alt Hacker NewsI agree. Even where blogging and sharing information is still around, it is strongly linked with brand-building, monetization, and engagement-maxxing. Look at all the old Wordpress bloggers who switch to Substack in order to have some eyeballs on their posts, and then inevitably begin conforming to its ethos willingly or unwillingly.
For me, the information-sharing part of the internet now is the shadow libraries. I can get access to all (well, still not quite all) journals and university-press publications from the last century? Awesome. Vastly more informative than some blogger who nowadays is probably trying to monetize my attention.
It is the same with forums, trackers and private libraries. They are instantly more useful for information seeking purposes. And none of this really fits into attention-monetizing economy of Internet.
I’ve recently counted movies available on my HBO account and it is in low hundreds. There is absolutely no way to find a specific movie across existing services - information discovery is broken, and their subscription models force me to pay in weird ways (subscribe, watch, unsubscribe.. rental is scarce) for a relatively simple outcome.
Another weird example are books that are widely available on the web in pdf and other formats with absolutely no way to legally purchase them in electronic form. There is a vast untapped shadow network of people doing [often volunteer] work of publishers: scanning, uploading and categorizing content in a searchable way. At the same time most publishers who actually own rights to this content are prioritizing entertainment and attention focused platforms, where 20% of invested work already gives them 80% of business results.
One can argue that this is (a) the only economically viable model we could come up with and (b) most people that are looking for entertainment don’t really have this problem.