Comment by cubefox
1 year ago
Websites like Quora, Instagram, TikTok, and now X, work against the idea of an open Web. Content is increasingly concentrated into separated silos. But I understand why it's happening: People who don't have an account can't receive personalized ads.
FB, Linkedin, Pinterest as well. All of these walled gardens are "built on the shoulder of giants", whose work pioneered the open internet.
Further, what isn't silos seems to be content chum whose main purpose is collecting the reader's email address.
Oddly the modern web seems to be driving me offline and back to books.
> FB, Linkedin, Pinterest as well. All of these walled gardens are "built on the shoulder of giants", whose work pioneered the open internet.
Very true. Using the openness when it’s convenient and actively shutting the door behind you, it’s one of the most morally reprehensible things that one can do in a shared ecosystem.
I don’t use TikTok much, but when I see a (web) link to content there it’s always publicly available.
For now.
> But I understand why it's happening
I'm not even mad at them that they want to pay the bills. What I find sad was the method they have used: capture community as big as possible and then sell the community. So many people and orgs fell for that. Now the 'squares' are closed. There is no public internet, just niches.
Yeah it's sad. I hope Musk reverses course for X. At least in showing threads, not necessarily for individual user feeds. Perhaps when the platform is in a better financial position.