Rumpelstiltskin wrote: ↑Wed 8 May 2024 12:25 am
All very possible. I wonder if part of it is two fold. First that internet and tech capabilities in general are (and have been) rapidly increasing. This could be part of what is making older and possibly dated websites function worse and worse as they get more and more outdated year by year. Secondly, if that is the case it could (on the more sinister side) be a way of more passively suppressing archives and databases etc by making it not seem too strange. Sort of a "oh well, these are old sites and out of date, time to shut em down" type of approach. With the hopes that those sites sort of vanish off the web.
The first does happen but in a limited scope. The end of ActiveX, and similarly horrible monstrosities, has always created work for webmasters who either had to update or abandon their sites to obscurity once they could no longer be accessed. The roll-out of https-everywhere has also impacted websites. ISPs used to cache frequently accessed data. Because traffic is now encrypted and supposedly "unreadable" by ISPs (hah!) it cannot be cached and must be retransmitted internationally in every instance. For someone like Google, who can afford to offer to install their own box on-site at the ISP at their expense, or at least in the country, this creates a massively advantageous playing field. It also increases the amount of data which must be paid for by both parties and breaks old sites which have not yet been upgraded--because the content never needed to be secret or secure--by browsers refusing to deliver content except through multiple scary and confusing warning popups.
However, improved network infrastructure should have made old websites fast instead of slow. It's always been a problem I had around here that the web was designed by people who cared about nearby readers with fast connections, which made sites close to unusable. The bloatware has only gotten much worse on new websites.
Ultimately I think that we have multiple actors acting more or less independently, doing what is bad for us because it suits their own purposes and for possibly multiple reasons per actor. Obviously the ADL et al. want both to drive discussions they don't like off mainstream sites, yet channel all traffic into the more controllable mainstream sites. Obviously they and other censors want to get rid of inconvenient archives. Obviously big tech want to control all information and get full access to all that sweet, personal data. Obviously ISPs want to connect as little as possible, as cheaply as possible, and charge extra for anything you want to actually do besides maybe browse FB. Obviously governments want to restrict speech. Etc. And most obviously, the demons have a greater or lesser degree of influence over all of the above and have their own agenda. We should also remember that permissive liberals and their principles are not free of agenda either; institutions such as the Internet Archive are not acting with the intent of promoting Orthodoxy. (Although I do admire the work they have done.) I don't take the Dyerite position that everybody sat together at a meeting and decided on the plan. Some groups may have done so, and members may even think that their group is the group, but in reality many groups are acting independently. Unless you want to count the aforementioned demons' plan as the plan.
So to make a long story short, I think the second happens as well, but it is mostly not one master plan. Different people can do that at different times when it suits them and they get an opportunity.
