The imminent fracture of the web
I propose a possible future for the web in which it doesn't remain a single, muddled infrastructure that loosely intercommunicates between large populations on a single hand's worth of megaplatforms. Far too many competing interests are at play, vying not only for the rapidly decreasing supply of easy advertiser revenue but also for role that the technology ought to occupy in the world. That's all it is: a technology. It's a communication protocol. It isn't Tiktok, or YouTube, or Google, or Twitter. Those are products that utilize that protocol. Watching YouTube become something else and the rest falter in reputation, userbase, and value, I start to daydream about what the ecosystem of this infrastructure could become.
'Fragmentation,' is my most optimistic long term expectation. I could see there being three layers to the internet, each with its own barriers to participation and enjoyment.
Layer 1: Basically Television
Barriers to access/success: Money, connections
Barriers to enjoyment: Taste
The most visible and publicized face of the internet, this layer will be screened by automated processes and underpaid wage slaves for a janky, very American standard of family friendliness and focus on video content on which it is easiest to serve lots of attractive and inescapable advertisements. The trend of video content creators with the capital and personal/professional connections to create flashy, polished content from scripts written by others who do not appear on camera rising in popularity and earnings will intensify, leading to a melange of 'network' projects and personal escapades of rich brats that runs the gamut between 'basically a tiny TV show' and 'expensive sludge.'
Barriers to access/success: Money, though probably not a lot.
Barriers to enjoyment: Don't worry, Da Sludge not for you!
You may not have noticed, though it'd be difficult, but Da Sludge is already establishing itself. As the ad-supported model of the internet suffers a long-deserved public image implosion and auto-complete garbage yacked out by large language models becomes more available as a tool for (more than anyone else, because it's actually unimpressive low-rent junk) scammers and grifters, we're seeing a proliferation of what are effectively fake websites. They exist to trick users and, more frequently and importantly, web crawlers into 'viewing' them to generate empty metrics they can use to swindle advertisers too stupid or indiscriminate to question those metrics. It's something I've been anticipating for a while now: The advent of spam as a kind of free-floating, static information slime that just sits around waiting for suckers. On the fractured internet, it will be the largest portion by virtue of sheer volume, but people will not choose to look at it. It exists now, and will continue to exist, as an ambient churn of gunk through pipes.
Barriers to access/success: Time, money, learning curve.
Barriers to enjoyment: Time, learning curve.
I would argue that the era of the massively multiplayer, unfiltered online space is already over. Everyone posting on the same platform for whatever reason they want or need, as an experiment, is in the process of failing. This comes about not just by virtue of the model's innate failures (its obvious potential as a vector for harassment, the capitalist nightmare of content moderation at a global scale, etc) but by virtue of an accelerating rate at which the public at large wakes up to these failings. The internet is re-fracturing because we can't actually trust business freaks with our inalienable rights to community and self-expression, and because business freaks have realized money is no longer free.
Enter the third layer of the fractured web. The third level is unfriendly to advertising potential, personal, amateur, and by turns weird and banal. One does not enter the third layer to make money, and will more than likely be committing to a continual expense in time and labor and cash in varying ratios.