Many Connected Islands

“I’m living in the future so the present is my past” - Kanye West, Monster.

I want to say Platforms ruined the internet, but that would be a pretty bold lie. Yet, it’s definitely how I feel sometimes.

They defintiely changed how we interact with the internet though. Made things more convenient and more accessible. Made it so Grandma could easily navigate and view pictures of her adorable snotty nosed grandkids. Read and share posts on the latest in propagandic folklore and comment on the most rage baiting posts without needing to learn how to setup an RSS aggregator.

Reducing the friction for creators to get their content in front of an audience. Changing virality from being something that was just happenstance to something that could be formulated to boost average watch time, shares and interactions.

Platforms all but removed the need to understand egress bandwidth or worry about available hard disk space when posting media online.

Removed the need for businesses to pay for someone to design, host, and maintain a WordPress instance that would eventually fall prey to a 0-day exploit in some nitwits SEO plugin.

Platforms did a lot of great in helping people spend more time connecting. Allowing people to share the latest in gossip, rumors and their own malformed opinions and less time worrying about the security of their FTP accounts.

If it wasn’t for platforms - legacy media and journalist’s wouldn’t have to compete with Larry the cable guy for breaking news, and advertisers would be forced to target quality content and not just write a blank cheque to Google or Facebook.

Platforms made it possible for, RealMan251202 , to educate us on the perils of feminism, or DonkeyDix10201, to debate immigration policy with experts.

We no longer need to belong to 30 different phpBB forums, to constantly tell people that they’re dumb and to use the search feature before posting.

Yet besides all of that, I still miss the chaos of the old internet. The randomness of coming across a site filled with gems. For all it’s flaws, all of it’s technical gatekeeping, I miss it, and sometimes wish we could just go back.