>>151040014
The NPC meme is real, ha.
Anyway, a huge part of what killed the internet is Google's algorithms and how SEO is the only way to ensure you get any traffic at all if you're not already one of the big mega-websites. If you don't SEO the shit out of your website, you're NOT showing up in a Google search, and thus your website costs more than you make from it and it dies.
That stuff's out of the hands of people, nobody "wants" all their sites to follow the same careful guidelines and all end up being samey.
Other things that helped kill the internet:
>texting and social media in general killing people's ability to write/read more than 200-ish characters at once, eventually leading to them switching to visual "social media" instead, like Twitch, Vine and TikTok
>ads getting super intrusive to the point where about 50% of users use an adblocker, cutting funding to sites that can't survive without them
>NEW: AI "journalism" websites also popping up weaponizing SEO trickery to clog up search engines and kill even more smaller websites
Stuff that people CAN control that helped kill the internet:
>people becoming so "us vs them" and drinking the tribalism juice so they end up mass-migrating to often-private "social media" walled gardens like Bluesky and Discord just to get away from "not-us" people instead of acting like human beings and accepting differences, or doing even a second of unbiased research about the "other team"
>people becoming such unabashed consoomers that they don't even so much as interact with anything they haven't learned about via literal/figurative advertising, turning their minds into fully believing that "if I haven't heard of it, that means it's literally bad" unless it gets talked about on TikTok (like Dubai chocolate). This includes everything from websites to food, to forums, to even stores IRL
