The independent internet that's driven by passion and a desire to build is still out there, it's just getting increasingly hard to find.
Search is ultimately the tool that ties the internet together; after all, you can't consume content that you can't find in the first place. But in the modern, corporation-first internet, Google is highly incentivized to not surface independent websites, for a variety of reasons:
* Websites run Google ads, so they don't punish sites that run tons of ads, as a user-focused search engine might.
* Large, well-known websites are safe to surface to the top. Surfacing the "wrong" site for a highly political topic could get Google in trouble.[0]
* ... and frankly, most users are looking for these sites anyway. There's way more teenagers and non-techies using Google for a quick answer on a cell phone than there are people trying to find interesting independent blogs.
* For-profit sites are more likely to invest in SEO than a small, for-passion website.
All this adds up to an independent internet that's there, but mostly hidden.
I honestly think in the too-near future we'll see the independent internet relegated to Usenet status. Major websites and other businesses (who are willing to pay a fee/have legal contact info) can opt-in to be part of an ISP's internet package, and anything outside will be inaccessible. The recent KiwiFarms debacle makes me think this is coming sooner than we think, as this is a very easy way to keep "harmful" content inaccessible.
[0] This is why Google image search is so incredibly useless now; there was a media blitz a few years after its release where journalists found it would give racist responses with certain pictures of Black people. It's safer for Google to just make it so general that it's basically worthless.
The relegation is already underway. Google has already decided that HTTP-only sites without recent updates don’t belong in top results. Lots of great work from just a few years ago is invisible to most internet users, while “content aggregators” and monolithic platforms soak up all the eyeballs.
You have to use something else entirely (like Wiby) to find the perfectly usable, valuable work that isn’t on a major platform. It /may as well/ be Usenet for how available it is.
Small sites can fight against this by bringing back pre-google concepts like webrings and affiliated sites. Very few people will find your niche site, so it's important to help them find other related niche sites.
I've seen webrings brought up repeatedly here on HN. Did those ever work well? I always saw them as one of the ever-increasing number of grifts mentioned in the article. It seemed like when you joined one, it didn't really help traffic to your site, but did help redirect the traffic you already had coming to your page to other sites in the ring. I tried it once and found it didn't increase traffic at all, but that's just one data point, so maybe there were some that worked as intended?
Web rings are more of a long term community building tool than one weird trick to boost traffic. A thriving online community does bring organic traffic, but it takes a long time to build.
Also really doubtful the people who leave using the webring were going to stay around anyway. It's probably better to work on building a compelling website than to turn it into a maze with no exits. Making people feel trapped is not going to make them want to come back.
Search is ultimately the tool that ties the internet together; after all, you can't consume content that you can't find in the first place. But in the modern, corporation-first internet, Google is highly incentivized to not surface independent websites, for a variety of reasons:
* Websites run Google ads, so they don't punish sites that run tons of ads, as a user-focused search engine might.
* Large, well-known websites are safe to surface to the top. Surfacing the "wrong" site for a highly political topic could get Google in trouble.[0]
* ... and frankly, most users are looking for these sites anyway. There's way more teenagers and non-techies using Google for a quick answer on a cell phone than there are people trying to find interesting independent blogs.
* For-profit sites are more likely to invest in SEO than a small, for-passion website.
All this adds up to an independent internet that's there, but mostly hidden.
I honestly think in the too-near future we'll see the independent internet relegated to Usenet status. Major websites and other businesses (who are willing to pay a fee/have legal contact info) can opt-in to be part of an ISP's internet package, and anything outside will be inaccessible. The recent KiwiFarms debacle makes me think this is coming sooner than we think, as this is a very easy way to keep "harmful" content inaccessible.
[0] This is why Google image search is so incredibly useless now; there was a media blitz a few years after its release where journalists found it would give racist responses with certain pictures of Black people. It's safer for Google to just make it so general that it's basically worthless.