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Why the Internet Feels Broken
Curator’s Note
Vox at their absolute best. This explains the enshittification of everything in 18 crisp minutes, with the kind of visual storytelling that makes complex ideas feel obvious in hindsight.
If you’ve felt like the internet has gotten worse but couldn’t quite articulate why, this video is your answer. The Vox team traces the economic incentives that turned the web from a place of discovery into a place of extraction.
They interview platform designers, economists, and former employees of major tech companies, all of whom tell the same story: the internet was built on openness, but openness doesn’t scale profitably. So every platform eventually closes its garden, raises its walls, and starts extracting value from the users who built it.
The video ends with a surprisingly hopeful note — a tour of the small, independent corners of the web where the original spirit lives on.
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