Inertia

This is an unrefined thought, but it seems that a great amount of the tech world (and probably other industries) have pivoted to profit off of inertia first and foremost.

Ok, so to set this idea up, what I'm thinking about is how when internet tech was still pretty new and young there were sometimes controversies or whatnot where a company or network or website did something stupid and people banded together to route around them.

I don't have a specific example off hand, but thinking about how things like newsgroups would spawn subtopics, or forums would have a schism and then a whole new forum would sprout up elsewhere run by someone else. A popular website starts being loaded down with ads so someone starts up a competitor without ads. Stuff like that.

Somewhere along the line, though, the internet and websites and online services became "professional" and were no longer being run by what amounted to a single fickle dictator who could pivot on a dime and who held strong opinions about what was and wasn't good for their community or selves and were willing to act on them.

Suddenly it was teams in charge of things. It was bosses and owners and boards of directors watching the money flow. And now, no matter what the individuals actually running the infrastructure might think, few have the power to take matters into their own hands to right a perceived wrong.

To make matters worse, the tech landscape got more and more complex and, weirdly, confined. You can't just host an email server in your garage anymore (well, you *can* but it comes with a lot of caveats). Most ISPs in the US make it next to impossible to self-host anything because you don't get a real IP address or it's explicitly banned in the terms and conditions.

And, because the novelty of being online has worn off, if you do try to setup a small isolated community chances are no one will care - they'll just stay on Reddit or in their corner of YouTube or TikTok or something because that's where people go to find communities since it's where everyone else goes too. After all, who wants to make yet another user account and profile? Catch-22.

So I circle back around to my initial point - the size and scale and roadblocks that have been imposed over the years created a huge amount of inertia. A big site with thousands, tens of thousands, maybe even millions of users ends up being run by the kind of people that don't want to disturb the status quo because it's too valuable.

The inertia becomes a prison, of sorts, except when you're that big you think of it as a competitive advantage where it's better to close things off, lock things down, and get your tendrils into everything to keep as much of the people and money to yourself as possible.

And thanks to the leveraging power of computers, a relatively small team can run even a very large community like a royal court lording over their conquered lands and demanding tribute from the peasants - which they can do, because they've made sure the peasants have nowhere else to go.