I don't think it's dying. I hope it's a paradigm shift like when it changed from wild west lawless chaos to three or four huge companies running all of it. Maybe we end up with everything replaced by different distributed services. It's going to incredibly annoying when half the search results are dead links or links to reddit but that annoyance can drive innovation.

I still remember the Photobucket apocalypse back in the day. One day to the next seemed like internet only had "broken link" images.

I wonder if the internet, possibly the worlds best accomplishment in cooperation, can survive a post-globalist world?

Perhaps it’s the purist expression of the wave in optimism for liberalised trade before it crested and rolled back out to sea.

We need to choose. Link rot or massive megacorps owning everything on the Internet.

Before reddit, imgur, etc got big, the Internet was FULL of dead links. Image links in particular. Small image hosts cleared their storage after a while because, y'know, kinda expensive to host a bunch of content for free.

But you know what? We ran everything. And discovery was hella different. Personal websites, bulletin boards... Clicking links from one place to end up at another, and then you find another link to another website... It was something different entirely. Of course, Digg, StumbleUpon and reddit all were originally just websites where you could share what you'd discovered and other people could comment on it, but reddit ended up becoming THE place to hang out, and then nobody bothered going to all these small websites anymore.

I see the fediverse as being something in-between. The content doesn't all belong to a massive corporation, but it's also still MORE centralized than the Internet of old. We all hang out in a shared, federated space, rather than having a bunch of different spaces. Communities aren't as insular, which is both good and bad - and I guess everyone has different preferences anyway. But while on a big network like the fediverse or reddit, you tend to feel like part of a very big community (unless you subscribe exclusively to tiny communities/subs), on the forums of old, you'd have a small community and most people were fairly active participants, so it really felt like a close-knit community if you know what I mean.

Unfortunately, big tech has been expending millions (edit: more like billions, maybe trillions) in currency and talent to figure out how to make all-you-can-eat video and images turn a profit. Apparently, it just can't happen at a global scale even when it's lousy with ads and personal data collection.

So, get ready to open your wallet. We'll probably see more and more such services moving to paid-for subscriptions. (IMO)

Feels like someone pressed the self-destruct button for The Internet, eh?

As far as I know, companies like Gfycat make money by selling API access to different apps. Like say in a messaging app likeTelegram or Signal. The easiest way for them to integrate a gif search and send function inside of messages is through API access to Gfycat's servers. Gfycat then charges them for this streamlined integration and access.

That plus selling user data or ads on their website means they will have some revenue. I dont know if its enough to keep them afloat. Since they are shutting down, I'm guessing it didnt pan out so well.

It sure as hell lasted a long time though

Youtube is definitely bringing back a profit to Google. Probably not huge, but definitely far from 0% return.

Now they did have to shove way more ads in there to make it happen.

Having an acceptable ratio between ads and a big media storage seems pretty much impossible, unless subscription based which most people can't really afford.