I have had some thoughts that I wanted to write down lately, especially after some news that broke this morning and last night around social media. Sorry if it seems a little unorganized. The TL;DR is that I think 2023 is going to be a very unstable year for social media as web platforms in general, not just in content.
This week it was announced that Imgur was updating their Terms of Service (TOS) and will start to purge all pornographic content on their platforms. Also announced was a purge of anonymous content, which would create a lot of dead links all around the internet, similar to the Photobucket debacle several years ago. Now to some this might not be a huge deal. If Imgur wants to shoot themselves in the foot, who are we to stop them? But I feel this is just the latest step in a long march to the death of Web 2.0, almost entirely self inflicted by the Silicon Valley thought leaders who seem to have lost the plot.
Currently, we are dealing with a crisis on most of the major platforms:
- Twitter has the Muskpocalypse.
- Reddit and Imgur are attempting a Tumblr any% speedrun.
- Facebook is dealing with the fallout of the Metaverse failure.
- Instagram is unusable for its regular users.
- TikTok is dealing with a potential US Government ban.
- YouTube keeps shooting themselves in the foot with ever changing content rules.
A lot of these have to do with major app markets and monetization models. Dealing with America's puritanical view of content and their definition of NSFW (often lumping in LGBT+ with hardcore porn) has lead even porn sites to not want to deal with NSFW content. Which, contrary to the normie's popular belief, is what drives a lot of engagement on many of these platforms. On top of that, a pursuit of endless growth has led to these websites nickeling and diming their own user base. Hiding once free features behind paywalls, as well the new idea of charging a small fortune for API access to apps and bots that had real world use cases like disaster response. Not to mention the amount of sites that use user credentials from social media to sign into their accounts, are job boards going to need a licensing fee to allow Facebook login?
Unlike previous generations of internet collapse, there are no viable alternatives waiting in the wings for a lot of these sites. They either were bought out or outspent by the big sites. Digg was replaced with Reddit, but what will replace Reddit? MySpace to Facebook, to what? We have had crisis of platform collapse in the past, but it never felt like all the major plaforms could collapse all at once. And viable alternatives are either bespoke small operations built on the nostalgia of pre 2008 internet, sketchy app based clones, or alt right cesspools.
So, what I am trying to say here is that I don't think the collapse isn't preventable, I think it has already started. Our best course of action at this point is to start archiving what we can, and batten down the hatches. Beware, the Intenet's Bronze Age Collapse has come, and the Sea People are already at the gates.