos with poorly researched copy and paste information from Wikipedia, and a generic "top ten this list".
But at the end of the day there is still a lot of genuine resources that are stuck to these parasitic platforms and cannot be moved unless users create their own sites and catalog all of their positive contributions such as guides, videos on specific topics, images, tools, papers, documentation. Or even shows on Netflix/HBO. The list goes on.
All of these things explode when degenerate platforms like Facebook disappear. It will be like Yahoo destroying GeoCities but on a scale 100,000 larger for EACH platform. The power of the internet is swinging, the internet is in a crisis and few people even realize the extent of the damage a platform collapse will have on everyone's lives.