I’m thinking about trying to cohere my endless ranting about why social media (and the larger internet) is such a mess because of platforms, and trying to get at the meat of what, especially millennials/gen-x are talking about when they say they miss “The old internet”
I just kind of want to establish a sense of how platform capitalism in the ‘web 2.0’ era is the real driving force here, and I’m pondering different ways to tell this story to someone without any background in it. So I think I have two main options, or I go somewhere in between?
Is it better to tell the gritty details using specific events and concepts that the audience might be unfamiliar with, like Eternal September, AOL Keywords/Search, or just the early era of grandma on Facebook?
Or to go the complete other way and tell a story unrelated to the internet, about amateur communities with a shared hobby forming, getting noticed and exploited by corporations, then left out in the cold as enshittification occurs, and those hobbyists have to expend their own time and expertise to try and remake functional communities?
Or… is the answer to go somewhere in between those two poles? Avoid the jargon and insider explanations but talk about user bases, upkeep and the modern era of community admin martyrdom?