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?
“who is the they” - big social media
The biggest social media of all is YouTube, and even mentioning those words screw your reach, get you demonetized and later deplataformed. They killed most critical channels about history and war reporting, and these pages you see on Facebook, ask about their reach any of these days, you will see that they barely reach their own followers.
ps: Sorry, the original commenter was talking about people “censoring” each other - if it means just blocking, I fully support it (but usually it means reporting everything they don’t like and getting it banned). I was talking about social media itself censoring everyone.