Friction

The internet got worse when it got easier to use.

This is not a popular opinion. Making things easier is supposed to be good. Accessibility is good. Lowering barriers is good. More voices is good. All of that is true and the internet is still worse, and I may be old but I swear I am not yelling at clouds here.

The early internet had friction everywhere. You needed to know what a DNS record was. You needed a shell account or a dialup connection and a local ISP that someone had to physically maintain. You needed to learn a text editor before you could participate in anything. The friction was not intentional design. It was just the state of things.

But the friction had an effect. It filtered for a certain kind of person. Not smarter, not better; just someone who wanted to be there enough to figure out the tools. That changes what kind of participation happens.

I often recall in the 2010-2015 years (interesting political overlap there) that people often spoke of a “marketplace of ideas”. I genuinely wanted to believe in that. Sometime around 2020 I recall seeing the apt and modern retort: “an Amazon of Concurrency”. I think that better captures the atmosphere we are left with.

Cory Doctorow calls it (or something very adjacent to this) enshittification. Platforms are good for users, then good for advertisers, then good only for the platform. Once a platform reaches scale, its users are the product. Their attention is the inventory. The platform’s job is to maximize the value extracted from that inventory.

Friction interferes with extraction. Some users leave before they can be monetized. Some conversations stay small and weird instead of becoming content.

So the friction gets removed. And the thing that made the place worth being in disappears with it.

The dark forest theory (under abuse) says that when public spaces become hostile, interesting people retreat to smaller private ones. Group chats. Email lists. Invite-only forums. Places where the entry cost is knowing someone who is already there.

The cost of entry is not money. It is social. You have to be the kind of person that other people want to invite. This is a form of friction.

The interesting internet didn’t disappear. It moved to places that require a little more effort to find.

This site has no comment section. There is no reply button, no reaction, no share count. There is nothing to optimize against. The only metric I have is whether I think the thing I wrote is worth reading.

We will see if that turns out to be a better hedge against metrics than I expected.