I do think they will essentially die. They will morph into completely different websites, but I think they will be around for a long time, and I think their userbase won’t shrink even a bit.
Big websites are slowly adopting the facebook model: All the content is hidden and requires you login to view it. Creating an account requires some sort of personally identifying information like a phone number, photo of ID, mailing address, etc.
The old model simply turned out to be unprofitable. It was always done under the motto of “bring the people and the money will come” and so they made it as easy as possible to build up a large user base, but it turns out that motto is false on the internet, and investors have finally realized it. There is no point in having a massive user base if they don’t actually generate a profit for you. Anonymous internet users do not do this. They are indistinguishable from bots. If they don’t use adblock, they don’t click on ads. They don’t donate money. Yet they use up the majority of the server resources.
It used to be that you at least needed anonymous users to generate content for you, but (in part thanks to facebok) non-anonymous usage of the internet has become normalized. If anything the best content will come from someone who has their real name, and profile picture attached to the content they submit. The anonymous nobody is much less likely to post anything valuable.
I think the internet as we know it is dead, and tbh I don’t even blame big corporations for this. I blame mass tech illiteracy, and people’s willingness to sacrifice their privacy for some dopamine hits.
I feel like these mainstream platform have provided us with the framework of what we want the internet to be. But they’re business with the goal of profit, and that’s ok. Just not ok for us because that’s not what we want/need. I’d like to believe that the fediverse is the future. A decentralised, true social media that actually match the name. The fediverse is the media for social interaction that are of the people, by the people and for the people of the internet.
Part of that is my issue with a lot of platforms; they try to be everything at once. I don’t want every social media platform to have featured articles, stories, a messaging function, and disappearing messages.
If Snapchat stayed the way it originally was I’d probably still be using it today.
I think it’s been coined the enshitification of products as they gear towards profit.
The problem isn’t just profit, but maximizing short profit by any means necessary.
They are not content with providing a good product and making a bit of profit. They always have to press ultra hard to squeeze the last drop of profit out of the product. And they don’t care that it worsens the product and ultimately will kill it and its business end. But that’s more than two quarters away, so they don’t care.
Reddit is only the most dramatic example of this.