Counter point: We can't have a different Web

Search engines ruined by their SEO spam designed "to pull in money via ads and affiliate links", Social networks and their "constant push to satisfy...an algorithm tuned to keeping eyeballs on the platform", newspapers and their "aggressive paywalls and expensive subscription models", the ads, the trackers, the popups, and the chatbots - the enshittification of the internet in all of its forms can be traced back to single source. The root of all evil. Greed is the problem and we're no better equipped to deal with it online than we are offline.

It seems like everywhere people act selfishly and try to take as much as they can from everyone else while giving back as little as possible things only get worse for everyone, but you can't stop people from falling into that trap. It's like some kind of mental disorder. A person suffering from greed will knowingly poison themselves and their families. It's caused people to pollute the air they need to breathe and the water they need to drink. We'll never convince someone afflicted with Greed to stay away from our websites.

Any new internet protocol we create, any new platform we develop, any new community we build will be slowly corrupted the moment it gets popular enough to be useful. It will probably start even before then. Speculators will try to get an early foothold to gain an edge over their soon-to-be competitors. The playbook has been written, and now it's just a matter of following the steps. Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish.

We have many advantages compared to the people who created the internet. We have better tech. We have better access to that tech. We have the examples they left us to build from. We also have things they never had to deal with. The technology they used was designed to work for them. All of our technology is designed to be used against us by other people.

They were creating the infrastructure to communicate freely. All of our infrastructure is already captured and monitored. It's designed to get in our way if we aren't using it the way others want us to. Simply hosting a website likely violates your ISPs TOS. Using Tor or a VPN means some webpages never load and those that do harass you to solve riddles to improve the AI they'll use against you.

The creators of the internet never had to deal with AI bots pretending to be normal users spreading astroturf and shilling for their masters. Real content takes time and effort but ads can be spammed by bots which never sleep until those ads drown out everything else.

The only way to get back something like the internet before it was infested with greed is to keep most people off of it. Small communities can be controlled and moderated. In a small community the identities of users can be verified to keep bots away. It doesn't solve the problem of carefully planted shills or paid off members, but it keeps the problem a little more contained and manageable. The problem is that what we'd be left with in that case wouldn't really be the internet. Just another walled garden, one to keep the money away. At best we might be able to pull off going back to the time when you could find a really cool BBS, but the old internet was a once in a lifetime thing.