Today, however, we’ve moved into a siloed web — and the line no longer applies. Information on one part of the internet is likely to stay there, and only a tiny percent of stories break through. Rather than one big community, the web is a community of communities. And often, they don’t overlap at all.
The siloed internet is, in part, a product of paywalls.
For paywalled news to spread, other sites must aggregate it. And aggregation is dying in the paywall era.
There are downsides to a no-longer-flat internet. Filter bubbles are legitimately concerning and have broken once-universal agreements on what is true. Polarization is worsening too. But the silos are here and not likely to disappear. The good news is that publications, once left for dead, are actually getting paid for their work. And if there’s one thing better than a newspaper that everyone reads, it’s many thriving newspapers, each making a go of it on their own.