The last bit sounds a lot like an advertisement for Lemmy ^^
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Nah it’s about as bad as it’s been for the past 2 decades, when the Internet became commercial.
In the 90’s Internet was driven by enthusiasts, who actually cared about the subject of their sites. Today the noise from commercial interests dominate almost completely.
I’d sacrifice Google and YouTube in a heart beat, and go back to Alta vista even web crawler as my main search engine, if it meant we could get the quality internet experience we had in the 90’s.What I miss the most about the 90’s web is websites being reduced to the bare minimum possible. Delivery of content first then everything else. The only thing that got an exception: GIF images.
But… but there were no ads! How did people know what to buy?
Oh, there were ads. Small to medium sized banners you easily missed. The only adblock you needed was disabled pop-ups.
Pretty sure both of those search engines were commercial operations. Hell, Alta Vista was owned by Digital (a large tech corporation).
I don’t know what to say, you are right, and I hate you for it.
What is more interesting, Google came as a more friendly alternative, with drastically less ads than Alta Vista and other search engines of that time had. Today’s Google is only just approaching now the amount of ads on the search results page that those had. It is just a bit smarter about mixing ads with actual search results and the ads are more targeted (which is not necessarily a good thing).
Let’s revolt and bring back web rings!
One model that seemed to work well was the pre-social media internet old people might remember: bulletin boards, forums, blogs.
Ouch.
The video makes an interesting comparison between online and offline communities, but I think it’s missed how common identities that gave offline communities cohesion have also broken down in the modern age. Increasing pressure for jobs and housing, among other things, have forced many societies to become a lot more internally mobile. This has resulted in a much diminished sense of local community because so many people rarely stay in one place long enough to form local bonds.
Supporting the local sports team and attending the local church together once helped us overlook our differences, but those shared experiences are shrinking. That loss of offline cohesion is contributing to the alienation and polarisation alongside the troubles online.
I love the stereotypes, angry Twitter, idiot Tiktok and paranoid Facebook.
I mean, they’re right. The internet really IS worse than ever, and I don’t think the Dork Web (federated social media) does enough to fill the gap of Twitter at its peak ten years ago.
If you really want to play “get off my lawn,” I’d suggest that the internet is also not as good as it was in the 1990s, where just being on suggested a level of competency with technology that no longer seems to apply. Yes, the download speeds were terrible and there was no YouTube, but 1990s internet was a literary pursuit. Now, it’s largely visual, and tailor-made for short attention spans. Instead of mind-enriching, it’s mind-draining, like television.
You can still find the mind enriching parts if you look. It’s a neutral communication medium at this point, the barriers to entry just don’t really exist anymore. People use it how they will. Dumb people will use it in dumb ways. 50% of people are dumber than the average person. That’s a lot of people.
The part about the filter bubble being the opposite way around is interesting. But it does intuitively make sense, because we do build our RL-society-circles as a filter bubble, so the online one stresses us because it is not that.
I kind of get what they are coming from, but I don’t fully agree with their take of being more exposed to other views on the internet. At least not as a general rule.
There are loads of people who (understandably) will block any and all opposing views from their feeds, making the remaining stuff only things they agree with
And even if they don’t do that they’ll join only communities where the bias is already there.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/fuFlMtZmvY0
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Lol, yeah, when watching that bit my mind goes “wait, that’s just forums and Fediverse”
