> Their (public school) teachers senselessly already tell them to avoid it. :-(

Teachers have been telling students to avoid it since the beginning, this is not a new development. If anything, I think teachers may be more accepting of it than in the past, particularly for finding citable sources.

My teacher never told us to avoid Wikipedia. They just told us not to cite Wikipedia directly. Multiple high school and college professors told us to read Wikipedia got general context building, and to read the citations to find relevant sources.

That of course being the point of an encyclopedia; you're generally not supposed to cite it, right? It's a guide to other sources.

> So why not Wikipedia?

- Cheap to host, just text and images

- Funded by non-profit with too much funding

- All images are permissively licensed

- Easily archived

- Easily forked

The only potential "death" I can ever see happening to Wikipedia is the kind that happens from some kind of fracturing, similar to what we often see with fan wikis. But this kind of outcome could be a good thing really, multiple competing Wikipedia's would probably help keep each other honest, and wouldn't functionally be too different than the non-english sections of Wikipedia that already exist.

If anything I'm a bit concerned that Wikipedia might be getting a bit too influential than an encyclopedia aught to be.

> Funded by non-profit with too much funding.

Right. The Wikimedia Foundation keeps trying other projects. They think they are supposed to grow. This leads to increasingly obnoxious demands for more contributions. "By 2022, it employed around 700 staff and contractors, with annual revenues of $155 million, annual expenses of $146 million, net assets of $240 million and a growing endowment, which surpassed $100 million in June 2021."

It's the disease of universities - too many administrators.

Too much money by what metric?

Either way, it functions but I feel it's simply a tool for 99.9% of people. They don't read the in depth heated arguments, they looks something up, get brief context, and dip. What they do with that information is honestly no better or worse than any news organization.

Ideally we teach to identify and take bias into account, but we've been at a trend for a while now to try and regulate tech instead of society.

> - Cheap to host, just text and images

I doubt it's cheap at this level of traffic.

The surprising rebirth of podcasts is the only standout in that list.

It's as if blogs became popular again. Though the days of simple RSS feeds with a high signal to noise ratio are probably long behind us. (I know some are still around, but I mean popular in the way podcasts are now).

> Their (public school) teachers senselessly already tell them to avoid it. :-(

Weren't they doing that from the beginning? I get the feeling this feeling has gone down not up.

>I don't think Wikipedia will die for any specific technical or political reason. I just think it will die because everything else that was wonderful from 2009 or before already has, so why not Wikipedia?

It still seems to be surviving. Editor count may be down but a lot of the articles that have to be written already exist. It may stop improving much and only include new events but I don't think it will die until there's a replacement. Maybe people will just consult LLMs for general information and never visit Wikipedia?

I sadly agree with everything you said, except would add that Google Maps has already died for many users outside of urban areas. Satellite view has always been great for scouting outdoor areas but the app falls apart if you actually go anywhere with poor service and try to use it.

One of the most basic features, saving a pin on a map, broke years ago and despite many complaints on their support forum it hasn't been fixed. Directions can be terrible in less traveled areas, and dangerous if followed blindly since they will happily lead you down roads that require 4x4 or are totally impassible. Not to mention saved offline maps are unreliable and the UI clutter has gotten drasticaly worse over the years.

Maps still works fine for the typical things a Google emplyee cares about like getting directions in a well traveled city or finding places to shop, but it's only a matter of time before those usecases get crushed under the ever-building pressures of short term monetization, enshittification, and Google's general apathy and lack of care for users.

Trying to use Google Maps inside Germany due to poor mobile is a nightmare.

Trying to use Google Maps in France usually ends up being send down a dirt road or up a mountain.

Trying to use Google Maps to check my train the other day and I showed the next train and then a train 2 hours later, I had to put the depart time to 1 minute after the train leaving to see the next one.

I've said for years now the product owners of Google Maps are some of the most incompetent on the planet for the size of app they have.

You forgot Digg

Nowadays, everybody wanna browse like they know the next big site, But when they click, it's the same old hype, Just a bunch of reposts, nothing quite like, And web surfers act like they forgot about Digg.

Nowadays, everybody wanna share like they've found the freshest link, But when they scroll, it's closer to the brink, Just echoes of the past, faster than you blink, And online crowds act like they forgot about Digg.

>I just think it will die because everything else that was wonderful from 2009 or before already has

Assuming this is true, what are the leading hypotheses? Regression to the mean? Eternal September? I know everyone likes to talk about "enshittification", but what is the actual mechanism?

Since this is HN, someone's going to say "capitalism", but "capitalism" doesn't explain why Google search results get worse or Facebook is too annoying.

Oh that's easy. Dotcom Boom and Bust ended one era of the web right around 9/11, and you get a weird era between 2001 and the release of the iPhone where there's a lot of content posted on Newgrounds or flash game portals like Miniclip. An era where people still got information from Magazines and got demo discs, and people were discouraged from sharing their real name or personal information online instead of being required to provide it in order to create an account. Steve Jobs refused to put Flash support in the iPhone justifying it through security reasons but the real reason being it undermined the walled garden and iPhone app marketplace, and Android didn't think it would be worth it either, leading to even Adobe dropping support in 2011 ending that chapter of the internet entirely. When 100% of your users access a website through a desktop computer you are going to design it one way. When half your users are mobile and half are desktop it's going to be designed a different way.

That's honestly a really interesting point, I never thought about it but there was something magical about the Flash era

> capitalism

not dismissing other points your making or questions you're asking, but what happens with search results is a phenomenon that's more or less related to monopoly power - so as they (Google) control more, the classical theories behind capitalism no longer hold. For example, they provide worse search, but there is no close second. Even if there is a close second, that "other guy" is unable to afford the 60+ billion Google is paying to other companies to make them the default.

Competition is a double edged sword. More competition means businesses are liable to go bankrupt if they don't optimize for profit above all else, ethics be damned. Less competition means lazy monopolies. If you're anti-monopoly, it's hard to think of a bigger "lazy monopoly" than the government.

There isn't a simple solution here.

What you think of as “the classical theories about capitalism” are after-the-fact rationalizations which reflect neither the motivation for the development of capitalism (class struggle between the mercantile class and the feudal aristocracy) nor its actual operation in the real world, and which were developed defensively in response to the original (and critical) theory about capitalism-as-an-existing-system, which absolutely does not cease to hold in the presence of monopoly, or view the emergence and maintenance of such a condition as aberrant.