this post was submitted on 10 Sep 2023
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That's not right and I'll tell you why. You're not wrong about geocities opening up the ability to create websites to a lot more users. Geocities and other website creator sites like that were great, and did exactly that. Even MySpace did the same thing. But then here's where corporations threw the control element in.
They added a social element. They took away a bare website presence, maybe a counter to see how many people came by, and replaced it with an upvote and downvote system where your thoughts were subject to peer pressure and social correction. MySpace, Geocities, all of those independent free website creator tools died in favor of Facebook, digg, Reddit, Twitter. The odd stuff, the weird stuff, the truly countercultural stuff, disappeared under the tyranny of the masses. People turned to blogs for a while. But soon those died too.
So now we have the new element of control. The control of what you get to see. What the web search engine shows you. What rises to the top of your feed. Hell a lot of the times you have to really work hard to find your own friend's posts. I'm looking at you Instagram.
But by all means disagree with me. But you won't convince me that this is better. Not in a million years.
I appreciated both sides of this discussion.
Not just control. Manipulation, subtle and not-so-subtle.
This could be the tagline for the entire internet.
What's more, they created a standardized format for how people add content. Facebook has template, Instagram has a template and users just plug in what they want to contribute. It has made it easier for more people to post things, for better or worse, but it sucked so much creativity from the internet. The individuality of personal websites has been crushed by these entities forcing people to use their format.
MySpace actually let you put in custom CSS and it was a huge free-for-all, everyone's page looked completely different, and usually it was a tacky unreadable mess of hot pink comic sans text over a bright purple texture background, absolutely horrible but very charming. Facebook very explicitly in contrast allowed no customization at all as a reaction to how bad users could make their pages look.
Don't get me started. How about "meme" templates? Just stick a few lines of text onto this well-known picture and everyone will have chuckle as they pass by.
It's exactly what you said.
There's only so far to go technologically speaking. Making websites and message boards was a solved problem a long time ago. Search engines were pretty much perfected about a decade ago.
Tech companies stopped being tech companies too. I dunno what they are anymore. The dystopian cyberpunk evil corporations.
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