The internet has become soulless and i hate it
Do you remember the early days of the internet, when websites were a reflection of their creators unique personalities and passions? A time when the d
I think we're all a bit disillusioned with it now. I feel like on the 2000's era internet we all were showing up bright eyed and optimistic about the possibilities. We lived in a world without the internet and having it felt like a superpower. But in the 2010's and especially around 2016, the misinformation pump got turned on hard and we saw the internet bring some truly sinister real world events to fruition. SEO started getting used more and more through the 2010's. Social media companies started finding nasty ways to profit off of us by being more selective in what we see. And now this has been the year of enshittification with big companies finally making moves that actively worsen our experiences in order to cash in on a lot of investment money that never turned into anything real. Basically I think what happened is a mixture of people becoming more cynical and the internet becoming over-automated and now this year businesses finally realizing that potential profit is worthless without acting on it.
With all that said though, the Fediverse feels like our chance to finally fight back. Lemmy still only has around 60k monthly active users. We need to try to bring that number up.
Why bring it up? More people rarely add more value past N. I suppose the better question is what is N? I'm loving lemmy right now, do we really need the cesspit that was large subreddits?
Well, for context, Mastodon has around 1.5 million monthly active users. Twitter/Reddit are around 450 million monthly active users. You can enjoy Lemmy's small size but also see that at 60k monthly active users it hasn't even reached a size comparable to many other famous small sized forums. I don't know what N is. I personally think the Fediverse should be the replacement for corporate social media and that social media can be essential in how information spreads through society. It can decide elections. It can shift society's views on issues. I think it does us a disservice to go the hipster route and cling to our small niche thing and resist growth. The beauty of Lemmy is that there will always be small communities regardless. Anyone who wants a small community need only defederate from the big servers and stick to a small, niche server.
Why 2016 specifically? was there a significant event that happened in that year?
So you are proposing we "fight back" by bringing more users, including the ones who are denigrating the internet.
Something something "pot called the kettle black".
The internet has become soulless and i hate it
It didn't. It's more alive than ever.
It's just you visiting wrong places, not paying attention to the correct ratio of negative and positive content.
I think this is true to an extent. The internet is still filled with magical things, but no one can deny that a huge portion is just ad-filled garbage at this point. Most everything "mainstream" is designed to manipulate us and suck us dry. I still say the internet is both the greatest and worst invention of all time.
Adblocker do great job at filtering out the majority of ads. Resign from social sites (or their parts) that drown in toxicity (anything dealing with "news" is usually the 1st place to avoid) and it's going to improve your online experience.
I still say the internet is both the greatest and worst invention of all time.
I'd argue that there are better contenders, but this is a discussion for entirely different community. 😜
It didn’t. It’s more alive than ever.
The web as a whole is more alive than ever, but many of those old school places aren't. They still exist, but most of the userbase doesn't.
I have some hobbies, which used to have a thriving online communities on forums and blogs. For the average internet user, that wanted to read up about such hobbies, they would gravitate towards those forums or blogs. This has fundamentally changed with the popularity of sites such as reddit, facebook, youtube & discord. The conversations that were had on the forums moved to the above platforms and as such a lot of the deeper nuances of conversation were lost.
A specific hobby of mine had a dozen active forums to read. Now all but one are mostly dead. The only one in my native language is also gone. My country's native communities moved to facebook, which is now only used for announcements and some simple questions being asked again and again.
There has been a complete reversal of internet discourse on many topics. Instead it's (again) back to having discussions with your friend group and building up connections locally.
It's not a simple thing, but the solution to is to do yourself what you wish existed. I'm shifting away from social media to my own site that I can personalize as I want. It feels nice.
At the same time, one of MY hobbies is blooming. There are thousands of sites dedicated to it, new productes emerge on daily basis, there are tools, communities, the interaction I couldn't dream about back in 80s or 90s. I can enjoy it with people from all the world, I can add to it and see other fans commenting on it. It grows, it becomes better with each new year.
I guess it begs for the question, whether the subjective choice of a hobby is enough to judge by as vast medium as the Internet...
I think you are confusing soulless with dead. It's more alive than ever yes but it has become monotonous. The original feeling of individuality of websites has been reduced to the monotonity you see when you visit different websites. For example, Twitter, Reddit, Instagram or even their federated alternatives like Mastodon and Lemmy (I haven't used Pixelfed) are designed in a similar way to that users feel familiar and don't get turned off from using the website. This is just one example I can think of now.
I think you are confusing soulless with dead.
I'm not. By "alive" I mean that from where I sit, the Internet is a vast, colorful tapestry. There's plenty of individuality, diversity and originality in it. It's just that it's not given to you on a silver platter.
Imagine being a person living in a skyscraper, rarely leaving it because all the things you require are situated on one of lower floors. What isn't there, you order to be brought to you, conveniently. So you complain that the world became souless, monotone, repetitive, not like in the old days, when you were living in suburbs and had to travel on your own to find the service needed.
I'm not living in such a skyscraper.
Lemmy has pretty much of a soul, same for other fediverse platforms.
I'm new around here but i like the atmosphere a lot. I created my account after posting this article.
Welcome!
OP is biased and is visiting wrong places. That's all...
A-bleeping-men. The "unspoken rule" of the internet is "Follow the trends and what the majority is saying. Because if you are not, then please fuck off.". Its all about self-validation for the sake of (everything) nowadays. Even if it means screaming at randoms for minor/futile reasons.
*sigh. Back in my days, it was all about trash talking with randoms and enjoying the company of said randoms -- and we loved every second of it. It was a little, happy place pretty much.
Nowadays its a "depression center" of sorts where everything is wrong and nothing is right.
I don't remember that time for regular websites, but do remember it for YouTube before it became a place that started aggressively shifting towards promoting creators who were sharing for the purposes of monetizing. Hard to find videos that fill the old vibe unless you use something like block tube next so the popular channels aren't pushing down the visibility of those type of uploads.
I guess Twitter is that way too where it started shifting into a corporate and influencer platform to advertise stuff to people as the user base exploded.
Fediverse fills the old vibe though of people just sharing because they feel like it as opposed to an expectation of like, subscribe, ring the notification bell, visit my merch store in my profile, and check out my patreon. And I see you read my comment but haven't subscribed. So please do as you drink and enjoy the refreshing taste of power aid as it cools you off on a hot summer day.
Inflation went up, interest rates went up, venture capital money dried up (and Russia/ China pulled out of crypto/risky investments). All the “market capture” corps turned off the free use lures and started to monetize their users at the same time. There are smaller startups that still have free use lures, but which will be big next is a toss-up.
I wish all the rich people would go fuck off to doing whatever they were doing before ruining computers for everyone.