Well, first they moved from BBSes (and Usenet, I guess) to personal websites, then internet forums and the blogosphere.
Somewhere along the road the medium changed partly from text to video, this was initially surprising to me, but on the whole isn't particularly important.
Then Reddit ate the forums, and I'm not sure what happened to the blogs, but they don't feel the same either.
So they got spread out, got sold out, and overshadowed by louder people doing the same except with ads and for money.
I totally skipped over some bits of Internet history, but the point is, it used to be more open. Maybe harder to use and smaller. But it wasn't all being funded by gigantic ad corporations. Because the platforms they provide may technically seem capable of providing the same ground as for textfiles, they're also continuously pushing on their users to behave in certain ways to optimize advertising profits. And that kind of sucks the life out of everything, it seems.
Somewhere along the road the medium changed partly from text to video, this was initially surprising to me, but on the whole isn't particularly important.
Then Reddit ate the forums, and I'm not sure what happened to the blogs, but they don't feel the same either.
So they got spread out, got sold out, and overshadowed by louder people doing the same except with ads and for money.
I totally skipped over some bits of Internet history, but the point is, it used to be more open. Maybe harder to use and smaller. But it wasn't all being funded by gigantic ad corporations. Because the platforms they provide may technically seem capable of providing the same ground as for textfiles, they're also continuously pushing on their users to behave in certain ways to optimize advertising profits. And that kind of sucks the life out of everything, it seems.