Popular animated gifs hosting service gfycat.com is shutting down on September 1, 2023 and all hosted content will no longer be accessible at that point.
I hope you’re right. Everything was a lot more wild. You’d discover a blog through some link and feel like an adventurer explorer a blank part of the map. It was much more fun.
Yeah, it seems like people made the internet something valuable, a bunch of commercial businesses turned up to take the reins so they could harvest hat value for wealth for investors, it's reached a point where that juice is no longer worth the squeeze for them and we'll go back to a phase where the progress and generation of value will revert back to regular people again for a while. Likely that balance will then tip back towards profitability again and the cycle will start anew.
@Piers@z500 I remember in the early days of commercialization of the interwebs, the capitalists just could *not* wrap their heads around the idea of *sharing*. Legalities aside, putting music or art or whatever that you had spent money and time on, and then just... putting it out there for anyone was so foreign to them.
You know, come to think of it, the internet has been oddly stable for the past decade. Prior to modern social media, sites used to come and go all the time. I had to switch forums twice because the ones I was using shut down. Same for my image hosting sites and flash game sites. We were honestly due for a major shake up.