What would the Internet of People look like now? – The edge

Enter, loser, return to Web 1.0. We have the possibility to come out from under the algorithms. So maybe it’s time to think about what a people network looks like today.

I’ve been thinking about this for some time now, the decadence of Google search and with it the ability to find archival material; the destruction of Twitter by the coward Elon Musk; the AI ​​rush polluting the open web; unnecessary login prompts. The era of Web 2.0 is coming to an end.

One of the main hallmarks of Web 2.0, in retrospect, hasn’t been mobile adoption, although that certainly is part of it. Rather, it was the brokerage of most interactions by algorithm. Before social media, going viral was much harder; real people were to forward your site or video, usually via email or chat. Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and later TikTok made it easy to suddenly become famous, so much so that people started filming strangers in public for weight. In the beginning, algorithms made things findable! That was Google’s original goal.

There were, in the beginning, many advantages to Web 2.0. It made much of the internet more usable for the average person and phones helped with that too. Sites like Facebook (and MySpace and Friendster and Diaryland and LiveJournal) took off because it meant you no longer needed rudimentary coding skills to create your own website. Suddenly, being online was more accessible than it had ever been.

At first it was fun! Since most of these sites were more concerned with scaling than monetization, there were few ads. And that made it feel better than the regular web, where pop-ups and pop-unders were a plague, and banner ads were everywhere. But then, of course, things started to change.

As social media suffers convulsions, I want to address my sick colleagues at Too Online. The web looks like a hellish landscape from Blade Runner, but we already know how to build our communities because we’ve been doing it for a long time. We also know how to moderate our communities because we don’t do it on a large scale and because we’ve seen shit in every online community we’ve joined. More people than ever are online and have the kind of rudimentary skills they didn’t have at the start of Web 2.0. Maybe it’s time We escalation.

Google rot? Bring back the webring. Broadcasting around the world sucks? Shit, group chat. Facebook? Baby doll, it’s easier than ever to build your own website, and you don’t even have to know the basics to pull someone else’s code.

One of the great things the platforms offered was an audience. It’s definitely an advantage if you’re trying to start a business as a content creator. The problem, as all creators know by now, is how beholden they are to the algorithm. Take the YouTubers, who over the years had to adapt their content to the whims of Google, or the Instagrammers, who had to dance to whatever new tune Mark Zuckerberg was playing. The problem with building your business on a platform you don’t own is that the foundation is never stable; you have to be able to constantly move with the new currents of whatever is going on there. And what’s good for Google or Facebook isn’t necessarily good for you.

There’s definitely a shift happening, and it’s not yet clear how it’s going to unfold. The retreat to group chats (Discord, iMessage, Telegram, WhatsApp) feels like a return to old-school messaging and chat rooms (RIP Firefly). Mastodon and Bluesky are a pretty niche, Threads is probably DOA, and it looks like Reddit is pushing its own exodus.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned watching Silicon Valley, it’s that you don’t have to be smart to be a programmer; anyone can learn to code. There are plenty of free online resources now, and if you don’t use social media that much anymore, I bet you have plenty of new free time.

In old cyberpunk novels, the outside world itself rots as online becomes an endless spectacle you can disappear into. But if you look around, the world itself is still quite dynamic, while the web seems to resemble all of the blade runner. Outside of our little bastions of humans, its tumbleweeds and garbage. Forget VR headsets. If you want to make the internet good again, it’s time to go rogue, and many of us already know how. (There are, of course, people who would suggest we move to Web3, which is crypto. I don’t really think that’s a solution, especially because of usability issues and general regulatory upheaval. I’m not blaming people for their hobbies, but I don’t think crypto solves that problem.)

What will the web look like if we decide to erase everything we’ve done since the dot-com crash? What kinds of communities can we create with people who have since logged on? It is certainly possible, even delightful, to teach them the old ways. But more and more, I think I don’t want an in-between experience; I’m not interested in your algorithm. I liked online because there is people there.

Businesses have taken over the web, but that doesn’t mean they can keep it. Of course, there will always be the occasional who will never look any further, but for the real internet buffs, well, you can do whatever you want. Maybe now is the time to do it. Many of you have already done this, I know because you keep emailing me. Now is the time to teach the children of the algorithm the ancient magic because you were there when it was written.