The World Wide Web Has Been Rotting for Years (Quality, Accuracy, and Depth Consistently Decreasing)
The number of active sites fell back to the level it was at 4 years ago: (never mind that many of those new ones are spamfarms/LLM slop)
The World Wide Web has sadly become a platform of hate, violence, and cybercrimes. Even as recently as this month we were subjected to cybercrimes (those were reported to the police, which came here to collect evidence of the crimes). Some lunatics think they're above the law and they use the Net to carry out their crimes.
In the past people said that the Web had both "good" and "bad" and that the good outweighed the bad. Well, that may no longer be the case and probably hasn't been for years. Even Wikipedia deteriorated greatly. It's not about how many hours are put into it; it's about whose hours and who sponsors those hours [1, 2]. Wikipedia is big business now and the key word is... business. Many people write 'encyclopedia' entries about themselves and their own companies, albeit usually by proxy (to bypass rules and restrictions). So it gravitates towards shameless self-promotion, i.e. the opposite of what encyclopedias used to mean.
If the Web becomes a digital Sodom and Gomorrah, fewer people will use it. If fewer people bother, more sites will go offline, sending the Web circling even faster down the drain.
Too much of the Web in 2024 is just marketing, not information, as even articles are often just PR disguised as news. This is awful because it means "researching on the Web" just means "exposing oneself to PR", i.e. absorbing deceit or believing the best liar/s. ZDNet is a very recent example of this.
There are also hate campaigns, like the social control media-fuelled slanderous petition against RMS (started by IBM and GNOME in March 2021). Thankfully there was a counter-petition, which got about twice as many signatures, serving to at least make a point.
With 3.5 days left (sans further extension/s), the FSF is just 75 new members short of the goal, which was 200.
Software Freedom and the Web have long been connected in a number of distinguishable ways. If we lose Software Freedom, we'll also lose the Web. Pay attention to the latest evil move of Mozilla. Because Mozilla is now run by GAFAM executives. █