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.
The internet has become soulless and i hate it
Submitted 1 year ago by Provider@feddit.de to technology@lemmy.world
Comments
jesterraiin@lemmy.world 1 year ago
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
Where are these magical “right” places?
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.
Today alone (…)
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.
canthidium@lemmy.world 1 year ago
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.
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. 😜
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…
Blaze@sopuli.xyz 1 year ago
Lemmy has pretty much of a soul, same for other fediverse platforms.
jesterraiin@lemmy.world 1 year ago
OP is biased and is visiting wrong places. That’s all…
NightOwl@lemmy.one 1 year ago
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.
Gray@lemmy.ca 1 year ago
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.
Olap@lemmy.world 1 year ago
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?
Gray@lemmy.ca 1 year ago
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.