2015 is the year the old internet finally died

"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... longform could be the steak, but it couldn't be the meal... 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... Social media has, essentially, turned every content provider into a syndicator... And the best syndicators were always those who could take the most crowd-pleasing stuff... And if you work in online media, that's terrifying... our articles increasingly seem to be individual insects trapped in someone else's web" - 2015 is the year the old internet finally died - Vox