Fighting for our web

Molly White · 7 Oct 2024

Others here said this too

The web is being flooded with coherent, generic, generated text that buries the writing worth reading.

Their wordsWhat is out there is buried among ever-growing piles of useless content farm material or, increasingly, AI-generated garbage.

Also said by Maggie Appleton, Anil Dash

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6 korrents from this piece ↓

Molly White did not write this page.

Every claim below was made in this piece, quoted word for word and numbered in the order the piece makes them, so you can read it there rather than take our word for it. The sentence above each quote is our reading of the claim, not their wording. Each quote was checked against a stored copy of the page at build time; where the two differ, the quote is the fact.

Our reading
Websites outside the big platforms have become hard to find at all, and that is a large part of why they can no longer sustain themselves.

Their wordsWebsites outside of these handful of social networks are harder and harder to even find, and partially because of that, they have a harder and harder time sustaining themselves.
Our reading
The web is being flooded with coherent, generic, generated text that buries the writing worth reading.
Mental modelValue moves to what stays scarce

Their wordsWhat is out there is buried among ever-growing piles of useless content farm material or, increasingly, AI-generated garbage.
Our reading
What has gone wrong online belongs to the industry that grew up around the web, not to the web itself, which is still a substrate anyone can build on.

Their wordsThe web is still just a substrate on which anything can be built. Most importantly, the web is the people who use it, not the companies that have established themselves around it.
Our reading
One person building something honest and small can shift how a whole industry is seen, without a platform or a job at a big publication.

Their wordsAnd it doesn’t always take a job at The New York Times or a huge pre-established platform to become one of the voices speaking up, helping to turn that tide.
Our reading
Whether the open web survives will be decided by what ordinary people collectively do, not by the companies that profit from it.

Their wordsBut the platforms do not exist without the people, and there are a lot more of us than there are of them.
Our reading
A dominant platform is more fragile than it looks, because pushing users far enough makes even the locked-in ones leave.
Mental modelLock-in and switching costs

Their wordsThe platforms have installed themselves in a position of power, but they are also vulnerable. They must do everything perfectly to maintain that position of power—not enrage their users too much, not push the regulators too far, not miss any of those competitors who are seeking to take a portion of that power.

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The other pieces are the ones whose claims are worded most like this one's. That measures language, not agreement: they may argue the opposite.