A thought provoking read about how the Internet - despite its growing userbase, ever-increasing compute power and distribution reach - is becoming a much smaller place, increasingly owned by a narrow group of interests.

Two observations stood out for me.

First, the author's ultimate conclusion:

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It is worth remembering that the internet wasn't supposed to be like this. It wasn't supposed to be six boring men with too much money creating spaces that no one likes but everyone is forced to use because those men have driven every other form of online existence into the ground. The internet was supposed to have pockets, to have enchanting forests you could stumble into and dark ravines you knew better than to enter. The internet was supposed to be a place of opportunity, not just for profit but for surprise and connection and delight.
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This built on her earlier observation about the proliferation of "clone" startups, such as Lemon8, which is a clone of Instagram, and BlueSky which largely mimics Twitter, that were the outcome of the how many venture funds invested during the recent wave of 'cheap money'.

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This kind of duplication isn't just a clear a failure of imagination; it is the kind of innovation that capitalism rewards. Don't make something new, make the same thing that someone else made very successful, but slightly better. To have a proven concept, after all, is to plagiarize. It's annoying to see millions of dollars thrown at making more-or-less literal dupes of internet companies that everyone is already using begrudgingly and with diminishing emotional returns. It's maybe more frustrating to realize that the goals of these companies is the same as their predecessors, which is to make the internet smaller.
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#startups #innovation #internet #socialmedia #venturecapital