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submitted 1 week ago by ryujin470@fedia.io to c/asklemmy@lemmy.world

Will the world's most accessed websites, like YouTube, Wikipedia, ChatGPT, etc. ever shut down one day?

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[-] chaosCruiser@futurology.today 17 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Yes. Nothing lasts forever.

For millennia, horses used to be crucial for everyday life. Nowadays, we have cars, airplanes and other CO2 emitting atrocities that made horses effectively obsolete. Before the petrochemical industry changed the world, it was very hard to imagine life without horses. When was the last time you saw someone plow a field with a horse? Oh, you haven't even worked on the fields. Oh, boy has the world changed in unbelievable ways.

For centuries, paper letters were the standard form of long distance communication. Before the internet, it would have been pretty impossible to imagine life without letters. When was the last time you received, let alone wrote one of those? Yeah, the world has changed, now hasn't it.

Sooner or later, all the famous sites will be obsolete, just like oil lamps, gas stoves, and quills. Currently, it's pretty hard to imagine what that new thing would be. Usually, these changes happen gradually. Eventually, you just realize you haven't used that old thing in a while, because you've been using the new thing for such a long time.

this post was submitted on 04 May 2026
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