Dark forest

Description of the current state of the "open web", where ads, tracking, pop-ups, scams, mis-information are at every turn of a user's journey, which is causing many to retreat to Cozy Web spaces that are smaller group and permissioned.

Maggie Appleton's Dark Forest and Cozy Web article puts it very succinctly:

The predators here are the advertisers, tracking bots, clickbait creators, attention-hungry influencers, reply guys, and trolls. It's unsafe to reveal yourself to them in any authentic way. So we retreat into private spaces. We hide in the cozy web.

Confusingly, Dark Forest by itself can be argued in both directions – that Dark Forest is both a space where one can be attacked when moving in the open, but that "protective forests" are where people can hide. In my formulation, these protective forests are the Cozy Web.

Against the Dark Forest is Erin Kissane's post that uses the reverse formulation.

The concept was recently popularized by the sci-fi book, Dark forest hypothesis (Wikipedia):

The dark forest hypothesis is the conjecture that many alien civilizations exist throughout the universe, but they are both silent and hostile, maintaining their undetectability for fear of being destroyed by another hostile and undetected civilization. It is one of many possible explanations of the Fermi paradox, which contrasts the lack of contact with alien life with the potential for such contact. The hypothesis derives its name from Liu Cixin's 2008 novel The Dark Forest, although the concept predates the novel.