The Internet Isn't Meant To Be So Small | Defector

It is worth remembering that the internet wasn't supposed to be like this. It wasn't supposed to be six boring men with too much money creating spaces that no one likes but everyone is forced to use because those men have driven every other form of online existence into the ground. The internet was supposed to have pockets, to have enchanting fores

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In the late aughts, Twitter and Facebook still valued curiosity, but over the next decade they realized that it wasn't good for business; curiosity brought people to their platforms, but then it whisked them away. So Facebook began paying news companies to make videos that could be hosted on the site, so that users would never leave the page. Twitt

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The reason the death of Google Reader matters, here, is that it marks a pivotal moment in the deliberate and engineered shrinking of the internet. When Google Reader died, article discovery shifted. People were no longer reading RSS feeds, finding new sites, following them, and being updated when those sites posted. Instead, they were scrolling on

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This kind of duplication isn't just a clear a  failure of imagination ; it is the kind of innovation that capitalism rewards. Don't make something new, make the same thing that someone else made very successful, but slightly better. To have a proven concept, after all, is to plagiarize. It's annoying to see millions of dollars thrown at makin

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Both Bluesky and Lemon8 are designed to be black holes. We are all of us craving something new, places and spaces online that we can go to feel good and have fun and be inspired. These are normal human things to want; people want to be around each other. But it is almost impossible to create or maintain that kind of space if your company's goal is

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