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I find this really interesting! Let me ramble a wall of speech this article's way if you don't mind.

I agree with this minus the sentiment recent social media platforms are the "birth" or major driving force behind this.

In the mid 90's, any major discussion board, major search engine, or major online service was driven almost exclusively by corporate advertising coupled with anonymous acts of aggressive behavior. UseNet is an amazing example of this, where the very term "trolling" in an online context -originated,- with many discussions and user focuses driven by subtle or unsubtle corporate interests.

I also question the idea that only recently has web ventures turned profit. I would need sources cited for this claim. It's more accurate and even in line with the narrative of this article that only recently have web services been able to make a significant profit (with or without) advertising firms offsetting server costs via adviews/clicks, and even that is questionable. Citing Wikimedia which is a known money leak (or ocean) or Google services like YouTube is not exactly a good argument, since what they lose in raw cash value, they more than make up for in asset value.

The truth is, the internet hasn't really changed in its fundamental nature. There are just many more people exposed to it, and due to confirmation bias, we tend to focus on negative examples of our fellow man participating in this wonderful game we call the world wide web.

That said, to the article's suggestions...

1.] Stop using Facebook. // Sure, I'd love for Facebook to burn in a fire today if possible, but you're not going to convince people who see Facebook as useful to abandon Facebook to any level that will actually benefit you unless you can plant the notion it is harmful into the public conscious.

You don't even have to be a member of Facebook for its algorithms to develop a commercial "profile" of you, thanks to your friends who do use Facebook naively dumping boatloads of personal information on here. Just you quitting Facebook, or any popular social media service, is futile. That will change nothing, except maybe cut down on battery loss since the FaceBook mobile app isn't optimized and is always running at a low level.



2.] Stop using Google. // Yes, instead of giving Google your searches, give another company your searches. (Often times, even companies that compete with Google will sell searches to the same third party search aggregates!) This doesn't "fix" anything, it just redistributes the problem. Never trust a search engine to cover your privacy for you, regardless of their claims not to mine user data or log IPs. At the very least, everyday browsing through a sufficient VPN is more useful than swapping to a supposedly benign search engine.

3.] Start paying for the things you enjoy. // Ignoring the misinformed piracy argument semantics I'm seeing in this piece, how exactly does paying a mainstream artist through carefully regulated shop front ends that give them a minimal cut of the profit help improve the internet again? The notion here is that if we pay for content, we won't get advertised to, which... isn't... true? At all? I'm having a difficult time even understanding what the argument -is- with this point. As holier than thou as it claims to be about those damned hipster armchair bloggers touting free information, it seems to operate under the misguided assumption that if we pay for everything always, companies will stop performing bad practices that inconvenience us.

4.] Limit the content you post on message boards. // Ignoring the fact it's conflating a comment section on a video hosting website with bulletin board software or message boards, I'll roll with its vague definition of message boards and instead, focus on this line.

"It’s beyond me why YouTube thinks allowing leagues of racist comments on its site somehow improves its services or otherwise carries the populist torch of the Internet."

Yeah! It's.. beyond me why we would want to allow users to speak freely. As long as we police people's thoughts and define what racism is for others, I can't see the need to allow them to voice their views.

Snark aside, this entire suggestion is at best useless, at worst devolving the internet further. I've managed message boards before of private game servers with several thousand members - small sample size but it's given me a looksie into angry teenagers dropping each other's house addresses and threatening to kill each other and threatening to rape their sisters and other hormonal charged lunacy.

What it comes down to is, you can be as strict as you want to, and ban people as much as you want to - but there is always a way around IP or even MAC address bans, and those are our only tools.

If we start to impose "real IDs" or people's real life identities, then to punish these -dastardly trolls-, we also remove the ability to protect legitimate criticism from mob rule. We also remove the ability to protect people with unpopular but entirely legal views from mob rule. We limit our own personal freedoms to keep people playing nicely. Don't expect that to come about without criticism. Hell, for a simple example of where it can go wrong, go back to this article's point #1! Imagine if having a Facebook account, all the negatives included, was not compulsory but mandatory to navigate the internet.

5.] Demand transparency from content providers, and work together to create a Web that does what all new media should: set a stage to compliment and advance the human conversation. // ...Sure but, there are many differing views on how this should be accomplished. "Truth" should be prioritized over popularity of an answer but, when people vehemently disagree with what is "true" or a "fact," can or even should a content provider decide this for the end user? Our reviled Google who we earlier in this article said we should abandon is trying this right now!

Ultimately, this article paints early internet culture and their structures in a nostalgic, rose tinted glasses view that misses the fact much of the early internet was a porn sponsored world of lawless debauchery. It has some gloriously optimistic expectations of what certain changes would bring to the internet. And it advocates for egregious levels of censorship that could arguably make it impossible for "us" to reclaim the internet from a corporate filter, ever.

But, it also bashes Facebook and Google, and I myself am an armchair hipster blogger. So if people get behind all of this, I'm down! Burn Alphabet Inc. and Mark Zuckerberg's works!