Am I the only one who thinks social media has destroyed the spirit of the internet?
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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.
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“The first duty of every Starfleet officer is to the truth — whether it’s scientific truth, or historical truth, or personal truth! It is the guiding principle on which Starfleet is based.”
“We work to better ourselves and the rest of humanity.”
— Jean-Luc PicardSome of the basic tenants of Star Trek society are inclusion and shared progress. Elitism and exclusion are how we got to the mess we find ourselves in.
A better lesson is responsibility for the "nerds." You all sold your talents and abilities to salespeople and conmen instead of seeing the value in yourself. Then, you got manipulated into building a dystopian technology that entraps the common people instead of liberating them.
They needed guidance and you gave them your insecurity instead. The evil desires the technology as it is does not have the intellect to manufacture it. That requires complicit "nerds."
So you have to found Starfleet and hire the nerds yourself. They won't organize on their own.
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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.
I would not consider Lemmy social media. Forums are few and far between, IRC is barely still kicking and Usenet (as it was) simply doesn't exist.
I was curious about Usenet awhile ago, was it still linked computers mirroring information like the old days? No, it more or less simply linked usenet providers at this point.
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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]The feeling you're talking about pretty much always happens when you find a small community. Like when you move to a small town and life just somehow feels more personal. Those are still around, they just aren't well known (but they never really were). I mean it's like there are a lot of very large cities today but small towns are still there 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.
Some of my best memories online are in golden era Tumblr, which was a pretty big social media. So I don't think social media, per se, is the issue.
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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.
wrote last edited by [email protected]So I will preface my comment with the fact that I hate Internet ads and do everything within my power to block and/or avoid them. Aside from being annoying they're a blatant security and malware risk, and I avoid them for that reason alone.
That being said, hosting websites gets pretty expensive pretty fast when lots of people come to your site, especially with the advent of much higher bandwidth media that goes along with better quality images and video.
In my opinion the fact that the majority of people just have an expectation that everything online should be free is THE problem. I was there when the Internet was free and open and without ads. That was the culture, and the root of the issue we have today is that that culture is the foundation of the general expectation that it should continue to be so.
But that's not sustainable with the costs involved in hosting today. Shit costs money yo, why should other people bear that so you can search for recipes for free without it being annoying for you?
The fact that nobody is willing to pay for content via subscriptions or paid apps is literally why the ad-based model is the overwhelming majority of the Internet, and apps, and why data collection/sales is so rampant.
Web development and running a webpage is not easy. Even for those that are skilled enough that it's easy for them, it takes a ton of time. Usually multiple people's time for any site with enough visitors to make it a good site. App development is hard and takes a skill set that requires a lot of training or time investment to learn. Why should all that go for free for you?
Until people are willing to pay for content they find valuable the Internet will be a hell hole ridden with ads. YouTube ads are awful, but do you have any idea how much it costs to run YouTube? You think someone should just absorb that out of the goodness of their hearts? Ridiculous.
The goal of the Internet is still to share information and communicate, but all the hardware and bandwidth and time costs real dollars, and the only way for most sites to recoup that is via ads because people just won't pay anything if given an option, they'll just go to another site that has free content, because there's SO MUCH stuff that you can generally find what you want, for free with ads, somewhere else.
There's only two possible solutions that I see:
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everyone starts being willing to pay for content they find valuable. I don't see this happening. There's too many people that share your opinion without taking into account what it costs to actually run a modern website.
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some complicated type of system that directly pays websites for use, based off of usage from people. I think this is almost too complicated to implement that it's likely impossible with today's Internet. If we want to also maintain privacy/anonymity when surfing I can't see how this can ever work - so unless we have some future system where people are uniquely identifiable on the Internet, and then some additional system that somehow "fairly" compensates websites for traffic from users, this won't happen. It would need to involve ISPs, their customers, and web site owners in some coordinated payment system to work.
Not to sound too preachy but to me your comment comes off as super entitled.
I pay for apps that I think are valuable, even ones with no cost like Signal. Because I value what they provide. I subscribe to sites that I find valuable enough to do so when it's an option. I abhor data collection and ads and I fight them without prejudice. But even I don't think I pay enough directly to offset how much I cost providers, I'm sure I don't, but that's mostly laziness because it's a pain to pay every site directly so I donate to the ones I really appreciate and use heavily. If I could pay my ISP for my link and then have a direct credit system that throws dollars and cents directly into website coffers as I use them, that would be great - but I don't want to give up my privacy either, so.... Yeah.
Long story short, ad-based content is going nowhere until there's a fundamental shift in either people or how the Internet operates.
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I would not consider Lemmy social media. Forums are few and far between, IRC is barely still kicking and Usenet (as it was) simply doesn't exist.
I was curious about Usenet awhile ago, was it still linked computers mirroring information like the old days? No, it more or less simply linked usenet providers at this point.
IRC is as active as it has always been. It was never a high throughput system, you can barely keep track of more than 5 people talking.
Forums are still kicking as well, you have car owner forums for basically any make and model, Hobby Forums, specialist Forums (house building kitchen or gardening just to name a few I consulted recently).
Yeah, they don't have the scale of Facebook, they never had.
And lemmy, reddit, Mastodon and Co are very much social media. What are they if not?
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IRC is as active as it has always been. It was never a high throughput system, you can barely keep track of more than 5 people talking.
Forums are still kicking as well, you have car owner forums for basically any make and model, Hobby Forums, specialist Forums (house building kitchen or gardening just to name a few I consulted recently).
Yeah, they don't have the scale of Facebook, they never had.
And lemmy, reddit, Mastodon and Co are very much social media. What are they if not?
wrote last edited by [email protected]Lemmy isn't social. It's just forums aggregated. One could use it as a social app, and some people do, but it really is not necessary or even really welcomed.
I have seen estimates of a reduction of 50 to 75 percent in the number of forums over the last 15 years. There are certainly a lot less. People go to reddit or discord these days.
Same with IRC but the decline is even higher.
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Lemmy isn't social. It's just forums aggregated. One could use it as a social app, and some people do, but it really is not necessary or even really welcomed.
I have seen estimates of a reduction of 50 to 75 percent in the number of forums over the last 15 years. There are certainly a lot less. People go to reddit or discord these days.
Same with IRC but the decline is even higher.
I'd love to see the methodology for those estimates, because I see more every year, not less. IRC stays flat.
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I'd love to see the methodology for those estimates, because I see more every year, not less. IRC stays flat.
Go look at the major irc chat hosts. Add up daily users. Then compare that number to the estimated users in 2005-10.
