i have depression

The web has been monopolized into a handful of big tech sites that trap everyone inside. The enshittification runs deep.

Nothing to do anymore but work, shitpost, and cook crack cocaine in the microwave.

I attribute Hexbear with keeping me up to date on the hip slang lingo of the modern teen-ager

i haven't finished reading every last HTML page on marxists.org yet

Hard agree. Shit's just boring now. Even hexbear, while the best place on the internet, still gets boring when the posts aren't there

Hexbear is the last fun place on the internet

I dunno what we are in now but the old web was better. 1.0 sucked. 2.0 was good though. You had all these nich communities bubbling with energy and ideas. Now it is just reddit and psyops and comodification.

https://neocities.org/browse

Hexbears should help expand our creativity on the web, by taking inspiration from NeoCities (successor to GeoCities). Not everything has to be sterile and bland and boring. I'd even like to be able to customize our profile pages more than just things like the banner and profile picture. I mean, just look at how much life can be breathed into a site with so much flexibility. Look at all the colors and non-standard layouts. What the web as lost is personality, which we should be taking back. We're on FOSS sites here in the Fediverse. We can do better, and we shouldn't be too afraid to take risks by deviating from what's accepted as "normal" these days.

We had way better tools for self-expression on older formats like early YouTube, MySpace, etc etc. We don't have to stay the course of sterile, standardized, corporatized web formats.

The original point of using the web was making things beautiful and tinkering around with different designs. It was to tell a story with the layout. That was part of the content itself, not just what we say and do online.

Edit: https://yesterweb.org/ (on NeoCities) has plenty of good and interesting information on this general topic of a worse present web (a manifesto, if you will)

Check Hexbear

Pay bills

Order stuff

Watch a few youtube videos from select channels

Check email

Stream some show I don't even watch off a russian piracy site, I just want the noise.

Check twitter for silly shit

That's the entire internet.

I thought I just had depression but no, the internet really does suck now

ripping off the twitter and reddit bandaids, in addition to not using ig or tiktok, means i can spend about 15 minutes online before i've seen all the current content. we probably aren't supposed to spend hour after hour surfing the web.

The only cool thing about the internet are niche hobby sites. Everything else is an SEO skinner box hellscape. I'm sort of glad honestly, it's helped to cure me from reddit scrolling and actually go do stuff like work on projects or go ride my bike.

Relevant relevant meme

did that "losing net neutrality" thing everybody was concerned about circa 2010 eventually happen, and that's why everything's worse?

the internet does feel a lot more corporate than it did 10 years ago and especially 20 years ago. That sucks a lot of the fun out of it. Making money off of the internet was barely even a thing 15 years ago.

It's been this way since like 2008 IMO. Internet is just an addiction that we're not allowed to break or else we get cut off from social and employment opportunities.

It is a conspiracy theory, but the way everything feels like copypasted crap really makes the Dead Internet Theory feel plausible.

I think some niche youtube channels are fun, but it certainly is becoming a bore. If I had to guess, it probably is from everything being localized to a handful of websites and those are in turn optimized by an algorithm for profit instead of something enjoyable. The internet has been turned into what is addictive instead of fun.

My personal theory is that we are so detached from joy that many find "reaction videos" a source of amusement because we can't feel excitement ourselves anymore, so people vicariously enjoy something "new" by watching someone else be very excited and happy about it.

I only really partake in interacting with people I don't know on Hexbear, and anything else I leave exclusive to people I know in real life.

Its a fantastic reservoir of knowledge at your fingertips, but a terrible and inhuman way to interact with other humans. Much nuance and body language is not seen, and people essentially develop the same kind of anonymous rage they feel when driving a car except it is in front of a computer screen.

It’s turned to shit over the last 10 yrs, exponentially worse in the last 5. You cannot Google businesses any more such that finding home repair is an endurance trial.

You cannot google most things without hitting a top 24, 11, or 32 list. Product, business, topic, doesn’t matter.

And when you do get a result it’s the same handful of places. Product? Amazon, Walmart, Wayfair. Topic? Spruce, Reddit, Wiki. Business? Yellow Pages, Angi, Yelp and the business will not actually be anywhere near you but a national chain with an 800#.

All the interesting bits and random have been culled by paid ads and Google algorithms.

no flash games

Coming to hexbear feels like being able to breathe after holding my breath across the rest of the internet, which is truly a fascist cesspit, with the exception of a dwindling number of twitter accounts.

i literally only have fun here or reading manga/fanfic online. gamification/algo-focused content really sucks the soul out of posting, but tell me something that hasn't been said a million times at this point, i guess

I used to spend an embarrassing amount of time each day following up on deranged Evangelical twitter users. Posted some of the worst takes to the dunk tank and would generally get worked up about things.

But I would never create an account because I’m not giving Twitter my phone number (that thing that easily identifies you to everyone and most people never change, which is why every website wants it).

So when Musk decided to not let people view twitter without an account, that part of my day just dried up. I wouldn’t say I’m happier but I really don’t miss it. Between that and the new algorithm here I’d like to think I’m spending less time online. I probably am, but I also find I do this exact thing a lot more (just open my browser and not knowing where I want to go, but I know I want to go somewhere)

It really feels like 2024 election season is truly gonna make me log off. I'll be around the age was when he got grillpilled. Internet got so bad I took up golf this year.

digital kessler syndrome

I've found myself looking at porn more than I used to just because there's sometimes still some whimsy to be found

There's still lots of cool stuff online, it's just not always new and hot. Doom scrolling is a trap. Return to random keyword searches to find the strange stuff. Even that is harder now with all these shifty walled platforms though. Pinterest is so annoying.

That just means more time to read theory!

Eh sometimes creative stuff happens on the internet, but it's all so monetized or becomes full of inscrutable drama before it can get cool.

I'm not gonna say the internet used to be more democratic or open, because when I first started using it every website was run by some white male computer dork from Bellevue, Washington who wanted to share his love of pictograms or declarative programming languages.

But there was a wacky amount of variety you could stumble into. No one was trying to make money because there was money to be made. No one was trying to build a huge audience because there wasn't one. Everything was niche and that was cool.

I mean I've basically hoarded a shit ton of older media from 2000 and before. I'll sometimes expose myself to modern media and realize I made the right choice to stay under my rock.

trump no longer tweeting was the spiritual death of the internet

Then why can't I log off? 😔

True dat. Even the handful of niche subreddits i go to are pretty miserable, and beyond that is a vast and desolate silence.