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The gradual death of the open internet and ideological capture and where this all leads
One interesting thing you get to do when you get older is to take stock of your predictions, observe trends over a longer timespan and see if your mental models were actually worth their salt.
When I was growing up, I was at the very tail end of the people who still grew up with what I'd like to call a relatively "open" internet. Open in the sense that there was no Reddit, no walled gardens, the iPhone was young, Facebook was beginning to be a thing when I was in school.
Internet norms were very libertarian in most "serious" places, much more male, much more autistic. People thought that we'd have this open space forever where there are no central authoritarian rulers, censorship was mocked as technically impossible even with the Great Chinese Firewall having been a thing, the Arab spring was heralded as a prototype of internet-enabled uprising against authoritarian rulers, the whole thing was very much end-of-history-like. Things like the EFF and Richard Stallmann were relevant, nerds cared about open source, etc.
Then it all came crashing down. People began to concentrate on social media, on sites like Reddit. Network effects did their thing and centralised power and moderation. Eternal September became truly eternal. The word "echo chamber" became a thing. Smartphones meant tech literacy was no longer a prerequisite. The whole thing became politicised, with Trump, Cambridge Analytica, etc. Now everyone is a Russian, Chinese, Israeli shill. Nobody ultimately cares about privacy, censorship, speech norms, etc. that much. Stallmann got cancelled, I think the EFF and the various open source orgs are now all either into AI grifting or grievance stuff. It's gone or going away. I won't look at wrongthink when I have secure-boot enabled TPM-secured age verification built into my OS and sending all my wrongthink to the government.
It was fun while it was closed up. I am sure none of this is novel.
But the interesting thing is the further direction of travel.
Australia and Britain now have age-verification laws which require everyone to submit ID. I think some more authoritarian Asian countries (like South Korea) already have this for things like video games. It is also talked about to make things like VPNs illegal or harder to access in the UK (with the usual suspects pointing out that this puts the UK in company with countries like Russia and NK), the other non-US Anglosphere countries usually follow (seriously Australia/UK/Canada/NZ have a weird thing for paternalism). The sad thing is that this is bipartisan and nobody really opposes this. The evidence base for social media bans is actually quite thin so this will probably not even make the kids not miserable while entrenching ideological control
You can picture children being fed state-backed news from a young age now too, which I guess is Lindy in a way. Will probably entrench and accelerate existing biases and trends even further though. I don't expect "peak woke" to have been passed.
The big boogy-men of the Internet are incels, right wingers and Andrew Tate. Incel discourse is a personal bugbear of mine because it is completely detached from reality in the sense that even though even right-wingers come up with plenty of theories about supposed resentful incel violence, the people most likely to rape and murder women are actually the sex havers. But I digress.
So the governments come up with weird dystopian schemes of censoring and tracking this stuff while other kinds of probably actually harmful stuff (neurotic and mentally ill women amplifying their neuroses about men and society, viz. the "Angry Young Woman", race-grievance amplification, various untrue "tax the rich stuff" verging into blood libel and calls for assassinations) is left untouched, amplified or even supported. Moral panics are nothing new I suppose.
I am a very heavy user of LLMs. I talk to them basically all day at work at this point. Not everyone does, there are still plenty of people who don't use LLMs but younger people use them more than others. I imagine usership heavily skews intellectually as well, as a lot of the general population hates interacting with textual media. I imagine that in the coming years the censors and nudgers will also try to get a front-row seat to this as well, so when you ask for certain things you not only get a Reddit Markov Chain but one where all the "wrong" opinions have been RLFH'd out.
In the future when everyone outsources their thought processes to LLMs that presents a level of ideological centralisation Stalin could have only dreamt of. Should Amanda Askell et al. get to decide how everyone thinks? Maybe not in my opinion, but who knows what'll this stuff do to the kids.
This stuff is particularly pernicious in the non-US anglosphere. I think the EU is also thinking about OS/device-level censorship but in Germany a court struck down the social media ban idea for kids for now (with the argument being something like "kids are people", which is very Kantian and German-idealist in a way). I think California or something tried to force the Linux kernel to put this stuff in and right-wingers will jump on this just as left-wingers would, with different bugbears (porn for right-wingers, wrongthink for left-wingers). Not sure if the US will be a holdout or not. At least speech norms are a thing.
As someone who skews Libertarian, this is all a great disappointment, especially because I like being able to argue with smart people, even if they have viewpoints many consider despicable. I personally mostly just want to be left alone and not have goons sent to people's houses because of wrongthink. Do they still make the kids read Orwell? But I guess not only has the experiment of giving everyone a seat at the table to talk to each other failed spectacularly, it has also manifested a vector of ideological state control hitherto unparalleled that governments are now starting to seriously use. Who knows, maybe complaining about having to pay 50+% of my paycheck to Boomer UBI will be criminalised in 20 years. At least the Chinese are honest about this stuff and don't pretend to be into free speech.
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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