The internet is going back in time, and that’s a good thing

With drastic changes sweeping across networks including Twitter and Reddit, the social web as we know it appears to be coming to an end. Most recently, Twitter has limited how many Tweets you can scroll through in your feed without paying. Meanwhile, over at Reddit thousands of subreddits remain inacessible, in protest against the company's new management and their monetisation plans.

Whether you agree with those changes or not, whether they will prove to be the right thing for those companies or not, the question being asked by many people leaving those networks is "where are we supposed to hang out now?"

It wasn't so long ago that the internet was a place of genuine exploration, with not just half a handful of monopolistic destinations, but many smaller ones instead. The places we would discover weren't plagued by the programmatic promotion of polarising content to maximise engagement. They weren’t compromised by the corrosive business models of Twitter and Facebook, through which it has become clear that paid voice + algorithmic feeds are measurably bad for societal wellbeing.

Community forums, IRC, and good ol' fashion email inboxes are a few of the kinds of places I'm talking about. One might think that new innovations would be the new social web destinations, but instead these familiar-looking kinds of places are where so many people have arrived at. Over the past years we've seen an immense resurgence in email newsletters and a rapid rise in Discord user numbers, the IRC-like app of today, both of which are expected to be catapulted even further, in light of recent social web events. Nostalgically, even the shutdown of 25-year-old DPReview was avoided - a bustling community that is home to almost 50 million forum posts which now live on.

The modern web feels increasingly broken, and these latest changes by some of those social giants make it easy to understand why: a typical Google search result isn't as useful as it once was, dominated by paid links, and others to sites that you can't even view. From news site links with paywalls, to Tweets being account walled, and so many subreddits closed to the public, even the value of search engines have been eroded as a consequence. While some people remember the days when search engines were not very useful, this is a new and abrupt reality for a lot of people. Critically however, we are not just mindlessly opening accounts with every walled off site a search engine links us to - we’re also looking elsewhere.

As a result of this reality and this behaviour, the size and power of any individual network is set to diminish, with their controversial changes stoking our willingness to consider spreading out again... inadvertently, to something that looks more like a version of the internet from a time past. What we’re witnessing is the re-fragmentation of the social web.

A move back to the IRC-like interaction of Discord, along with email inboxes for our "feed" of news, may seem like a regression, yet through this redistribution of our attention we are reclaiming our individual independence from behemoth aggregators. We are reclaiming our agency, in many cases our privacy, and in some cases our sanity.

This apparent disaggregation of the social web may leave some people feeling a little lost. Especially those too young to remember how the internet functioned as a tool for discovery and connection two decades ago. Yet portions of the population at Twitter and Reddit heading for the exits is not a sign of us giving up on the social web. It's a sign that we don't actually need or want the latest version of it. Many of us are beginning to realise that alternative and sometimes older paradigms for conversation and consumption are the better ones, after all.

If you're interested in what my most important newsletters are right now, I've left a short list below. I’ll catch you on Discord to discuss their next editions...

1. Techmeme
2. Hacker News
3. Bloomberg's Australia Briefing
4. Future Crunch
5. A personalised digest via the power of Mailbrew