I think you are mistaking infiltration for ‘getting spread out too far’.

Nearly all of what you describe can be most easily attributed to planted agitators.

I think a better metaphor is fermentation.

It happens naturally whenever the ingredients are brought together but in order to get a quality product you need ridiculous amounts of knowledge, process, and technology.

And even a tiny bit of the wrong bacteria can ruin an entire batch, but people will still drink it and go blind.

Fuck yes those memories…

I used to purposefully disable the error correction on my modem so the connection sound didn’t have that stupid hissy wobbly beepy part at the end. Yeah it meant that sometimes I’d fjhkswa thjasd ar eee e but it was worth it for that pure music.

Maybe we’re blessed for knowing it like none that came after, or cursed for knowing it will never be that good again…

If they really understood the phrase ‘too many cooks spoil the soup’, then they’d realize the advantage of smaller online communities.

Reddit was at its best when it had a low count but engaged userbase, and became actively worse as it grew.

I think this is because trolling and response isn’t a 1 to 1 ratio. All it takes is 1 toxic person to make an entire subforum rancid and takes the effort of several mods to mitigate it.

The more people you have, the more chance you will have these trolls organize, the more likely they will either overwhelm or infiltrate the mods.

Yeah but then when it collapses all the roaches will scurry off to other forums, including lemmy .

Personally I want it as a place to sequester the hard and alt right, like 4chan was before the digg exodus.

Every time someone pops the infection caul where they gather, it just spreads their toxic juice everywhere else.

without browsers, I don’t think there would be a need for most of that, as there would be no need to create the visually compelling but ultimately ridiculously overmoduled live documents.

Esports would still exist just like normal sports existed before the internet. Technically esports predates the world wide web as coin op competitions already existed and sometimes even made it into international news.

Again streaming sites would still exist as mentioned due to the high serving costs, and esports could easily be part of their lineup.

How would we be viewing simple stuffs like blogs then?

There is still place for documents on the internet without the WWW. back in the BBS days, we’d download text file magazines to read offline (lol sometimes having to save days and days of download credits just for a TEXT file! Man dialup was crazy. That said, without having to have one (kinda) standardized way to view documents those file formats would evolve beyond just text into something more like OpenOffice document formatting, again without the capitalism-driven effort to make snazzy, eyecatching but ultimately useless dynamically served document formats.

Honestly I think the dynamically served aspect of modern WWW documents is such a ridiculous waste of resources and bandwidth that not having it may just as well constitute a technical advancement over what we have today.

Well, back in the day you’d have a series of different services, usenet, irc, email, and for articles (at the time usually scholarly articles) you could use Gopher or follow certain usenet groups to find FTP sites hosting the docs.

So if we didn’t have a unified web browser, and those technologies advanced at the pace of other similar services, here is how I see it:

Most services would be accessed by discrete apps, one for your email, one for your chat, one for your remote and local documents.

We wouldn’t see the proliferation of siloed services, platforms like Facebook that offer all of these services but only within their subscribers. They just simply wouldn’t be able to compete with the established services or add nuance or extra value.

Discord would also likely have come into existence a lot earlier and unified some of those services, but again if they chose to silo it as they are doing now, they wouldn’t gain market dominance over already existing wide communities.

Without the profit incentive, existing services have no reason to tie their users to their platform or inhibit cross platform interactions.

Streaming services would still come into existence and fragment and silo like they are now, but that’s only because of the cost of providing reliable HD video content isn’t easily dispersed across unsiloed userbases.

Web advertisements would be non-existant but you’d still get spots in podcasts and videos.

Frankly I think it would be a better internet than what we have now.