Thread by @broderick

I think the internet is breaking up again and moving back towards the way it was in the mid-00s and I have several observations about this I'm going to dump in a thread.

The TL;DR is that grassroots internet use is both good and will create all kinds of fun new social problems.

1) A lot of reasons for this, but I think the combo of political instability, an excess of laid off journalists, and paywalled MSM sites have kickstarted a wave of newsletter publishing that will continue and probably become something close to a blogosphere again.

2) YouTube's quest for content that's good for marketers will inspire more free-wheeling, lower-entry video apps like TikTok to appear. The videos on those apps will probably travel very similarly to how videos on DailyMotion used to. No crediting. Going viral out of nowhere.

3) Messaging apps like Telegram and Discord are already beginning to recreate the feel of mid-00s messageboards. Federated messaging apps are becoming easier to create. We're already beginning to see micro-communities brigading and trolling each other.

4) Now that every major newsroom has some web culture reporter or 4chan correspondent lol, internet communities will start becoming more and more private. This will dovetail with...

5) A rise in piracy (as it did in the mid-00s). The amount of paywalled Netflix competitors coming in the next 2 years will mean most young people are probably going to dust off their Bit Torrent clients (or invent a new thing that works better for mobile).

6) These private Discord or Telegram (or other thing) groups will probably get pretty big. They will probably become huge hubs of pirated content. A Discord group for the readers of a newsletter? YouTubers and TikTokers already do this. Subreddits have Discord servers as well.

Basically, I think in the next few years, we will see a generation of internet users fully embrace non-mainstream private internet tools in a huge way. (I actually think it could slow down online radicalization a bit.)

I think young internet users, in particular, want spaces away from annoying millennial journalists documenting their every move, places they can share videos and music they can't afford, to make goofy content easily, and read news that isn't "viral," but opinionated and personal.