Ask Lemmy

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.

The Internet started going downhill around 2010, this is nothing new

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.

"social media" as buzzword (scientific speech, scientific image) and "social media" as political violence (commercial speech, manifest image) are two different beasts under the empire of law.

You don't consider Lemmy to be social media?

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

Does anybody not think that?

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.

Nah. Just corpos.

Yeah its definitely just you...

https://medium.com/@darianoneil/because-the-internet-how-social-media-ruined-music-ec2022282aa4

https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/comments/18tm3i8/cmv_social_media_is_destroying_western_society/

https://listverse.com/2021/05/24/top-10-ways-social-media-is-ruining-the-world/

https://www.bernsteinresearch.com/CMSObjectBR/Files/Recruiting/Global%20Internet%20-%20Has%20TikTok%20Ruined%20The%20Internet.pdf

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2024/01/long-youtube-videos-tiktok/677130/

https://knowyourbest.com/social-media-ruined-society/

https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/how_social_media_brings_out_the_worst_in_us

social media has destroyed the spirit of the internet?

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

I mean, Lemmy is social media. You might dislike centralized social media or something, but...

It's not 2017-18 social media, friend. It's just late state capitalism.

And the lion's share of it can be traced to increasing real estate and rent prices.

Which Douglas Rushkoff book is this concept again? I've lost track.

The internet keeps dying again and again. It started as a research project turned into a way to aid research. Then the sphere grew as nerds found a space to connect with other nerds. It was a community space where people knew each other. The only big source of trouble was each year, in September, when a new crop of kids gained access to the internet at their college. They had to be educated in the social structures and ethos of the culture they were stepping into.

Then, in the early nineties, the spirit of the internet died, in the Eternal September, as ISPs encouraged non-nerds to enter the cyber world. The community was flooded with more new people than could ever be trained to follow the cultural standards that had been established, and so they simply overwhelmed the capacity of the society to maintain itself.

Then those people began creating a new culture, a multiculture, with communities and sites forming around anyone with a bit of passion they wanted to share with the world wide web. People taught themselves web development just to share pictures of their families and poetry about their favorite trees.

But then, the spirit of the internet died. Advertisers wanted to take advantage of the new space to which everyone seemed to be devoting so much attention. They started monetizing sites. Creating sites became less and less about sharing your passion, and more and more about generating ad revenue.

And the internet persisted. Despite the disgust of the users, nothing seemed to stop the influx of capital into the community. And then came encryption, allowing people to even buy and sell things online. The internet died again, becoming a giant mall, a place you went to find stuff to buy rather than people to talk to.

And then came social media. It took the idea loved by so many of the early pioneers of the internet, that everyone could have their own site, dedicated to whatever they loved most, and centralized it. Friendster, sixdegrees, MySpace, and so on. With this change, the spirit of the web died again, commercializing even the idea of your personal page, your digital representation of yourself.

It has died. It will die again. Nothing can be relied upon.

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

Social media is a great idea, honestly. What's ruined it is the same thing that ruins everything - money men.

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.

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.

I don't blame social media at all. The Internet was, and still is, a communications platform. Some form of "social media" has always existed on the internet even if they were not called that back then.

I blame doing shit for the sole purpose of making money to be what has fucked up the internet. At least it's only fucked on the surface. The real Internet still exists, it's just not right out in the open where any random normie can find it.

The old internet was just an intermediate stage between the standardised internet, and before the internet when you had to find a clear channel through the ionosphere. Congratulations, however old you are, you've lived long enough to be bitter that the world has changed.

Now if we're talking about the specific way it's developed with a new generation of robber barons controlling everything, obviously few here will disagree.

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.

No, not the only one -

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

The internet has always been a collection of social media platforms: bulletin boards, Usenet, IRC, people hosting little personal sites and making contact with each other via email, etc. It got bad when big money arrived and brought in the general public. First is was platforms like AOL's chat rooms and forums, and later things like Facebook and Twitter. We are all living in eternal September now.

Exhibit A: this t-shirt from 1994

Social media is just a symptom of the larger problem which is the corporations prefering to build walled gardens so they can control users rather than the open protocols that defined the early internet. Back in the day, I used to call it "everything becoming facebook".

Social media is fundamentally a moat - a wall built around a set of consumers to keep them away from competitors. Investors love moats. If you whisper as quietly as you possibly can to yourself "I found a company with a wide moat that no one is talking about yet" JP Morgan himself will literally burst through your wall like the Kool Aid Man. They love it because it avoids competition, and as much as competition is the whole point of capitalism, it's the last thing an actual capitalist wants to deal with.

A big part of what made the early internet super valuable was the opposite of moats: open protocols. For example how GMail can send email to Yahoo or any other email provider. If Google had their way, that's not how email would work at all - you'd need a google account to both send and receive emails. That's why these companies have been trying to kill email for ages, trying to get people to use their own proprietary messaging systems instead, where you can only send to others with an account. Then they could capture you and keep you all to themselves.

Which brings us to the fediverse. The fediverse is an attempt to return to open protocols rather than creating a moat around a group of users. In many ways it's like email - your email provider might cut off a server if it's just sending spam all day, and this is basically defederation. But otherwise nothing stops you from communicating with anyone, and that's how it should be.