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but wait there's these spaces
Image description:
Young woman helping an old woman as she reminisces about the old web, "The web used to be open and distributed! Not closed and concentrated in the hands of a few companies!" The young woman, "Sure grandma, now let's get you to bed."
Exactly. The main thrust of my point isn't "the big corporations are okay," as some people are insisting. My point is that the INTERNET ITSELF is not being made un-free. I don't like the lying. People are conflating social media platforms with the INTERNET ITSELF. And that's just incorrect.
It may be suboptimal that billions of users have flocked to a few social media companies, but that does NOT mean that the big corpos have "centralized the web" in some fundamental manner. Everything about the Internet has grown, since the 1990s. Even tiny web platforms have more users and more growth than someone's piteously small website from 1997. Even if an "independent" website can't ever achieve the numbers of a large social media empire, is that really what any sane person wants? As far as I'm concerned, large social media platforms are useful for what they're useful for, and otherwise just serve as a basket for all the normies to sit in.
I'm old enough to remember a time when the normies didn't even fuck with the internet. They had their own baskets to sit in, and be advertised to, back then. Shopping malls, cinemas, television, department stores, hair salons, etc. That's where people gathered to get ripped off of a bunch of money, be propagandized at, and spew dumb opinions. Stupidity was just as rampant then as it is now. People just clutch at their pearls and blame corporations for public idiocy, because we can all peer into the massive aquariums of stupidity that are the social media platforms.
Those platforms didn't invent mass stupidity. They just profit from it.