The Internet Was Once Flat. No Longer.
Instead of one big community, the web is a community of communities that often don’t overlap.
“The internet is a big newspaper that everyone reads.” When I worked at Advertising Age, an ad industry trade publication, we’d use that line whenever a source didn’t want to share news with us. We were a small, narrowly-focused magazine, yes. But once we broke a story, it would travel around the web. So why not get an in-depth, thoughtful article from us and let it rip?
The line worked often, and likely because the internet was indeed kinda flat when we used it in the early 2010s. Paywalls were rare. The “content” boom was just underway. And though concerns of “filter bubbles” percolated, social media algorithms were either rudimentary or still on the roadmap. So news from any single entity could travel just about everywhere.
Today, however, we’ve moved into a siloed web — and the line no longer applies. Information on one part of the internet is likely to stay there, and only a tiny percent of stories break through. Rather than one big community, the web is a community of communities. And often, they don’t overlap at all.
The siloed internet is, in part, a product of paywalls. Nearly every website was once available to everyone for free. But…
