It feels like the web is becoming more closed every year — fewer open forums, more platforms locking away data and communities behind logins. What do you think are the biggest forces driving the decline of the open internet? Are walled gardens like Discord the main problem, or is it something else like artificial intelligence, corporate consolidation, surveillance, or changing user habits?
Centralization is one, where only a handful of big corporations dominate the internet. The other part is every platform trying to become everything and cornering all markets.
Take social media for example. In the early days, facebook was for connecting with your friends and family. Instagram was for posting and sharing photos. Myspace and twitter were for microblogging. Youtube was for long form videos and vine was for short form.
Now every social media platform wants to be a website, marketplace, payment processor, microblogging, short form video, music streaming, etc. This of course causes them to enshittify.