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.
Comment on The internet has become soulless and i hate it
jesterraiin@lemmy.world 1 year ago
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.
canthidium@lemmy.world 1 year ago
jesterraiin@lemmy.world 1 year ago
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. 😜
canthidium@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Adblocker do great job at filtering out the majority of ads.
Oh believe me, I’ve been running UBlock Origin for a long time. When I use a computer without it, I’m just amazed at the amount of ads nowadays
I’d argue that there are better contenders, but this is a discussion for entirely different community. 😜
Oh of course, little bit of hyperbole in my statement, but I definitely believe the internet has been a gift and a curse for society.
Yeah, I was born in the early 80s and grew up watching the internet grow, so I know how to navigate for the best experience for me. But I don’t think it can be denied that the vast majority of people don’t and fall right into the toxicity most of the time. And the effect it’s had on sociaty is hard to ignore.
jesterraiin@lemmy.world 1 year ago
So that’d be the gist of it, and the suggestion to everyone who perceives the Internet as a souless place: “learn how to use the tool that is the Internet correctly, so it won’t misfire on you”. I don’t think there’s any flaw in this approach.
cryball@sopuli.xyz 1 year ago
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.
jesterraiin@lemmy.world 1 year ago
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…
cryball@sopuli.xyz 1 year ago
I suppose it cannot. I guess my views are largely based on my own experiences.
I would still like to bring up another online activity, which is gaming. That has surely seen a huge change in culture and how the most popular games are played. 15 years ago one could show up on a public server, and after a while get to know the regulars. That served as a good stepping stone to creating online relationships.
With the advent of matchmaking, such interaction is no longer the norm. As such one has to go through the effort of finding communities, that they might want to be a part of.
jesterraiin@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Back in the days games were meant to serve for long. These days, new titles appear all the time and often disappear before they can mature enough. It limits the possibility to build a healthy, long-term fanbase/society and/or maintain equaly lengthy relationships.
But that’s video-gaming problem, that only seeps into the medium that is the Internet, much like the state of the modern politics, or moviemaking. The Internet is influenced by it, but is not responsible for it.
dpkonofa@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Where are these magical “right” places? Today alone, I visited a site that had a broken YouTube embed from 3 years ago, another with a story that had embedded tweets that were gone, a restaurant’s domain that redirects to a Facebook page that I can’t view without a login, and a news site with a paywall with ads all over that were, mostly, blocked by my ad blocker.
Every one of these sites came from a DuckDuckGo or Google search. If these are the wrong places, where are we meant to go and how are we to find the “right” places for information?
jesterraiin@lemmy.world 1 year ago
It’s a subjective matter. I’m not you, I can’t say what brings you joy and motivates you positively.
Say, Mastodon, Reddit, Youtube any other social site. Pursuing the topic of politics alone is going to push your mental balance towards negativity, pesimism, cynicism and possibly depression. Skip it, limit it, and if you can’t resign from it, then balance out it with pics of funny things, jokes, possibly a community dedicated to some interesting project or hobby.
The fact that such an experience managed to frustrate you is a strong indicator that you could use a bit more organized approach to the online content.
NightOwl@lemmy.one 1 year ago
I think xda is magical that it is still around and a resource to find out stuff about a specific phone. Then other forums like avsforum that’s kept popping up to help me when I had TV model specific questions throughout the years. Overclockers.net for specific motherboard discussions that have continued to be a resource over the years.
Deal sites like isthereanydeal, camelcamelcamel, and pcpartpicker continues be so useful as it has been in the past. Then there’s pcgamingwiki I use all the time. Oh Wikipedia of course. Even steam forums has been useful with guides there for games, and even sometimes people asking about troubleshooting for console versions because the devs are there.
I think there’s a lot of wonderful places. If you look at the most popular billion dollar run social media services with massive amount of users then yeah it start to seem bleak. But, there’s still places that were cool and are still cool because they exist with a more sustainable model as opposed to infinite growth.