Surveillance capitalists have built a truly miserable internet.

I've been researching local newspapers, and the problems they face, lately, and one of them is that none of the social media sites allow them to get any visits from their followers because they either significantly de-rank posts with links off-site or it costs money to reach followers with links, or both. Of course Google scraping their sites and summarizing is another symptom of the same problem; FAANG wants all the revenue and a monopoly on what you see. Every penny every eyeball. None for small businesses, none for independent media, none for individuals.

The local newspapers are already cooked. Because of what you say, and because Alden Global already owns most of them and has fired 90% of the staff. My hometown paper features about one local story per week now, plus two copy pasted booking reports (I can tell because there’s some kind of encoding error that always eats hyphens, so people’s hyphenated names are always CamelCased instead. They sold their building 10 years ago and now operate out of a small office with about two desks.

Have any of them seriously considered going back to print-only?

> Surveillance capitalists have built a truly miserable internet.

The way I saw it put recently: the internet used to be a library and now it's a store.