The layer where every human activity became a venture-backed destination, every destination became a feed, every feed became ad inventory, and every ad market became a machine for producing more things to interrupt you with.
Underneath that layer is another internet: older, slower, less polished, harder to monetize, and much harder to kill.
It is not utopia. It is full of spam, abandoned servers, broken clients, hostile nodes, strange old commands, half-maintained software, and people arguing in plain text about things no normal person should care about.
Was thinking about this the other day. And while the big players absolutely suck, I think we also share some of the blame by congregating in a small handful of sites and giving them the power that they have. Back in the early wild west days, it was more common to have a personal website and not just use Facebook. We ran our own forums or used usenet servers and IRC or other self-hosted chats and not Reddit or Discord. The only things that weren’t usually small or locally hosted were sites for images and video; and that’s still kinda hard today.