web4.guide

You can live on the internet and still own your digital life

The last years have shown us what appears to be the endgame of the "enshittification" of the Internet. That is, mainstream internet services have become worse and worse to use, all in the name of increasing profits. Several companies that exist solely to monetize user-input content have recently crossed a line, and people are pissed. We are in the era of selling your own data back to you. Greed has made the internet so insufferable to use over the last decades, that some of us are jumping ship. Web4 is a breakaway from mainstream Internet consisting of decentralized services aiming to maximize usefulness for the owners and their users. If you are sick of websites you love being enshittified by greedy CEOs and optimization for advertising revenue, you have come to the right place.

Enshittification? Monetization of user data?

Most websites you use today exist to make money off the content you and other people have submitted. This model of operation can be called "edge-dominant computing", and has become very popular in recent years. The idea is that tricking the users into contributing content themselves is much cheaper than paying professionals to make it. It doesn't really matter who made the content after all - as long as there's enough of it and it's interesting, users will come.

This extends into social media as well - nowadays social media is used for many things outside keeping contact with friends and family. This includes staying informed on current world events, keeping up with interesting public figures' lives, and consuming entertaining content relevant to one's culture (both in terms of country/origin and social cliques).

There is nothing inherently wrong with making back your operating costs when running a website, nor is there anything inherently wrong with running a website as a business. However, when run as a for-profit operation, the website owner's interests are not aligned with yours. This is especially visible in social media, where their best interest is serving you with the most addictive, polarizing, and provoking content they can - anything to make you spend more time on their service. As a result, people find themselves unintentionally browsing an app for hours on end. It has certainly happened to your friends, and you've probably done the same at least once without realising it. The disconnect between our interests and the ones of the site owners is a conflict of interest, and consumers don't have many rights to be heard in the matter. As a result, modern sites makes us dumber and less nuanced thinkers only for some extra seconds of your precious attention. You gaining accurate knowledge is not an interest to them. Your mental health is not an interest to them. You wanting to moderate consumption is not an interest to them. These sites have shown in the past that they consider all your posts their property, and they feel entitled to a steady flow of new ones. They are willing to sacrifice the few joys and benefits you as the consumer once had, just in order to protect their cash flow.

We suggest with this website that sites profiting off user-generated content are unwanted, and that they are against your best interests. You can most likely quit these sites today, find better replacements, and experience an increased quality of life surprisingly fast.