I think a bigger problem than 38% of webpages being dead is a lot of it is entities/groups/businesses now use facebook pages almost exclusively and have no other web presence outside of Facebook. In other words a Facebook account becomes a requirement to interact with them.
The same happened with forums. They're all subreddits, Facebook groups or Discord chats now. A lot of valuable information is kept hidden in those groups now, and it makes me really sad.
I love forums. I've kept the DIY Book Scanner forum online since... 2009? Recently (last two years) these damn AI scrapers have killed PHPBB over and over again. They got me kicked off my shared web hosting plan by abusing search and other forum features.
I upgraded to VPS for $500. The other admin spent 15-20 hours fixing/troubleshooting/transferring. And you know what? At the end of all this, I paid to give my data to these jerks, to keep it online for them to harvest. The forums are dead quiet.
Now I think, Discord is fine. They'll just sell the data to AI companies directly, the burden won't fall on me.
Reddit at least shows up in searches. I also think it's important not to look at the past with rose colored glasses. I think some random forum is much more likely to disappear than a subreddit.
I don’t think it’s rose colored glasses. Google saw the value of forums as a source of information when it bought and indexed Deja News’ usenet archive. A lot of pop and early Internet culture resided there. This was then turned into Google Groups, underfunded, targeted and businesses, and more or less buried.
Independent forums (phpBB, and the like) often came up on searches before this communities moved to Facebook Groups, where they’re mostly set to private due to spammers.
Similarly there was a time when Google indexed tweets more or less live, so you could find information for very recent events. I think Twitter asked for money and so that was the end of this.
Now I think Reddit, and maybe Stack Overflow, are the only things helping Google be anything more than an extremely hostile version of the yellow pages. I fear Reddit might at some point withdraw their content from Google and that’ll be the end of it.
Unfortunately keeping things up to date, secure, and free of spam is a lot of effort. Is very compelling to take your content where eyeballs already are, especially when you can let someone else take care of the hard parts for “free”
Car forums are still alive but yea the shift from thread discussions to comment and/or video discussions really kills a lot of knowledge. It’s great to find old forum posts showing you how to work on your car. It’s tiresome skipping through videos to find what you need to or even searching Reddit.
The big thing about discord is you can chat now with people but the knowledge is not in a good format to come back to later.
Sports forums too. I find that user stickiness there is pretty good because the Reddit sports subs are simply too large, and have an Eternal September/zero-friction problem, as joining it is a click away.
However, if you managed to find the forum on a search engine and took the trouble to sign up for an account, you are more likely to abide by the general vibe of the place, rather than Redditize it with shallow, meme-y comments that reliably get a lot of upvotes.
I think the challenge is finding these rare, valuable places in a sea of noise. Gone are the days that you'd stumble on them, with Google et al keeping you blasting down freeways with no chance of turning into a quiet cul-de-sac where you might see the perfect home for sale, or at least rent it for a while. I still find value and joy on the internet, but it's much rarer and typically the hold-overs from a previous era, or tenuous things like following a handful of YTers while ad blocking still works.
I'm probably in the minority of people who appreciate that trend. Valuable information being hidden means that community comes before information. If you want to gain access to other people's knowledge you have to opt-in and interact with and understand the people who made it, and that creates an incentive to contribute back and use knowledge in an appropriate way.
The open internet seems increasingly predatory and a place where some gigantic ML company just vacuums up your stuff or resells your content for ad revenue, parasitic.
I don't mind the fact and think it's honestly a natural reaction to this that people guard their information. It's sort of like a medieval monastery version of the internet where people recognize that information is cultivated rather than just some commodity you scrape off the web.
The reason why platforms such as Discord, Facebook, etc don't give open access to your content isn't because they don't want a predatory ML company to vacuum up your content, rather it's because they want to sell access to your content to the predatory ML companies. Meta already trains its own AI on Facebook and Instagram user content. Discord's business model (host an unlimited amount of data for free in perpetuity) is inherently unsustainable, so it's likely they'll start selling user data to ML companies within a few years (assuming the AI boom lasts that long).
That's a really human-centered view of what we have in forums.
I think many of us (wrongly) have a tech-centered view of online communities -- witness the multitude of "Show HN" posts that are "look! I made an online place for humans to congregate and discuss X".
The tech stack matters little (if at all), but bootstrapping the community's trust and culture (and maintaining both) are most of the heavy lifting, and the differentiator for success.
I recently (re)discovered an HN post by one of the core community moderators of deviantArt, and its success was made possible by its culture:
AI will make all that even worse.
Data staying hidden behind nice UX is VERY bad news.
May be all that will lead to an equivalent of open-source, but for data.
Not only a lot of communities are hidden because of Discord (at least with Reddit they were more discoverable), the worst part is the fact that they are unsearchable or behind a paywall.
Like the "join my discord if you pay at least 3$/mo!" is pretty innocent but you are gatekeeping a community that before was pubblic.
If we are talking about something like a content creator focused about an hobby or pc problems you can see how Google will become even more useless.
Reddit was the least bad choice between it and Discord but has failed the "i want to be a social network".
Even the idea of payment to access a community is just absurd. If I'm an integral part of a tight-knit community I can see myself participating in common expenses, but I would never pay for access. At that point you're just a consumer buying a service.
>Even the idea of payment to access a community is just absurd.
Is it?
If we put aside the common notion that "everything on the internet is and should be free-as-in-beer and fuck you if you disagree", is it really that absurd?
Communities more often than not prefer setting up some kind of filtering to weed out certain people, and a paywall is one of those filters.
I only use Facebook to stay in touch with widely dispersed family members. Nothing else. One peek a day to see what's up. Assuming you have an account, I find this makes the task much easier:
And meta keeps things endlessly. Not just a hyper compressed picture and a set of references to local files. That part of the siloed web vanishes too, just less dangly and obvious.
Are there any businessses of any notable size that are using Facebook alone? Local businesses near me have plenty of info on Google Maps. The website if they have one is usually out of date, but calling them directly answers my questions.
Also 38% of a web filled with diversity, no hidden agenda, and amateurs (in the first best of ways). This number is probably now .00001% of a much bigger, far more homogeneous web. a web 1.0 site > today's walled garden "group page".
I've been to restaurants where they only have the menu in digital and uploaded to FB. And they looked at me as if I was a weirdo when I told them I don't use FB.
Many times I recommend to my clients to use Facebook instead of their own websites. It was overkill. Often having your own website is a waste of money.
You used to be able to see a custom feed of a selected friend lists but since they removed that option the site has been completely unusable, unless perhaps you do something like remove 90% of your "friends" and groups but that would hurt usability in different ways.
Ooooh so thats what happened. I just recently restarted using my Facebook account after about 6 years of not really using it. I found it odd that I was only scrolling to android games ads, some diy videos and some rage-motivated generic posts from accounts I don't know...
I liked more the Facebook that showed me the humblebrag posts of my friends/connections (and I'm not being sarcastic)
It was very usable with custom lists up until recently. Their help pages still reference the ability to browse updates from custom friend lists (at least when I checked a couple of weeks ago) but the actual feature has been dead for a while now. Guess they didn't like that people were able minimize pointless engagement and doomscrolling.
It really is. I’m following two groups and a handful of people. I never see posts from any of them and it’s difficult for me as a software engineer to navigate the site.
> From a user perspective Facebook's feed is spam.
The topic is FB groups. They aren't spam, at least for those I'm a member. Some groups may be quiet, some are active, but I don't recall coming across spam posts from any of them. A particular group has a rule that members can promote their business once a week, enforced by the group's admin
Maybe it’s different where you are, but around here that filter would mean I could almost only patronize large chains. Small businesses have Facebook or maybe insta (which is much worse, Facebook business pages grant far more access to a non-logged-in user) and no website. Restaurants might have a barely-updated website (the updates are on Facebook) that links to some third party ordering service, maybe.
But it's clear that continuing to use Facebook in that manner will only strengthen the isolation effect. Voting with your wallet and going against the machine invariably involves some level of personal sacrifice. For me, sacrificing patronage is incredibly easy to do. There is more to life than commercialization.
My girlfriend says she only uses Facebook to interface with small stores, who use it as a sole point of contact or distribution. Let that sink in for a moment. Breaking this cycle will require hard work.
I suspect Instagram or Facebook gets them 10x the eyeballs of having a website, at 1/20th the effort, zero cost, and nearly zero skill or expertise at anything tech-related.
I suspect both can be true at the same time. In the case of Instagram it still seems silly to miss out on potential customers by only posting on a non-public platform though.
Facebook definitely makes more sense to me. It only stops me if I try to go browse back through all their photos or something. I can look at posts and any of their… I dunno how Facebook works, but featured or whatever images, for menus or current sales or what have you, no problem. Insta stops me if I try to scroll past the first screenfull of content, and doesn’t have as much info available outside of posts (most of which I can’t see)
I have avoided a place with only insta, simply because i couldn’t see anything I needed to.
Many small businesses live on a shoe-string though and the cost of developing and maintaining a website is prohibitive.
Their self administered facebook page isn't anything to write home about and, likely, generates zero business but it is free so long as they resist the temptation to boost posts and have an extra 3 people see them for only $36.
