Am I the only one who thinks social media has destroyed the spirit of the 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.
If I had a lot of money I would fund the creation of a new search engine. It would operate entirely on a white list model. And every website on it would be reviewed by people, for people. No posts from any social media site would be allowed; only small webpages. To be featured in the engine, sites would have to have verifiable human origins. So personal blogs made by real people or small businesses with actual physical addresses that can be fully verified in the real world. In order to get your business featured, you would have to apply, and someone would physically have to visit you in order to verify your authenticity. Oh, and any website that uses AI in any form would simply be ineligible to appear on the search engine.
Yes, this would result in a drastically reduced pool of potential sites, but what remains would be absolute gold.
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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.
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.
You're describing AOL. This is nothing new. And just as AOL failed and faded, so will the social media giants.
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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."
The nerds got their wish granted in the most monkeys-paw way possible. For 20 years or so, computer nerds were trying to tell everyone about the internet. They saw the potential and what it could be. They were early adopters, and they wished that everyone could appreciate this wonderful thing they had discovered or helped invent.
Well, they got their wish...
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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.
Yeah. Yeah it's just you my dude. There's no way I've ever heard that sentiment before on websites or other posts.
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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.
The real problem - how do you deal with bots? Sure, we could start a new nerd movement to say, revive web rings and personal websites. But with LLMS and other AIs, how do you keep that whole ecosystem from just being flooded with AI content?
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MySpace was social media and had none of the toxicity.
Usenet was Social Media and it had allllll the toxicity.
Randall published this on February 20, 2008.
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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.
Truth. We need to massively regulate social media. If I had my way, I would prohibit any large social media site from offering any kind of content stream algorithmically targeted to a single user.
This wouldn't be a restriction on speech. You could still have your website and publish whatever you wanted. You could still have sites where people can upload user content. But something like YouTube would look far different. YouTube could have one main page of content they show everyone, but they couldn't have individual feeds for individual users. If you wanted to find content not on the main page, you would have to find it yourself. You would have to find channels, subscribe to them, share recommendations with friends, etc. If people want to create their own curated content feed, that's fine. But they have to be the ones that do it.
We don't even need to ban social media. What we need to completely ban is individually-targeted algorithmic content. That's what's lead us to the insanity we are currently experiencing. And this should apply to everyone, not just kids. If anything adults need this more than kids do.
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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.
Its not so much social media that ruined it, as capitalism and centralization.
Forums themselves are a form of social media, and they're (mostly) great. For Reddit and Lemmy, debatably the best part is the social elements, like the comments sections. The problem isn't the interaction or the "social" nature of it. Its that these platforms have turned into psudo-monopolies intent on controlling people and/or wringing them for every penny.
Thats not to say toxicity and capitalistic exploitation didn't exist before either. The term "flame war" is older than a lot of adults today. Unlike today though, platforms were both more decentralized meaning they were easier to manage and users could switch platform, and were less alorithmic meaning that users could more easily avoid large, bad-faith actors. You'll notice the Fediverse have both these qualities, which is part of why its done so well.
IMO, the best fix to this, would be twofold. A) break up the big monopolies and possibly the psudo-monopolies. Monopolies bad, simple enough. B) Much more difficult, but I believe that what content a site promotes, including algorithmically, should be regulated. Thats not to say sorting algorithms should be banned, but I think we need to regulate how they're used and implemented. For example, regulations could include things like requiring alternative algorithms be offered to users, banning "black box" algorithms, requiring the algorithns be publicly published, and/or banning algorithms that change based on an individual's engagement. Ideally, this would give the user more agency over their experience and would reduce the odds of ignorant users being pushed into cult-like rabbit-holes.
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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.
Algorithm curated content driven by engagement doesn't deserve to be called social media any more. The Feed, seems apropriate, malnourishing as it is.
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The real problem - how do you deal with bots? Sure, we could start a new nerd movement to say, revive web rings and personal websites. But with LLMS and other AIs, how do you keep that whole ecosystem from just being flooded with AI content?
I honestly don't know. It's going to be a big problem. LLMs are capable of having this exact convo we're having without giving away the game.
Some sort of personal vouching system? Ever changing "human tests"? I'm not sure it'll be enough.
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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.
Most people aren't made for the internet.
Most people can't handle the type of information. Most people fall for rage-bait, hate-inducing, right-wing propaganda.
We need to find a way to make the internet a thing where there's only people on it who actually want to use the internet in a healthy way.
One way to do this is to say no to commercialized parts of the internet. Say no to all commercial platforms selling ads or selling your data. These are full of rage-bait and only attract the worst in humans.
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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.
I also like zombocom
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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.
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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 blame social media at all. The Internet was, and still is, a communications platform. Some form of "social media" has always existed on the internet even if they were not called that back then.
I blame doing shit for the sole purpose of making money to be what has fucked up the internet. At least it's only fucked on the surface. The real Internet still exists, it's just not right out in the open where any random normie can find 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.
wrote last edited by [email protected]I fucking hate anyone on the internet who starts with "am I the only one..." Its so tired, lazy, lacks creativity, and has a touch of narcissism or inability to be self-aware.
But this!
Holy shit. For anyone to truly think they are the only ones to have considered social media to be such a bad thing with 7-8 billion of us and social media for 20 fucking years.
Absolute garbage. Get a mirror and do some reflection OP. Holy fucking shit.
And for the record.... NOBODY is the only one for anything. Pick a different I tro for once. Holy god damned shit.
I can only hope some twatwaffle responds to me merely saying "This."
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If I had a lot of money I would fund the creation of a new search engine. It would operate entirely on a white list model. And every website on it would be reviewed by people, for people. No posts from any social media site would be allowed; only small webpages. To be featured in the engine, sites would have to have verifiable human origins. So personal blogs made by real people or small businesses with actual physical addresses that can be fully verified in the real world. In order to get your business featured, you would have to apply, and someone would physically have to visit you in order to verify your authenticity. Oh, and any website that uses AI in any form would simply be ineligible to appear on the search engine.
Yes, this would result in a drastically reduced pool of potential sites, but what remains would be absolute gold.
I love the idea, but wouldn't it be one of those old web indices (like a site or book that was just a list of other sites) with a keyword search function? Like a centralized webring with user submissions?
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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.
Throughout history, every village had one idiot, two max. And maybe one psycho.
Today thanks to the power of the internet these idiots and those psychos can unite and create big communities and represent a strong unified force in the world.
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Came here to say exactly this. Capitalism breeds consumerism - and consumerism destroys everything.
I predicted back in 2000 that the net would become a big complex system of cable channels, you pay for every site you visit. It's sure AF going that way.
Something wonderful is gone forever. Thanks America.
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I love the idea, but wouldn't it be one of those old web indices (like a site or book that was just a list of other sites) with a keyword search function? Like a centralized webring with user submissions?
Yeah, I'm basically envisioning something like that. An old school web index composed entirely of human-curated human-made content. How to actually fund such an effort? I have no idea. That's why I started with the the premise that I somehow had millions to throw at the project. It would invariably be very labor intensive.
It would probably have to be subscription funded. Maybe there's a way to pull it off, but getting people to pay for subscriptions for services like this has long been fraught. Surveillance capitalism was built because donations don't cut it, and no one wanted to spend a few bucks a month for Google or Facebook access.
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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.
Saved, thanks for sharing. I just learned how geologists date rocks
