I alluded to this earlier this year when we redid JY&A’s links’ directory, but Joan Westenberg confirms it with some real stats.
Once upon a time, the web seemed limitless, but now ‘we’re trapped in digital zoos built by tech giants. Google. Facebook. Amazon. Apple. Microsoft. They’ve carved up the web into their private empires, each one a glossy prison of convenience,’ she writes.
‘The untamed digital frontier where anyone could build the next big thing is all but gone. Instead, we shuffle between prescribed platforms, our choices funneled through corporate filters, our creativity confined to pre-approved templates. We traded freedom for comfort, exploration for ease-of-use.’
Both themes have been part of earlier blog posts.
Westenberg says that Google, Tiktok, Amazon and Microsoft (I believe she accidentally omitted Meta, as she noted there were five) occupy 43 per cent of all web traffic, whereas a decade ago they made up 17 per cent.
As to the open web, her stats are that 31 per cent of all web traffic went to the top million sites in 2012. In 2022, that rose to 57 per cent. There are fewer independent websites or sites outside of the major platforms today.
There are real dangers here, not least the gatekeepers becoming synonymous with the web, and people seeing only what they choose to prioritize; their dominance hides the independent web. Taking this further, Westenberg says, means the internet will be a walled garden with less diversity.
I know this because when we go through our link lists, we’re usually pruning. There’s less diversity in design because of the demands of different screens. It’s hard to make a splash with a new website now without a ton of money behind you ensuring you a presence away from the internet. If you have a new brand, you need a lot more money than you ever did to spread between different media and promotional methods.
We had it good in the 1990s when the web was more experimental, and those of us who ventured there, who bothered building websites, reaped the rewards as we promoted our businesses there. As more went online, we had to compete harder, but that’s life. But the 2020s present greater challenges with bot-written content and Google, still the primary gatekeeper, siding with big corporations (including themselves) when it comes to ranking information, and allowing the search engine to be gamed.
Another article I clicked on today (courtesy again of Leigh Harrison) is headlined ‘AI slop is flooding Medium’, where two “AI” detection services independently estimated 40–7 per cent were likely generated by bot.
Kate Knibbs, writing for Wired, concludes that the conspiracy theorists’ dead internet theory may come to fruition.
The reality on Medium, I found, was that they were fast (indeed, the fastest) to remove “AI” drivel, and humans do the work.
Its CEO, Tony Stubblebine, says the majority of the drivel gets no views, and contrary to the tone of the article, based on personal experience they have done a fine job.
Facebook, meanwhile, has not—I found another bot net today but I already know they will do nowt. Unlike 2014, I can’t be bothered doing dozens of reports, because these days they will do nothing. (Facebook will have far more than 40 per cent bot, incidentally.)
These experiences, however, point to not so much internet obsolescence, but they make you question the necessity of Google if it fails to weed out the junk and Facebook if it promotes it, and consider what other methods exist to help one get to useful sites. I earlier suggested Curlie and other human-curated directories might have to return in force, and that might also help reduce Facebook, Tiktok and other Big Tech platforms to background noise while the good, human-made stuff gets highlighted. We need to change how we use the web, and almost go back to what we did in the 1990s, before decent search engines, and head to credible sources of useful links.
If 40 per cent of Medium is bot rubbish, then it’s not that hard to extrapolate that to the wider web, and certainly for nine months of this year I had to contend with hundreds of bot-written drivel containing my name, at risk of crowding out real information. Did it make up 40 per cent of what existed about me? Maybe not, but then I have been online for a long time. Would another victim of Semrush’s algorithmic guesswork be quite as fortunate? (We’ve already seen how Google’s bots can destroy a business.)
All the more reason to return to human curation.
Steadfastly keeping and maintaining our links’ lists over nearly three decades doesn’t seem so silly after all.