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.
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.
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
Social media is the front of the house.
What destroyed the internet are the cabal of Corporations monetizing every interaction and directing flows from the back of the house.
Unfettered Capitalism killed the internet experience.
Mostly because it brought boomers into the Internet and they the proceeded to infest the rest of it.
Mostly because billionaires are using it for unfettered propaganda which everyone is vulnerable to not just older people
Listen young man… Boomers INVENTED the original internet!
You are not
Community has been replaced by the trough.
Is that an Animal Farm quote?
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?
It’s slow by design, for better encryption. Faster fibreoptic cables maybe? A faster speed of light might help?
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.
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.
In its Facebook and onward phase, yes I agree. Prior to that we had this wonderful site called Livejournal where you could privately blog to a select group of friends, and it was the absolute best way to brain dump, have people give you real advice, and make the best online friends. Yes it had much controversy when it was bought by a Russian company, I can point you to a podcast if you want more detail on that, and certainly there was drama sometimes, but I would give a lot to just talk to my friends as a group that way again and really know each other deeply that way again, and other than the odd very ignorable ad, you weren’t forced to be part of an algorithm or AI horseshit or fake news or verified accounts or any of that garbage. You could buy a permanent account for 100 dollars for the added features, but that was basically started to keep the site running after it took off. It really was beautiful and helpful and loving and felt organic and true for that time.
Have you ever noticed how hard it is for novels or TV or any other fictional platform to include anything about smartphones or using social media? When it is mentioned it feels very awkward and forced into the narrative.
Only a fool or a 12 year old would think otherwise. Back in the late ‘90’s, the web had a great sense of community. On forums, IRC, places like Cybertown, etc. You had smaller communities where you could reasonably know most users. They had a human scale; like a friendly neighbourhood.
Modern social media is definitely terrible. It happened because we were too welcoming. Back in those days, the web was a nerd domain. We all shared the same sort of interests and optimism for the future of the web. You had to BE a nerd to get online. To WANT to be online.
But now that it’s too easy for everyone to get on, the idiots have taken over. We really should kick everyone off the web who can’t name at least three characters from either Star Wars or Star Trek.
“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 Picard
Some 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.”
Elitism and exclusion are how we got to the mess we find ourselves in.
And that’s why I would not let Lemmy users run society. The userbase here is people who like the idea of left-populism, but hate the population.
Star Wars or Star Trek.
This is what the sociologists call “eurocentrism”
We’ll also welcome our Babylon 5 and Battlestar Galactica brethren, obviously :D
Just out of curiosity, what would the Star Trek equivalent be outside of eurocentric experience?
Three Body Problem?
Dragon Ball
I honestly don’t know, the world is so diverse.
As for India, it could be quotes from the freedom fighters (maybe too historic) or one of the few early 2000s TV shows which used to be in the collective consciousness, before the nation descended into artistic illiteracy and degeneracy and hate.
I am on the fediverse, yes I am allowed to have inflammatory opinions
John Munch
The Internet started going downhill around 2010, this is nothing new
It’s not social media that did it. It’s monopolistic, unregulated, greedy, giant tech corporations that made the internet shitty.
Exactly, early social media was tons of fun. It was like the early internet but easier since anyone could make a profile with any info.
Then it had to be monetized. They had to glue eyeballs via attention, no matter what kind. Now it’s all rent seeking, innovation is 100% about what can produce an immediate return, no care for the long term. The grift economy…
It was not social media, that was about the people. It’s what the social media companies did in search of dollars that did it in. Greed. Full stop.
Not social media. Capitalism.
The internet was ALWAYS social (e.g. telnet). It wasn’t ruined by people using technology to connect, it was ruined by capitalism finding new, insidious ways to monetize the human social drive.
i think the difference is that before the internet was a social mesh of countless websites.
while today it’s just a handful of social media sites.
yhea, it’s capitalism, but social media is the main tool capitalism used.
This is why I’m finding more and more that it’s easier to find local events the “old fashioned way” (word-of-mouth, flyers, local newspapers and zines, etc) rather than through social media. It used to be easier to see events local to me, but now the algorithm pushes events that I may like but aren’t local at all. Sometimes I do actually see something local, but it’s too late.
You don’t consider Lemmy to be social media?
For me, “Social Media™” requires algorithm based media to be delivered to you without your input and heavy advertisement model attached that introduces corptate bias.
Lemmy is more like a fancy forum. Not quite the same as old bbs forums, but still better then twitter, facebook and whatever the hell reddit is becoming.
