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AnonTechie [soylentnews.org] writes:

An interesting essay on the Internet by Terry Godier

The internet you grew up on isn’t dying. A commercial veneer glued on top of it is.
You have noticed that the internet is dying.

Twitter changed hands, changed names, and changed shape, and the version of it you knew is gone. Reddit went public. Google search now returns generated answers stapled to half a dozen ads. Instagram is bots making content for bots.

Discord servers you joined in 2019 have gone quiet. The blogs you read in 2012 redirect to parked domains. The forums where you learned what you know got bought, gutted, redesigned, and left to rot.
This is real. You are not imagining it.

The places you spent your younger years are gone or unrecognizable, and the places you use now are visibly straining under a flood of machine-generated text nobody asked for. There is a low ambient grief about it, and a faint guilt, something like: “I should be doing something. I should be somewhere else. I want the old thing back.”

I want to tell you a thing that I think is true, and that I think will make you feel better.

[Source]: The Boring Internet [terrygodier.com]

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