I still think the internet could undergo a "collapse" and rapidly shrink to something resembling the 2000's internet. The enshitification of everything is quite literally, "mining out" the value of the internet, hollowing everything from below. At some point, nothing is believable and putting your "content" online amounts to giving it away. Eventually, the users _will_ walk away and suddenly the whole affair falls apart.
I think rather than collapse it may get filtered down more. I've already got ad blockers and some similar stuff like fbpurity which removes the sponsored nonsense from facebook. LLM type AI might help there by filtering down to things you are interested in and connecting with real friends rather than the junk that commercial algos push at you.
The 2000s internet was way bigger than the 2026 internet. Every google search pulls up the same 50 sites now, and the first page will be split between just two sites, as if I needed 6 slightly different Amazon links about a book I was googling.
In the 2000s you could literally use google to scrape for open camera feeds; it was just internet-grep. Random people had extensive pages about their random hobbies. The actual internet was buried when the search engines decided to ignore queries and guide traffic, and eventually mostly disappeared. Back then there was more variety on youtube; there was more variety on myspace than is now on facebook.
People spend more time on the internet now, but it's just scrolling versions of the same 20 stories of the day linked from the same 50 sites on the same 5 social network feeds. Even those 50 sites are all owned by the same 10 people, which means you get between one and two self-interested perspectives on those 20 stories. The rest of the internet is filled with slop and the rest of your feed (from real people you don't even really know) is repoasts that they imitated from seeing them updooted somewhere else. It's positively claustrophobic.
The catch is that they eliminated public space and made unmediated communication suspicious and borderline illegal, so where are you going to go? Find somebody on an app to hang out with? Watch some netflix? Isn't that still the internet? Make your kids put down their phones and talk to you? How are you going to have a party if you don't post it on facebook?
It’s not gonna collapse. It can only grow bigger; the entire world economy runs and depends on the internet.
Rather, what will happen is a bunch of us will willingly stop participating and stepping away from the technological singularity. A bit like the Amish, this time not for religious reasons. Let the urbanites enjoy their AI-generated virtual realities, with work, sex, and food from the comfort of your phone, competing for fewer and more bullshit office jobs creating more addictive apps; I just want to live on a farm with solar panels, grow tomatoes and write code for fun.
You can still share via torrents, but Soundcloud seems to be the main place, as it has been for almost 20 years now.
On a separate note, I must say that starting to read your comment, I was sure it'll be going towards "Back in 2000 I cudda made a song outta that... Now, in 2025, I just use suno"
Some have walked away from the worst sites already but the majority are undiscerning and if they haven't left by now I don't think anything will be different in 2026.
Why have I been seeing people use "enshitification" so much lately? Yes I know where it comes from and what it means. It's like Cory Doctorow is the new Noam Chomsky of IT and enshitification has replaced "manufactured consent".
My belief is that its rise to popularity is a result of the underlying concept being something that everybody has been feeling for a long time, but lacked a word that could serve as its face in a satisfying manner. It's snappy and encodes a certain frustration and anger with the state of things that isn't conveyed as well or as succinctly with other terms.
Also there seems to be more of it about. Like facebook is crazy these days if you don't have things to block the junk. What used to be holiday pic from friend, post from mum is now holiday pic then three in your face hot / AI generated influencers doing in your face stuff then maybe your mum. It makes my head hurt.
Its the current term-slop to label anything changing in a way they dislike without nuance.
Yes many things are incredibly getting objectively worse, but it enables them to look at unsustainable practices in the eye and feign shock when it fails to keep steam.
