"i think [site] is honestly just corporate internet 2. the thing about corporate internet 2 is that it's fundamentally corporate internet but with the purpose of convincing you it's the internet. i can write a blog post about this"
many users seem to have a distinction between corporate internet and non-corporate internet. i have my own such distinction, but it goes three ways. i distinguish between corporate internet and internet, but also between corporate internet and corporate internet 2. corporate internet 2 is a new phenomemon, but its tactics are anything but new
this includes all the obvious examples. google maintains google.com and its 50-vigintillion subsidiaries almost completely in the interest of expanding its business. fandom.com obviously exists to profit off the media-interests of people. mcdonalds.com is clearly intended to provide a larger platform for its business. etc
this also includes less obvious examples. instagram.com is nothing like the internet : it's run by a huge business, its ui/ux feels like a shitty squarespace template, and it behaves in a way that actively degrades the experience of its product (the user). most storepages are corporate internet : they are run by business entities with the intention of selling something and they're all based on the same disgusting fucking wix template
this is when corporate internet is disguised as internet. wikipedia.com presents itself as the bastion of free information. public opinion on whether this is true has shifted over recent years ; i am not opening this can of worms. the important thing is that they, pretty much by necessity, operate as a huge business. tumblr.com looks like a freer social media option which provides users their own spaces. it's literally twitter 2, though ; it has the generic bullshit waterfall layout and it's run by a (catastrophically devalued) company which is doing silly things like selling your data to big-business ai (opt-out, not opt-in).
you're here! the internet is the pseudo-anarchic, totally free (as in freedom, not as in free beer (link to free software foundation)), totally public, totally personal (as in personality, not always individuality, institutions can be internet too!) part of the modern web. personal blogs, project pages, and the like are all internet. spaces don't have to be small to be internet : scratch.mit.edu is a large-scale place run by an institution . it's still internet because it upholds all the values of a free web and largely does not exist to fund a larger organization
the core tenets of internet are not exclusive to operation and intent ; ideology is significant, too. a piece of internet should ideally function as a work of personal authorship to share ideas and experiences, but it should also function to support a free web and support other internet. if your site fails at this, even if you're just an individual without the intent to use your site for profit, you might just fall into the category of corporate internet 2
in reality, sites exist in a set of spectra that really describe where they sit in all this. it's definitely reductive to categorize them in the way i have - it's a dichotomy (or, i guess it's a trichotomy) that does not really exist - there are no real boundaries. this is true of all things. even so, i am interested in hearing others' takes about the world of internets and what internets they categorize sites into. tell me about them somewhere {you can probably find a suitable contact on my links page which needs to be updated as of writing this}