I was listening to the Internet History Podcast with the founder of ReadWriteWeb, Richard MacManus and I was feeling really nostalgic and it sort of had me thinking about the past and how the web used to before, let’s face it, the mainstream population ruined it. Before your Mom joined Facebook and before HuffingtonPost and image-memes and Reddit and YouTube, there was the Internet as I remember it and honestly, I still live in that world. I haven’t really cut-over to the modern web…case-in-point, I still write to a blog and do 99% of my work on a desktop iMac as well as keep all of my data in a NAS instead of the cloud.
Yammer (before they pivoted), Ning, PHPBB and BuddyPress (that in my opinion, arrived too late) were the way communities were built. These more media-rich web applications were better than BBS and IRC only enough because the core of them was still text, handles and avatars but our connections were faster so there was an advantage of hot-linking images, embedding videos and having graphical polls be added. The core was still pretty simple.
Yes, these were silos but generally they were self-hosted on a single server by someone you knew and trusted, ads were minimal or the webmaster would ask for donations and when you were done talking about that one topic, you’d go to your address bar and go to another website. It was more diluted yet there was a clear separation between each property and something that isn’t well covered is you could be a fun-loving jerk on one site as your identity and a connection to your avatar and handle and then jump in a private forum related to your career in legal and act another way. While I’ve always been a supporter of removing all anonymity, there was a value to many of keeping their hobbies & professions completely separate. Facebook doesn’t allow that.
Something has been absolutely lost in our world of silos where casual internet users actually think Facebook.com is the Internet and why would Facebook educate their users to know any differently?
Aside from the communication silos, there’s been a huge convergence in media as well. Once independent sites such as TechCrunch and ReadWriteWeb are now owned by larger companies. Huffington Post is owned by AOL and Time Warner, Cox, Comcast and News Corp own what I’d assume is over 50% of the eyeballs that read news every day and finally, so much of this news is consumed 100% within Facebook.com which has another element of problems because they filter the news. Facebook shows you news based on your likes, clicks, interest and the kind of friends you have so if you want truly un-biased news from a media company who employs real journalists and isn’t owned by a billionaire or a monopoly, you have to leave Facebook and subscribe behind a pay-wall.
Why leave the comfort of Facebook and spend money to read the news? That’s what most people ask themselves.
I miss the days when people actually went to each others’ blogs and there was a community around bloggers and we all interacted and went to similar trade-shows and the only time you put a face to a name was in person and you trusted them and commented on their posts. Once a billion people got online, comments on blogs are a huge mistake now and page-views are way down and if you don’t optimize your site and hand over your property to Google & Facebook’s mobile optimization tools, no one reads your content anymore.
I have no issue writing these posts knowing no one will read them. I do have an issue with a lot of amazing authors on the web that are writing from their heart while everyone else reads click-bait / fake-news / celebrity gossip / ad-filled / malware-filled crap-tastic articles via Facebook.com’s silo and don’t know better or care to look outside of the silo.
Why don’t we bring back the web-ring or web-directories? Let’s go pre-Google and people with similar interests, bring back Trackbacks and the Blog-roll and support each other. I haven’t gotten a track-back in 2 years. Those were great. I’d read an article and at the bottom were all of the blogs that linked to it. It was the way I discovered many of the blogs I still subscribe to today.
Is it too late for us to bring back the individual web? It probably is because the people who know about RSS and know how to leave Facebook.com is so slim now that I’d just be talking to the same 10 million person population of geeks that were on the web in 2001 and have always been consuming content like I do. No one learned how to use their PC like a pro. They just moved on to iOS and Android where there’s less features and a crippled software keyboard but those devices work great for accessing Facebook.com. The web, as a percentage of the whole population that are experts in browsing and consuming the web responsibly is at an all time low. There’s less of us than ever. I think it’s beyond saving at this point.
Blogging isn’t going away but the audience is getting smaller every day. It’s really a bummer.