Can you be more specific? Which things? One might argue that they enshittified everything. I remember the internet in 1996 and while it had more technical limitations, I liked it a lot more than what we have now. It wasn't based on everyone trying to get our attention constantly and treating it as a commodity. Search engines worked. You only used the resources (bandwidth, RAM, CPU) which you needed for the things you requested.

Half the US maybe. Half the planet, I doubt it.

Did you know that not everything people say is stored permanently online? In fact, most things people say do not come with a permalink.

I think we understand each other and agree on some level, but not overall, so here is my stance. There is no left vs right in the US, at least not in any way that leads to significant political representation. The Democratic party is not left. It funded a genocide and that contributed to them losing the last presidential election. When you talk about both sides in media, you're really talking about which political ideas are commodified for profit, which is on the right side of ideology. Left vs right is not relative to the country, it's defined ideologically. Most of the US political spectrum is right. Left is about sharing power and protecting people. Most people in power in the US are unwilling to do either of these things.

"Reluctantly" as in "here's a bunch of weapons, please don't use them to commit genocide as you've been doing". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

You are describing capitalism, which is very much a right-wing thing. Selling woke content, or whatever you want to call it, is decidedly right wing. Left vs right is about access to power and how it should be shared or not.

If ten people with 100M each need access to 1B to create something, they can associate. They want the same thing and together, they have the money for it.

I think that's missing some important aspects. We have reached total absurdity in how "content creators" compete for our attention. That means a few thing if you want to make money online by telling stories, at least enough for a decent living.

First, you cannot do that without dedicating significant time to it, and I mean more than a healthy amount of time to dedicate to earning an income. It's all or nothing with your time.

Second, you have to be some kind of psychopath, convinced that you are justified in competing extremely for people's attention. It's not about doing something cool and giving/selling it to people who appreciate it. It's about pushing buttons in brains to keep people quickly rewarded and addicted.

Third, you need some leverage against established content creators, because you're aiming to steal attention from established audience. Most likely this boils down to a lot of luck.

I'm sure there's some counterexamples to the first two points, and I expect they're outliers and/or early established.

I think your statement is a bit like saying that anyone can make music with current tools. It's true from a certain perspective, but success is explained by factors that are ignored by that perspective.

It is often a preliminary to producing results though. Not necessarily peacefully, and not always improvements, but results nonetheless. A number of revolutions come to mind.

Doesn't it value collaboration over competition? If that's not a valid definition of left vs right, I'm not sure what is.

The online version might be absolutely fine but it's also still a data sovereignty issue: it is provided and hosted by Microsoft, "your" data included. If the OS becomes so irrelevant that we use web versions of everything, then the questions and issues about data sovereignty that were raised regarding local apps need to be raised regarding these web apps (and I believe they are).

Who do you have in mind who did better than Netscape back then? The one thing IE did better was insert itself everywhere.

I think a number of people left not to retreat to an echo chamber, but because every post, every hit on X means money for Elon Musk.

Just like in Russia

This situation was created by the US attacking Iran, which made the world a worse place. No incorrect argument or mental gymnastics will change this fact, reality is stubborn. You take all the time you need to reconcile your world view with that reality.