+- Tendo City (https://www.tendocity.net)
+-- Forum: Tendo City: Metropolitan District (https://www.tendocity.net/forumdisplay.php?fid=4)
+--- Forum: Ramble City (https://www.tendocity.net/forumdisplay.php?fid=44)
+--- Thread: Is link sharing... dead? (/showthread.php?tid=7493)
Is link sharing... dead? - Dark Jaguar - 25th September 2023
I've been thinking about how steadily the number of sites we visit has dwindled to about... 8 or so, and I've been wondering why. Oh sure, people like me or ABF still go to our favorite out of the way specialist forums here and there, but by and large if you want to watch a video, you go to Youtube, not Cinnemassecre or any of the other sites that we used to bookmark and head out to. Heck the few I did keep visiting for a while just host all their videos on Youtube now, complete with censorship and 1950's style "paid promotional" bits by the very person I wanted to see.
If I want information on other things, more and more Google just serves up reddit as a result, and you know what? I noticed something. People almost never share links to external pages any more. Some still do, and I absolutely appreciate that, but for example the Twitster (Sorry, Twitster X: Rise of Sigma) and Face's Book went and decided to bury any and all external site links as current policy. It just isn't "done" now. So, they keep all their viewers right there on that social media.
The internet is shrinking, and that worries me. It's not that I want the big names to censor less. They can do whatever... I want there to be more than big names, and for the biggest names to shrink dramatically in relevance. That's my worry. We just don't have enough variety out there any more. Consolidation is everywhere.... and everywhere is becoming a small world after all.
RE: Is link sharing... dead? - Weltall - 26th September 2023
I think part of why the internet has 'shrunk' is because we use it differently than we used to. Now, it's everywhere, all the time, in your pocket, whenever you want it. More of that internet use is for utility purposes; I wasn't paying bills or doing my job on the internet in the early 2000s. A lot of the rest is because the era of everybody having their own personal web presence and site is long gone. This isn't just about personal webpages, but also, if you want to find and join a community surrounding a game series or whatnot, more often than not, you'll look to reddit or something like it, because it will probably exist and there will probably be a lot of other people already there. Thus, less impetus to create communities and forums that are separate from the giant link aggregators and social media environments.
It definitely seems like Google, in particular, is far less useful and functional than it was back in its prime. It returns lots of reddit results, ads, and promoted links that often just re-appear two links down anyway.
RE: Is link sharing... dead? - A Black Falcon - 30th September 2023
Yeah, I have very much noticed how bad web searching has become as well. Make a web search on any search platform and you'll get mostly fake articles, maybe a few real web links to articles or whatever, and Reddit threads. I know that a lot of people on the internet have retreated to only using social media and major webpages -- the more dynamic internet of 20+ years ago is sadly mostly gone, even though far more people are online now -- but even so I'm sure that search could be made a lot better than it is. Why is it so hard to find anything actually useful in a search, I do not believe that there's really nothing to find...