- cross-posted to:
- comics@lemmy.ml
Yep, the world would be so much better if we got all our news from cable TV.
In parts, yes. TV does not have the same ability to respond to your actions. It can’t change the program for you specifically to cater to your individual habits. It can’t create the same feedback loop that social media algorithms have that push people further and further into extremist views.
Fam, stop giving away startup ideas for free! You’re sitting on at least three winners there! /s kinda
I mean, the internet went to shit when we all centralized around enormous corporate gatekeepers like Facebook and Twitter instead of the personal websites of yore, so I feel like that sentiment still tracks
Many things contributed to the downfall of internet.
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Corporations: not much to say about it. All they want is more users and all they want is more money.
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Ads: because everyone wants money. I am making a tutorial? I want people watching it to give me money. I am making a website? Money. I have free time I can watch some ads to earn money! Then corporations go in the middle: That guy is making tutorial I can put ads in it, give him a small fee and the rest for me!
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Centralization: as you said, instead of millions of forums people just go to reddit.
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Privacy: People not only don’t care about it, they are willingly giving it away for free, and the big corporations profit.
The selfhosting movement is the light in the tunnel, but it’s really dangerous out there and good actions can bring bad people and they can absolutely ruin your setup.
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Personal websites didn’t die because of social media, the simple fact is no one wants to run their own server… I run my own server and can tell you it’s a money sink much like a boat.
I pay $100/year for hosting, who are you using?
A computer in the corner of my house.
Probably cheaper to buy hosting service, unless it doubles as a room heater
One could argue it did work, just a little too well. In 1995 forget trans rights, gay marriage was just starting to become a question and about half of white people were still against interracial marriage. As the one atheist kid in that era, I was certainly an outlier and society still regarded it as a default that everyone was religious. Basically only black people were worried about whether police were beating people up too much and for the vast majority the only question was why we weren’t being harsher on criminals. Society’s views on things have changed very rapidly as a result of being able to access information very easily.
I think what we’re seeing today is not a result of the internet, but a reaction to the result of the internet. Things have changed too fast for some and there’s basically a cultural luddite movement.
As someone from 90s, we were told not to trust the internet.
Yea, I remember when everyone thought putting your personal info on the internet would get you murdered. Then MySpace came out and everyone quickly forgot all that.
myspace still used aliases. facebook was the actual shit stack
The Internet was incredible until the corporations colonized it
The internet is a great example of the capitalism to fascism pipeline.
My mom almost bought me a tamagachi in the 90s. I say almost because what she actually bought me was a cheap knock off.
What I remember most about it was my friend showed me their tamagachi, and it’s born as an egg.
Then I remember what mine was born as.
Imagine seeing this pixel art gorilla, and then he sees a second pixel art gorilla wearing a skirt. Then you see the closeup of the male gorillas face, and he wiggles his eyebrows exitedly.
The next thing you see is a pixel art of a sperm attacking an egg. In a knockoff tamagachi meant for children. I was 13, so I was old enough to know what I was seeing, but it definately had some real WTF vibes. Let’s put it this way. I’m 41. I remember nothing else about that tamagachi besides seeing pixel art gorilla sperm.
That’s all. I just wanted more people to know about chinese knockoff tamagachi with gorilla sperm.
This might be the very first time anyone has ever typed “pixel art gorilla sperm”. I mean unless you’ve told the story before.
I feel enlightened!
Sounds like you got a better Tamagotchi.
This isn’t the ones that was box shaped and had two terminals on the top to connect to others so you could fight them?
All I knew is I threw my dinky dino in a tree in my front yard and he lived there for years.
Me and my brother had those.
There was a window where the internet was a huge positive.
That ended 10 to 15 years ago.
Kinda coinciding with social media apps.
Smartphones were a bad idea. Social Media got large swaths of the population addicted to screens, increasing insomnia and anxiety. Unhealthy fads like the “girls pushing each other into eating disorders” and the whole “men are all bad” mainly spread through social media. The benefits of communication and knowledge-gathering/-spreading could have also been achieved with stationary devices. It claims to “connect” people, but made them lonelier. The loneliness pandemic is real.
The internet and commercial computer technology should have stopped developing before 2008. Since then, it’s just adding to the enshittification. The newest bloatware is AI and the claim that it could “replace human workers”. What’s next? When will be abandon commercial computing technology for free and open source alternatives?
I mean it has to make some money at some point and that makes it a matter of time until enshittification starts.
If your social media site does not need to make any money, it can also be unskewed in information, not sell your data not advertise etc.
No interest in keeping you engaged. That was maybe the driver algorithm that fucked up modern life.
It feels like there are few things that enshitificationTM doesn’t impact.
It’s almost like corporations took over the internet, monetized it, and deployed every possible tool to convert it into an addicting advertising platform without any regulations or standards, driving up social contention, misinformation and propaganda because the more rage you can instill in the population the more “engagement” everything will get.
thats when the MBAs took over from the nerds because there was way too much money, and somehow not enough.
Remember the days when the CEO of tech/manufacturing was actually an engineer or PhD researcher. Not many companies have that nowadays.
supposedly it goes in long cycles. during boom times, sales/marketing take over to squeeze out profits and market share. during bust times, development/engineering takes over to evolve the offerings. we just had a really long boom cycle and it appears to be finally busting.
3/4 here, never was interested in tamagotchis lol
The gatekeepers moved to control the internet.
Yeah, that third one was a mistake.
Now when I see someone saying ‘gatekeepers are the problem’, I assume they were kicked out of somewhere for being a bigot.
Perhaps it always has been…
Nah, I was just grousing about it yesterday on a cooking discord where somebody was trying to gatekeep the protein used in tacos. Using chicken in your taco isn’t “incorrect” and they can fight me.
Using chicken in your taco isn’t “incorrect”
Show them this lol
Depends on who the gatekeeper is. Would you assume the same about someone being kicked out of twitter/x?
Grunge was not wacky
“This song has 2 notes”
… Grunge was not that wacky
The Internet was so much better in the 90s.
It was slower, the graphics were basic, and we could get knocked offline by someone picking up a telephone. But damn, it really felt like reaching out and touching the world for the first time. It took so long for my mom to understand that yes, I can be chatting with friends online at 2am. She would always ask, “Why aren’t they asleep?” and I’d have to remind her that other time zones exist.
Grunge is not a fad. And for the record Eddie better and mark langlain ,however you spell it… Are the last front men standing from the grunge era
I have bad news about Mark Lanegan…
Yeah the internet was actually a tool developed by the US to spread
propaganda and brain-wash people abroaddemocracy and freedom of expression (slight /s)Yeah the internet was actually a tool developed by the US defece agencies to speed up communications
FTFY
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET
The ARPANET was established by the Advanced Research Projects Agency (now DARPA) of the United States Department of Defense.