When the internet first arrived, it was gorgeous. It was like stepping into a beautiful hilled landscape with the trees yet to be planted. But instead of trees, we got billboards, and zombies.

Tried to shop for anything lately? It's all Temu and Shein, monopolising the shopping feed with advertising. It's even seeped into Marketplace. The diversity of the early years has given way to corporate monopolies - Amazon, Google, Meta. It's like the cool trendy marketplace where you used to get your groceries being razed by bulldozers and instead you have the bright lights of a mall. Even Etsy, the one site that supported homemade goods, is now just a place to buy Temu items.

Worse, these mega corporations control what we see through algorithms. We affectionately call them 'algos' here in Australia, but they're anything but friendly. No longer do we have organic discovery, but feeds driven by AI, advertising and curation we haven't personally and consciously chosen. I see the same reels my friends do. Joyful discovery is dead. Homogeneity is king.

^{Dartmoor, UK}

Instead, we're passive consumers of polished content - damn, I miss the days where I'd spy into someone else's world on the other side of the planet and even befriend them because they seemed my kind of people. These days everything is so heavily orchestrated and choreographed to trick the algo I can't even trust the authenticity of anyone anymore. Content creators scour the platforms to find what's working well and rehash content to fit in with trends. True originality is hard to find. I've been watching 'Great Art Explained' on Youtube and wonder at the incredible artists of the last 300 years. Now, we have AI. It is absolutely not the same. Someone even sent me an AI mashup of two favourite songs which made me want to vomit. Search for 'AI mashup' and you'll get pages of people trying to get you to sign up and sub for - you guessed it, AI mashup sites.

Platforms such as Instagram keep us in gated communities or walled gardens because they're farming our data, tricking us to stay so we don't interact with the broader web. If you've been lost in a time warp of Instagram reels you'll know exactly what I mean. And where is the broader web, anyway? Page 10 of Google?

We're surveilled, tracked and monitored, our data used to mainipulate us even further. Freedom of expression has disappeared. We're not anonymous. We're regulated, censored and threatened with shadowbanning and account deletion. We can't be private or anonymous anymore. We're overregulated, overcensored, overmoderated.

^Dartmoor

Search for a genuine review of a film online and you're met with corporate owned platforms that read the same. Most are written by AI. The 'good' articles are behind paywalls no one can afford but the wealthy, another sub we shave away in favour of paying our internet bill or buying food. You have to be a critical thinker to seek out diversity of voices and perspectives to form real opinions, but no one does that anymore. We read headlines and swallow bias and live in bubbles and think we are the ones who know the truth and everyone else is mad. Large scale discussions and polarised opinions are encouraged with click bait questions that help drive traffic.

There's no novelty or innovation with new platforms anymore - incremental improvements, maybe, but nothing that will rock the boat. If tech innovations happen, it's in the macro worlds of Apple or Google - small developers haven't got a chance against these mega systems.

I read somewhere that since 2017 half the internet is run by bots. Everyone should use the internet and believe nothing - it's more than likely fake news, even if they appear trustworthy. How can you truly learn in a landscape that feeds you disinformation and has vested interest? And with the rise of AI, you can't even trust what you see. We've moved beyond the fear of deep fake. It's shallow fake and we're all falling for it. No one looks closer. If I challenge the fake news or fake images that friends or family members share, I'm meant with a shrug. 'It's cool anyway' they say. Or worse: 'it might be true though.'

Is Hive simply a microcosm of the larger internet, mirroring the dead hills of a dream landscape we brought into being?

Arguably, it still has it's own form of censorship. Certain niches aren't favoured by the whales, and users flock to more popular communities in the hope of being curated with larger votes. Where money is concerned, the populace flocks where they're more chance of favour. Downvotes can make more radical thinkers shrink from the platform as it's hard to make their voice heard when a few bad players criticise by weight of opinion rather than engage in discussion or simply scroll on. Downvotes are absolutely useful to eliminate behaviour from vote farmers and plagiarists, but can be crippling for those who don't quite understand what they've done wrong.

^Dartmoor

Yet for a truly authentic experience, people can still create content within their passion areas and interact with human beings. Engagement isn't dead in the same way it might be on other platforms - we just need a bigger user base for it to truly come alive. Communities can encourage original and excellent niche content within their particular gardens, supporting it however they can and trying to get more eyes on it.

Uniformity and homogeneity is usually yawned at - post the same vanilla content or advertising for your business in the form of an AI written blog, and everyone gets bored enough to pay you no mind. Arguably, Hive should have advertising so the money is fed back into the development of the platform or promoting it more widely, but most reject it because we're here in this little forest because the hills around it have been razed by corporate greed.

There's still room for innovators here, for small developers who get to practice code and create cool things. Anyone can have a go - if it's terrible, we won't use or support it, but we'll see it, that's for sure, and we'll give it a go. The consensus mechanisms that drive HIVE are far better than the corporate algos.

We can read independent book and film reviews, discuss investment strategies with well versed finance gurus, get our fiction critiqued and even read, show off our art and photographs, fine tune our skills through practice, sharing and discussion. Sure, some days we have crickets, and new users can struggle to get a foothold, but that's improving as community leaders and larger stake holders make efforts to make them feel welcome and valued.

Hive may have it's flaws, but the view of the hills here is pretty nice. It's not dead yet.