The internet is becoming a dark forest, full of life that's retreated from public view, as private spaces like Facebook Groups and invite-only forums have grown
Requiem for a heap allocation Tweets: Tom Ffiske / @tomffiske : Wonderful write-up on the Dark Forest Theory of the internet. As the internet becomes an ever more hostile space, real conversation is retreating into the perceived safety of private Slack channels, invite-only message boards, and text groups: https://onezero.medium.com/... Dare Obasanjo / @carnage4life : The idea that everything you do online should be semi-public has gone further than I expected.In 2008, I told Mark Zuckerberg to his face that I thought opening up Facebook so students & their parents would be on the site would kill it. I was wrong.https://onezero.medium.com/ ... @medium : In the dark forest theory of the internet, everyone stays out of the spotlight provided by the mainstream web http://read.medium.com/AAT3c8L Natasha Lampard / @tashmahal : “web 2.0 has been replaced by a new ‘Web²’ era, where we live in many different internets, numbers increase hourly. The dark forests are growing because they provide psychological & reputational cover. We can be ourselves because we know who else is there” https://onezero.medium.com/... Fabio Chiusi / @fabiochiusi : “In response to the ads, the tracking, the trolling, the hype, and other predatory behaviors, we're retreating to our dark forests of the internet, and away from the mainstream” — The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet, by @ystrickler https://medium.com/... Mathew Ingram / @mathewi : “The internet of today is a battleground. The idealism of the '90s web is gone. The web 2.0 utopia — where we all lived in rounded filter bubbles of happiness — ended with the 2016 Presidential election” — @ystrickler https://medium.com/... Mathew Ingram / @mathewi : The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet by Kickstarter co-founder @ystrickler https://onezero.medium.com/... Anne Helen Petersen / @annehelen : a very interesting argument on the consequences of retreating to our own “dark forests” (FB groups, group chats, newsletters) of the internet: https://onezero.medium.com/... Jodi Ettenberg / @legalnomads : Interesting piece from @ystrickler about Internet ‘dark forests,’ the private spaces online where depressurized conversation is possible. If we all decentralized our online consumption, how would we coalesce? https://onezero.medium.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
OneZero's framing of the internet as a 'dark forest' gave a name to a migration already underway: conversation retreating from indexable public feeds into Facebook Groups, Slack channels, text threads, and invite-only forums, driven by hostility, harassment, and the sense that everything posted publicly is performance or surveillance bait. The piece landed amid a broader reckoning with what open-by-default social media had produced.
Subsequent coverage has kept confirming the arc rather than reversing it. The Verge's survey of the social web's fragmentation — Twitter imposing limits, Reddit alienating its users, Instagram converting into an entertainment surface — reads as the dark forest thesis playing out on the biggest platforms, while OneZero's own follow-up on Twitter Super Follows and Clubhouse showed platforms chasing the same users into low-volume, high-attention formats.
First-order effects
- Users and creators pull their conversations out of public timelines into Facebook Groups, Slacks, and invite-only boards, shrinking the pool of public, linkable discussion that platforms can surface and advertisers can reach.
Second-order effects
- Platforms respond by productizing privacy itself: Twitter's Super Follows and Clubhouse's rooms monetize small, gated, high-attention audiences instead of algorithmic scale, effectively selling the dark forest back to its refugees.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the public web consolidates into broadcast-and-entertainment surfaces while genuine discourse moves into unindexed private spaces — a structural split that echoes the slow media movement's argument for smaller, deliberate communities and makes discovery, moderation, and search progressively blind to where real conversation happens.
The trend: Social platforms are splitting into mass entertainment feeds on top and gated, trust-based communities underneath, with each moderation failure and algorithm change pushing more conversation behind doors.