When you post on reddit, instagram etc. you’re giving the company your valuable data. (And it often is valuable, you put your thoughts into it and all that). Consider if you take 15 minutes to create value content, you’d get paid $5 or sth if you were doing it commercially. Now all that value is donated to big tech companies. (that’s the only reason why they have value at all.)
So what’s the problem with that? The problem is that reddit and others can instantaneously put your years-long effort behind a paywall. I’m not joking. Look at these:
when i want to see content on reddit (for research) or instagram (for local community) they don’t allow me to see the data that users have contributed. Reddit claims that it blocks VPNs for “security reasons”, meanwhile i’m using VPNs in browser’s incognito mode to not be tracked. Instagram wants you to sign in sothat they amass more users and can take leverage of the network effect even more.
I can understand restricting who can post to limit bot activity, but reading must always be possible. After all, it’s our data. That’s exactly what happens when you give your data to big companies to “communicate with other people”: your data becomes a source of income for them, at our expense.
What I’m particularly concerned about lately is the growing share of online forums that don’t even publish their content on the web.
The most famous example of this type of forum is probably Discord.
As those of you on Lemmy know, many people chose Discord as an alternative after Reddit’s deterioration.
Hasn’t this problem already escalated to the point where access to content isn’t guaranteed not only to some bots but even to individuals without accounts?
Shouldn’t those who love the web be extremely wary of online communities that don’t even try to be based on the web?
That’s what I think.
If search engines truly only show the “existence” of forums, then the open web is truly over.
I don’t think that we should be wary of them. It is only natural that when the whole web is overrun by bots, these gated communities will pop up. It’s an easy way to keep a lot of bad traffic out, while a space for users to interact and be authentic.
And yes, I think the open web is truly over.