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If you think bot accusations are bad now, imagine if the great firewall fell and 1 billion Chinese internet users suddenly inundated socials.
You mention how the barrier to entry corresponds to the degradation of the internet and I am reminded that someone pointed out that the popularization of "Dead Internet Theory" perfectly corresponds with the adoption of the internet by a huge number of Africans and Indians.
Part of the nature of libertarian wild west ethos is that it gravitates to places where there is no establishment yet. So don't waste your time in an established domain pining for the old days. Focus on new domains instead.
The US is obviously not a hold-out for freedom of information, as the USG would happily enforce IP law upon the world if it could (as orchestrated by the mouse). AI is a bit of a miracle in this regard because it came into existence faster than IP law could contain it.
Ironically the most "authoritarian" governements are some of the last bastions of hope for freedom in various fundamental domains: I'm thinking about the pricipled stand that Putin made with Snowden when a weaker country may have extradicted him (remember how few countries actually offered asylum to him (none in Europe btw)?), and China is really a darling when it comes to ignoring US ip law (ip law essentially being state-enforced artificial-scarcity on an inherently abundant medium), and it is former soviet territories that allow for true freedom of information via Anna's archive, Sci-hub, LibGen, etc.
The real libertarian frontier of AI is local open-weight models/paradigms(Hermes, OpenCode) which China is much more culturally-aligned with at the moment, at least for base models (I was about to say "GLM not withstanding" here until I checked and found out that Z.ai is indeed also a chinese company)
Many of these authoritarian policies emerging in California/Europe are partly an emulation of China. I have heard it said that China is the only government that took the internet seriously from its inception as a governed entity.
Even being somewhat libertatian-minded, I greatly admire the fact that Xi can label OnlyFans as socially-damaging "Western degeneracy" and wipe it in an instant from infecting China.
I tend to prefer using a decent LLM guide me through various textual analyses of literature that I have pulled from LibGen than have reddit-level arguments online. I think many young people are realizing that interactions with LLMs can often be more meaningful and healthier than an average interaction with strangers on any established forum in the World Wide Web.
I don't think Africans and Indians ruined the mainstream internet, I think it was "normies". The internet used to be dominated by autistic nerds like us, so it appealed to us; now we're the minority (like in real life), so it appeals to the majority.
You can still find communities which cater to autistic nerds, like this one. I think the answer is not censorship but gatekeeping. If California polices the internet, they won't police it how nerds want, they'll police it how (Californian) politicians and lobbyists want. Instead, on the free internet, one can create a community that excludes "normies" through culture, moderation, and as last resort invite-only.
The two problems I'm aware of are DDoS, but in practice CDNs like Cloudflare or Epik and bot-detectors like Anubis have defended so far; and doxxing, but most people want privacy for themselves, and many have worse skeletons in their closet than whatever you said, so that may be transient.
Africans, Indians, etc. are to normies what normies are to tech-nerds.
When people say "normie", they approximately mean "the masses of regular people in the Anglosphere" which is a global minority and techliterate (especially in English-first tech ecosystems) compared to the masses of people elsewhere.
The internet has formalized equality, so if a similar percentage of people in Africa and India join the internet as the US, then there will be many times more African and Indian users than native-English users.
But English communities have decayed, including ones I doubt have many English-speaking third-worlders. And language barriers keep non-English-speakers in separate communities.
I always wonder what’s going on in non-Anglo social media, like African and Indian Facebook(?) Maybe they’re similar, but then I expect the cause is mass-media exported from Anglo countries, not vice versa.
As an example from my own experience, there is a niche of Youtube electrical engineering instruction that is largely dominated by English-speaking Indians.
I agree that since the Anglosphere has more of a culture of media-creation/video-creation, most of the well-produced, viral content will continue from here in the near-future.
Don't discount the effects of a changing passive audience: they determine what gets popular.
India currently has the largest YouTube Userbase with 518 million compared to the US's 259 million.
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You're vastly overstating how strong the great firewall is and how hard it's policed. I spent a decent amount of time in China and plenty of upper-middle class Chinese have Instagram accounts and the like. They just tend to prefer their domestic equivalents since it interfaces better with their technology and how they see the world. If Chinese English literacy were higher you'd likely see more crossover, but the Firewall is less of a singular cause of divided internet than the language gap and China's internet having evolved into its own different shape during the period when the Firewall was more rigorously enforced.
Hell, there's jokes amongst a lot of Chinese netizens that Twitter is a porn app since that's 98% of what they use it for
I have never been there but I always got the impression that the Chinese government doesn't really care that much what the relatively affluent and educated can access think or do, but cares greatly that it can control algorithmic feeds of the "masses". Is this accurate? It honestly sounds like a better and more acceptable solution to me as European/Anglo governments come nearer every day to the total VPN ban and ID verification model of the internet.
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