Ask Lemmy

It has destroyed society.

I miss the days of everyone trying to have their own websites. It provided much more variety and unique experiences. Even if the quality wasn't as... great? But the Tripod, Geocities, Angelfire type sites in the world really let people be creative and build their own sites. I miss those days.

The spirit of the internet was dead long before that.

It definitely desecrated the corpse, though.

Social media is fine if handled well. Like there were no problems with myspace or early facebook. The problem with social media is when it becomes more based on algorithm than communication. Mass communication isn't the problem, it's the algorithm

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.

I feel like it's a mix of quite a few things, social media is DEFINITELY a big part of the problem but the monetisation of EVERYTHING is the main problem.

When the Internet was becoming more mainstream around the world (late 90s) most people who put content on there didn't do it for money, they did it just to share knowledge/thoughts or just be part of a small niche community.

This meant while there was less content it was more meaningful, and it got to the point quickly as it didn't need to show you ads etc.

Recipie sites show this perfectly, people used to just post family recipes in cooking forums, now it's all personal blogs riddled with ads splattered between the person's life story and multiple requests to subscribe to related guff.

Ultimately the goal of the Internet shifted from "sharing knowledge/communicating" to "show as many ads as possible". This makes 90% of each site filler to stop you getting to the 10% too quickly, so you get snagged on ads etc.

This is why AI is great for companies, they can put in the important 10% and have it make up the 90%, but it's just adding more noise to the Internet.

Also pair this problem with search engines that now take advantage of the noise to provide "summary" blurbs which mean you don't even visit the sites directly so they don't get the revenue, the search engines do, I think there is a term for this "one click results" or something.

Its such a shame, I loved the Internet from like 1995-2005, you could search for something and get really good information and facts on the subject quickly. Now the same sort of things are lost amongst the filler sites that just aggregate information and regurgitate it as their own, or just out uninformed opinions (maybe even AI results) as content as if it's from experts etc.

I could go on for ages on the subject as there are so many facets to the problem but I can't see any real solutions, it's just a midden heap.

The problem with centralized social media is it replaced all aspects of free speach and public opinion with algorithms that keep you hooked while all your personal information is being sold and given away. It doesn't have to be that way. Learn about free software, what it means, it's history, and it's impact on the world today. Learn about the fediverse. Most importantly, don't expect things to change if you don't. https://www.fsf.org/about/what-is-free-software

It's all about the money honey....

The early Internet was social media, but it wasn't so corporatized to the point of being ruined.

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 do agree, but indirectly, cause social media isn't inherently bad; It has been manipulated and exploited by oligarchs into weapons for information scraping and data theft. Zuck... Musk... Don't let them slink away into the shadow and blame the tech. There was a time when social media was mostly enriching and had a potential for community building, and they took that from us to profit massively. The internet is dying, and it's those psychotic freaks that have done it.

You're not alone at all. The old Internet died the day Facebook became the dominant social media app and gave the corpo their first real foothold into the digital sphere since the Dot Com Bust. It's not a space for free expression and information sharing anymore. Now it's all fucking ads, slop, and grifting.

Thanks to Lemmy and Linux I’ve been enjoying the internet in much the same way for some time now.

I even use a desktop PC on a daily basis and it just feels right.

Well, it’s desktop PC but I have the main monitor on an arm so that it can hover over my lap while on the couch. I’m a middle aged dad and my family likes to hang out in the same room together, so it is much more practically usable for me as a couchtop.

"Social media" is a really vague term. I think there are broadly 3 categories:

• Web2.0 social media: facebook, twitter, discord, reddit

• Forums: Old school web fora, (mastodon & lemmy?)

• Debateable social media: IRC, email chains/threads

Only the first category is relatively new and has captured the attention of the general public outside of nerds. The other two are either decentralised or are niche centralised sites. IMO it seems like the web 2.0 stuff is most problematic but not sure if it's the hyper-centralisation or their general popularity that is the issue.

Community has been replaced by the trough.

I have been here for a few months and Lemmy is gonna disappoint you too, my friend.

Not really, no. Social Medias can and will exist at any scale, some more or less harmful than others. For example, even Lemmy is filled with people spreading propaganda for foreign dictatorships.

We should take the good with the bad and takes steps to protect our own rights and privacy while helping others do the same. Just as people did during the dawn of the internet, when scams we easily recognize today were unknown dangers before.

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.

"I’ve known Lemmy for a few hours and I feel like I’m back in the early spirit of the internet."

Different system, same issues.
People are people.

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.

It's not social media that did it. It's monopolistic, unregulated, greedy, giant tech corporations that made the internet shitty.

Whenever I get overwhelmed by the modern web, I go to http://wiby.me/ and click "surprise me..."

It's a search engine that only spits out "real" webpages that were made by people like you and me. Very refreshing.

No, not the only one -

The internet is just a microcosm of social media’s destruction of our entire social fabric

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.

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.

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

It's not social media per se. It's capitalism. The Internet was this vast frontier, where you could meet anyone. Little communities formed, we all just talked, and self-regulated any bad behavior. It was a gift economy, we all freely shared knowledge, files, culture.

In the past 20 or so years, economies of scale took over. Corporations bought up the server space and aggressively shut down small communities. Community is discouraged, keep scrolling and click on the ads! Marketing killed the internet.

You are not

Its not so much social media that ruined it, as capitalism and centralization.

Forums themselves are a form of social media, and they're (mostly) great. For Reddit and Lemmy, debatably the best part is the social elements, like the comments sections. The problem isn't the interaction or the "social" nature of it. Its that these platforms have turned into psudo-monopolies intent on controlling people and/or wringing them for every penny.

Thats not to say toxicity and capitalistic exploitation didn't exist before either. The term "flame war" is older than a lot of adults today. Unlike today though, platforms were both more decentralized meaning they were easier to manage and users could switch platform, and were less alorithmic meaning that users could more easily avoid large, bad-faith actors. You'll notice the Fediverse have both these qualities, which is part of why its done so well.

IMO, the best fix to this, would be twofold. A) break up the big monopolies and possibly the psudo-monopolies. Monopolies bad, simple enough. B) Much more difficult, but I believe that what content a site promotes, including algorithmically, should be regulated. Thats not to say sorting algorithms should be banned, but I think we need to regulate how they're used and implemented. For example, regulations could include things like requiring alternative algorithms be offered to users, banning "black box" algorithms, requiring the algorithns be publicly published, and/or banning algorithms that change based on an individual's engagement. Ideally, this would give the user more agency over their experience and would reduce the odds of ignorant users being pushed into cult-like rabbit-holes.