2015 is the year the old Internet finally died

[Commentary] There is a very basic fear -- the idea that the Internet as we knew it, the Internet of five or 10 or 20 years ago, is going away as surely as print media, replaced by a new Internet that reimagines personal identity as something easily commodified, that plays less on the desire for information or thoughtfulness than it does the desire for a quick jolt of emotion. It's an Internet driven not by human beings, but by content, at all costs It's an Internet driven not by human beings, but by content, at all costs. And none of us -- neither media professionals, nor readers -- can stop it. Every single one of us is building it every single day.

The problem is scale. A larger, general-interest site can't be built purely atop longform, because longform takes time -- both for writers to produce and readers to read. Therefore, as both Buzzfeed and Gawker realized early on, well-done longform could be the steak, but it couldn't be the meal. The Internet has made it clear that the kinds of things that people want to read are sort of an endless collection of what's cool. And that might be a longform story, or it might be the quick, clicky little things that repackage the best flotsam and jetsam out there in a more presentable fashion. And if longform takes time, then aggregation is its opposite, easier to throw together in a few minutes with huge potential upside (though, it should be said, with much bigger potential for disaster, since everything is moving so quickly). Now, however, our articles increasingly seem to be individual insects trapped in someone else's web. The Internet has the exact opposite problem of every other medium. Instead of going from something for everybody to something for a large series of hyper-specialized niches, we're navigating the choppy seas where once stood an archipelago and increasingly stands a continent. As TV and music and even publishing become the internet, the internet is becoming everything else -- and it's taking so much of what seemed to make it special with it.