Idk if this is the right community for this conversation, but it’s been on my mind and I want to share it with someone.

In the 00’s every new thing we heard about the internet was exciting. There were new protocols, new ways to communicate, new ways to share files, new ways to find each other. Every time we heard anything new about the internet, it was always progress.

That lasted into the early teens and then things started changing. Things started stagnating. Now we’re well into the phase where every new piece of news we hear is negative. New legislations, new privacy intrusions, new restrictions, new technologies to lock content away and keep us from sharing, or seeing the content we were looking for. New ways to force ads.

At one point the Internet was my most favorite thing in the world. Now I don’t know if I even like it anymore. I certainly don’t look forward to hearing news about it. It’s sad, man. We’ve lost a lot. The mega corps took the internet from us, changed it from a million small sites that people created because they had big ideas, or were passionate about small ones, and turned it into a few enormous sites with no new ideas, no passion, just an insatiable desire for money.

We’re at the end of an era, and unlike the last 20 years of progress, I don’t think most of us will like what the next era brings.

  • 9up999@lemmy.mlEnglish
    223·
    1 year ago

    Internet was ruined with the rise of smartphones. Every dumb Karen and her friends started to post on the internet. With PC it was somewhat barrier for idiots. Pre social media times were the best. Nowadays idiots rule the internet.

    • FuckyWucky [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
      305·
      1 year ago

      Yea its the ‘Karen’ who are the problem and definitely not incels and reactionaries who definitely didn’t exist pre-smartphones.

      Reddit for instance had subreddits like r/jailbait, r/WatchPeopleDie, r/Beatingwomen and so many more.

      • TheAnonymouseJoker@lemmy.ml
        35·
        1 year ago

        Reddit also has subreddits, currently active, like r/FemaleDatingStrategy, a cesspool of femcels. TwoXXchromosomes is very similar in how they treat and classify men. I do not think either kind of spaces should be allowed to exist, if censorship is going to be used as a tool against targeted hatred.

          • HornyOnMain [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
            10·
            1 year ago

            Assumed it was a TERF subreddit because of the name, but then I went to check it out and it’s just a dumb 'Reddit-core’ism like calling table salt sodium chloride and it’s just like a general discussion place for women.

            Incredibly sus to be comparing a community focused on sharing vids of women being beaten and people dying to women just discussing life and their relationships.

          • TheAnonymouseJoker@lemmy.ml
            22·
            1 year ago

            Did I ever say that? Neither is ok, as I already said. Hatred is hatred, be it incel or femcel. If censorship is going to be used as a tool to destroy hatred, destroy both kinds of hate.

        • HornyOnMain [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
          41·
          1 year ago

          Yeah, like whatever, get rid of them too. But like why did you feel the need to “what about” to talking about misandrists in response to someone criticising the amount of violent misogyny present on the early internet?

          • TheAnonymouseJoker@lemmy.ml
            22·
            1 year ago

            OG comment claimed that “dumb Karen” is one of the reasons why internet went downhill, followed by a reply of “incels” being responsible. Within this reply, a mention of r/beatingwomen is put besides r/jailbait, basically signalling that the replier wanted the conversation to shift to a binary gender war, to which I replied that a counterpart to the incel subreddits exists, and is not shutdown or criticised the same way incel subs are, and that both must be shutdown if censorship is going to be weaponised to destroy cultural hate.

            Misandry is a counterpart to misogyny, and both fuel each other. This is the basic concept of hatred. Hate fuels hate, and love (not selective) fuels love.

            Whataboutism claims are a good sign of pseudo intellectuals dog whistling to attract mob attention, usually a last resort card played by people when they never have good discussion or argument skills. And apparently, I never imagined in my wildest imaginations that it will be used as a reply to a Hexbear user, considering I support the leftist instance (just like Lemmygrad) overwhelmingly.

    • Poggervania@kbin.social
      141·
      1 year ago

      I would argue it was ruined once social media companies found out how to monetize data. Facebook and MySpace were huuuuuge back before smartphones existed, and using a PC was actually not that huge of a hurdle for surfing the web. It was when companies went “oh shit, we can sell user data to market ads” that they all scrambled to make things easier to use and adopt.