Am I the only one who thinks social media has destroyed the spirit of the internet?
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We could go back to the old internet any time we wanted, but people have been supping on the convenience aspect of having everything bundled into easy-to-digest "apps" that they would have to deprogram themselves first and come to understand that finding shit on the old internet used to take work. Small wonder that people hear that X (formerly Twitter) is going to be the "everything app" and like the idea of that. I personally find it horrifying how many people are glued to social media, and meanwhile I've never had a Facebook account, never had Twitter, never had TikTok, and I'm still doing just fine.
We let corporations get their sticky fingers on everything, so now everything has to be profitable or it isn't worth anybody's time. Even YouTube videos are now all about maximizing engagement, interaction, and viewer retention so that the uploader can collect a paycheck from Google. I don't give a fuck about whatever excuses they use to justify it, people still made great quality content before YouTube partnered with people for revenue sharing.
If TOR wasn't so godawfully slow, I'd be using TOR and visiting .onion sites for everything. It perfectly recreates that "old internet" feeling of web design that has function over form and small communities built around niche topics.
What would speed up Tor?
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Mostly because it brought boomers into the Internet and they the proceeded to infest the rest of it.
Listen young man... Boomers INVENTED the original internet!
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Whenever I get overwhelmed by the modern web, I go to http://wiby.me/ and click "surprise me..."
It's a search engine that only spits out "real" webpages that were made by people like you and me. Very refreshing.
https://neocities.org/ is great too
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The emergence of social media has destroyed all the small communities to standardize communication and information.
It's a bit of a digital version of rural exodus. And since 2017/2018, I've noticed that everything that, in my opinion, represented the internet has disappeared.
I've known Lemmy for a few hours and I feel like I'm back in the early spirit of the internet.
wrote last edited by [email protected]Yup. It discouraged people from being anonymous and made stupid website accounts be extremely valuable to people.
So it's not about having a conversation with people it's about saying the right things so your account becomes more popular. You don't want to change your opinion on anything because people are following your account because they liked the thing you've said in the past. A stupid website account is a major part of your identity and your past opinions are also part of your identity.
So something that might've been just some weird phase in a small part of your life becomes a calcified part of your identity. The stupid shit you said in the past is part of who you are forever.
There's pressure to get out your opinion to get out your "hot take" before everyone else, so that you'll get all of the attention instead of someone else who got their hot take before you did. Hot takes are obviously going to be poorly thought out and people in a rush to get them out are easily manipulated. Then they get calcified and it results in people on willing to die on some dumb hill.
Because of all of this, people got dumbed done to the point where social media is basically just prison rules now. Gotta join some gang to survive, the gangs are determined by ethno-religious identity and survival is all about making your gang stronger than the other gangs. It would be funny if this nonsense didn't leak into reality, but since a lot of people's social media identity is a major part of their real life identity, all of the internet nonsense impacts the real world.
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What would speed up Tor?
It's slow by design, for better encryption. Faster fibreoptic cables maybe? A faster speed of light might help?
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Just out of curiosity, what would the Star Trek equivalent be outside of eurocentric experience?
Three Body Problem?
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What is UseNet ?
Internet history. An old protocol originally for discussion, nowadays also to sail the seven seas, if you know what I mean. It predates the web by more than a decade.
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i still don't follow you,
how is it that you don't mean what your said. and assuming you meant what you said is wrong?
Oh oh this is the part of Magellan's Journey where he had problems I guess. Cuz that didn't make a lick of sense.
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The emergence of social media has destroyed all the small communities to standardize communication and information.
It's a bit of a digital version of rural exodus. And since 2017/2018, I've noticed that everything that, in my opinion, represented the internet has disappeared.
I've known Lemmy for a few hours and I feel like I'm back in the early spirit of the internet.
You're not alone at all. The old Internet died the day Facebook became the dominant social media app and gave the corpo their first real foothold into the digital sphere since the Dot Com Bust. It's not a space for free expression and information sharing anymore. Now it's all fucking ads, slop, and grifting.
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I just gotta say, I felt that switch too around that time. 2016-2019ish. Something about how Instagram moved away from encouraging posts of your life to family//friends for pushing an influencer/celebrity sphere. People stopped sharing their lives, ordinary content wasn’t ranked as high. And then the other social platforms copied it
I think it's way earlier than that. Early Facebook was horrible. But everyone bought into it.
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Exactly. The internet was always social, connecting people. Capitalism and greed have ruined the internet.
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The emergence of social media has destroyed all the small communities to standardize communication and information.
It's a bit of a digital version of rural exodus. And since 2017/2018, I've noticed that everything that, in my opinion, represented the internet has disappeared.
I've known Lemmy for a few hours and I feel like I'm back in the early spirit of the internet.
I have been here for a few months and Lemmy is gonna disappoint you too, my friend.
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I think it's way earlier than that. Early Facebook was horrible. But everyone bought into it.
The early years of Facebook as a teenager were great for me! No advertisements, just friends and friends of friends posting updates about their thoughts, activities, and photos. Somewhere in my college years (2011-15) it definitely got worse but not to a degree I’d call ‘bad’. Not disagreeing or anything, just sharing!
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The small communities are still there, you just don't visit them because you are on social media (like lemmy). Forums are still there. IRC is still there. Hell, even BBS and Usenet is still there if you really want to go that way.
Yeah but honestly who uses Usenet anymore if not to download binaries.
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Internet history. An old protocol originally for discussion, nowadays also to sail the seven seas, if you know what I mean. It predates the web by more than a decade.
Also you could go to a niche technical forum and find some of the planet's bes specialists of the material. For computing, you'd often see the people that built everything (from software to hardware). It was truly a world forum at a level that things like Twitter never got close to.
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It's slow by design, for better encryption. Faster fibreoptic cables maybe? A faster speed of light might help?
I started a serious answer and then read the last part. Well played.
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The emergence of social media has destroyed all the small communities to standardize communication and information.
It's a bit of a digital version of rural exodus. And since 2017/2018, I've noticed that everything that, in my opinion, represented the internet has disappeared.
I've known Lemmy for a few hours and I feel like I'm back in the early spirit of the internet.
Pretty much but don't let that stop you from posting in other place. I try to make habit of posting in game forums of games I'm playing in. Sometime they have decent off-topic section where you can talk about other stuff. Only normies stick to social medias, us nerds stick to real internet.
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The emergence of social media has destroyed all the small communities to standardize communication and information.
It's a bit of a digital version of rural exodus. And since 2017/2018, I've noticed that everything that, in my opinion, represented the internet has disappeared.
I've known Lemmy for a few hours and I feel like I'm back in the early spirit of the internet.
I feel like it's a mix of quite a few things, social media is DEFINITELY a big part of the problem but the monetisation of EVERYTHING is the main problem.
When the Internet was becoming more mainstream around the world (late 90s) most people who put content on there didn't do it for money, they did it just to share knowledge/thoughts or just be part of a small niche community.
This meant while there was less content it was more meaningful, and it got to the point quickly as it didn't need to show you ads etc.
Recipie sites show this perfectly, people used to just post family recipes in cooking forums, now it's all personal blogs riddled with ads splattered between the person's life story and multiple requests to subscribe to related guff.
Ultimately the goal of the Internet shifted from "sharing knowledge/communicating" to "show as many ads as possible". This makes 90% of each site filler to stop you getting to the 10% too quickly, so you get snagged on ads etc.
This is why AI is great for companies, they can put in the important 10% and have it make up the 90%, but it's just adding more noise to the Internet.
Also pair this problem with search engines that now take advantage of the noise to provide "summary" blurbs which mean you don't even visit the sites directly so they don't get the revenue, the search engines do, I think there is a term for this "one click results" or something.
Its such a shame, I loved the Internet from like 1995-2005, you could search for something and get really good information and facts on the subject quickly. Now the same sort of things are lost amongst the filler sites that just aggregate information and regurgitate it as their own, or just out uninformed opinions (maybe even AI results) as content as if it's from experts etc.
I could go on for ages on the subject as there are so many facets to the problem but I can't see any real solutions, it's just a midden heap.
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Randall published this on February 20, 2008.
You just gave me the biggest flashback to a comic made by Endling.
What a blast from the past.
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Yeah but honestly who uses Usenet anymore if not to download binaries.
Approximately the same amount of people as 30 years ago. It's only that now they are a tiny part of the internet, dwarved by TikTok and Facebook.
