Am I the only one who thinks social media has destroyed the spirit of 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.
The internet has always been a collection of social media platforms: bulletin boards, Usenet, IRC, people hosting little personal sites and making contact with each other via email, etc. It got bad when big money arrived and brought in the general public. First is was platforms like AOL's chat rooms and forums, and later things like Facebook and Twitter. We are all living in eternal September now.
Exhibit A: this t-shirt from 1994
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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 probably not the only one.
However, the interest (on Lemmy-aligned circles at least) in self-hosting, reducing depedence on large tech companies, community building on smaller scale online and offline, has me excited again that the smaller counterculture can co-exist with the mainstream profit-motivated social media culture.
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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.
Not social media per sé, but definitely "the algorithm" that was introduced around ~2014 and has been tweaked by the likes of Cambridge Analytica to now provide us with endless ragebait.
MySpace was social media and had none of the toxicity.
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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.
The early Internet was social media, but it wasn't so corporatized to the point of being ruined.
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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 think you're confusing social media and late stage capitalism. Social media hasn't done anything to anyone, capitalism has used social media to further its own ends.
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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]Everyone clustered on like 4 websites for convenience, and then browsing the internet started to feel like wandering around different sections of the same department store: sterile, corporate, advertiser-safe, and everything's transactional. Plus, it made it incredibly easy for any party that wants to astroturf public opinion, because now they only have to set up shop on a few sites: botting comments, infiltrating moderator positions, abusing the algorithms.
We desperately need to break the internet's monoculture, and I think federated social media like this is a great start.
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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 don't think it was social media. To be honest with you, this is the worst thing I have ever said. Seriously! I swear to god, it was once the "normies" got on the internet. I think "normies" are socialized to be cruel, and they took that cruelty to the internet. I loved it when it was for the freaks and the geeks. It was the best of the best!
It took my favorite activity (reading) and turned it into a social one. An educational one too! It was amazing. There's still bits out here. I mean look at us. But there's a lot of trash on these sites too. Just filter, enjoy your echo chamber, and be open to people entering it with opposite opinions. In fact, be open to opinions all over the place, even in person. Just saying, I use this as reprieve. I don't need to work myself up, I want to chill and cool down with it.
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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.
Social media back then was making stuff you thought was cool and having friends and other weirdos across the Internet also enjoying the same things as you.
Social media today is juicing the algorithm to generate the most views, regardless of whether you like the content you're producing or not.
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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]I agree the internet feels a lot different than the eqrly 2000s, but breaking down what's different I can't pin anything concrete down.
There's pretty much no fundamental differences between how social media was and how it is now. People talk, share interests, get in arguments. What we feel is nostalgia for a wild west internet with less people and rules that will never exist again.
More people use the internet now so more people participate in the conversation. That's how it will be for the rest of human history probably.
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The internet has always been a collection of social media platforms: bulletin boards, Usenet, IRC, people hosting little personal sites and making contact with each other via email, etc. It got bad when big money arrived and brought in the general public. First is was platforms like AOL's chat rooms and forums, and later things like Facebook and Twitter. We are all living in eternal September now.
Exhibit A: this t-shirt from 1994
What was the state of the internet in 1994 that it would cause such resentiment?
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The early Internet was social media, but it wasn't so corporatized to the point of being ruined.
To expand on that, all media with a negligible barrier to entry is social media. Which describes the internet as a whole. The commodification of such media is both unnecessary and parasitic. The only thing "social media" adds is accessibility.
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This is true, though internet gatekeepers can keep people from being able to find these forums.
The extent to which that's possible is debatable.
I think it's simply that there's less incentive to find or to host those small forums.
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What was the state of the internet in 1994 that it would cause such resentiment?
My reflection on that period would lead me to suggest it was the mass "normie" invasion of nerd-space and the promotion of low-effort participation. I don't remember anything specific about that particular timeframe, though.
The internet was better when it wasn't big enough to be worth monetizing. And the signal to noise ratio has generally grown exponentially with participation. Which makes sense if you think about it.
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Social media back then was making stuff you thought was cool and having friends and other weirdos across the Internet also enjoying the same things as you.
Social media today is juicing the algorithm to generate the most views, regardless of whether you like the content you're producing or not.
The algorithm(s) and "For You" pages I think have done more damage to my ideal internet than anything else ever has.
I have a feeling that someday in the future we'll also see that the algorithm was also responsible for damage to the human mind and society as well.
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What was the state of the internet in 1994 that it would cause such resentiment?
94 was when it really took off and the hoi polloi started tuning in.
https://ourworldindata.org/internet
Be easy to make an argument for a few years later, but 1994 has always stuck in my mind as the take off point. By then there were "information superhighway" items all over the news, everybody got AOL disks, Windows 95 was right around the corner to take the pain out of PCs, stuff like that. That's the year I'd point to and say the internet was no longer a nerd thing.
1994: I was still fiddling with a 286 (WITH a math coproccesor I installed!), way beyond my skills at the time. LOL, my gf and I had to drive across town a beg a local IBM guy to give us a copy of the BIOS on a floopy when ours crash. He acted like Neo giving Choi the disk, "Yeah, I know. This never happened. You don’t exist."
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Not social media per sé, but definitely "the algorithm" that was introduced around ~2014 and has been tweaked by the likes of Cambridge Analytica to now provide us with endless ragebait.
MySpace was social media and had none of the toxicity.
Exactly. The algorithm is literally designed to stop people from thinking about what they actually care about. Of course that has caused deterioration of every aspect of human society to some degree.
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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.
Not the only one, but it's the walled garden platform approach.
The idea (from around 2010ish) was that every platform is an app and every app is everything. A company buys up other smaller companies until you have a payment system, a marketplace, a VOIP system, advertising, job posting boards, 4 different waya to share media, etc. etc.
While the tech world sold this as, and actually viewed this as, some organic online super village, it wasn't. It was a series of shit stripmalls adjacent to a Walmart in a shitberg town on a big freeway linking other shiberg towns with Walmarts. Sterile, restrictive, one size fits all dipshits kind of garbage. There's a kind of person that thrives in the parking lots of Walmarts and stripmalls in shitberg towns, and they thrive on social media, too.
Lemmy reminds me more of early internet as well, but also refined by the common language of those platforms as a common starting point. It's a niche, and it's not for everyone. But it is for you, welcome.
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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.
Cuckerberg
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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.
It's not social media per se. It's capitalism. The Internet was this vast frontier, where you could meet anyone. Little communities formed, we all just talked, and self-regulated any bad behavior. It was a gift economy, we all freely shared knowledge, files, culture.
In the past 20 or so years, economies of scale took over. Corporations bought up the server space and aggressively shut down small communities. Community is discouraged, keep scrolling and click on the ads! Marketing killed 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'm not old enough to have known the old internet, but the photo- and video-based social media never felt attractive to me. The only social media that I used was Reddit, but now I'm here. I appreciate the genuine people speaking their own mind for the sake of speaking around here, instead of the vapid, superficial and clout-chasing ""people"" (read: [fascist] bots) of other websites.
