The emergence of social media has destroyed all the small communities to standardize communication and information.
It’s a bit of a digital version of rural exodus. And since 2017/2018, I’ve noticed that everything that, in my opinion, represented the internet has disappeared.
I’ve known Lemmy for a few hours and I feel like I’m back in the early spirit of the internet.
Yeah its definitely just you…
https://medium.com/@darianoneil/because-the-internet-how-social-media-ruined-music-ec2022282aa4
https://listverse.com/2021/05/24/top-10-ways-social-media-is-ruining-the-world/
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
If it’s just the op, then where did all these articles come from!? Social media for ants!?
“Social media” is a really vague term. I think there are broadly 3 categories:
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Web2.0 social media: facebook, twitter, discord, reddit
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Forums: Old school web fora, (mastodon & lemmy?)
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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.
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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.
Needs moar webrings.
I also like zombocom
Shoutout for https://www.marginalia.nu/ too!
Whoever it is that has kept zombo going for most of my adult life deserves a medal.
You can do ANYthing!
Anything is possible.
3rd one is obsolete now and has been replaced with affection
If I had a lot of money I would fund the creation of a new search engine. It would operate entirely on a white list model. And every website on it would be reviewed by people, for people. No posts from any social media site would be allowed; only small webpages. To be featured in the engine, sites would have to have verifiable human origins. So personal blogs made by real people or small businesses with actual physical addresses that can be fully verified in the real world. In order to get your business featured, you would have to apply, and someone would physically have to visit you in order to verify your authenticity. Oh, and any website that uses AI in any form would simply be ineligible to appear on the search engine.
Yes, this would result in a drastically reduced pool of potential sites, but what remains would be absolute gold.
I love the idea, but wouldn’t it be one of those old web indices (like a site or book that was just a list of other sites) with a keyword search function? Like a centralized webring with user submissions?
Yeah, I’m basically envisioning something like that. An old school web index composed entirely of human-curated human-made content. How to actually fund such an effort? I have no idea. That’s why I started with the the premise that I somehow had millions to throw at the project. It would invariably be very labor intensive.
It would probably have to be subscription funded. Maybe there’s a way to pull it off, but getting people to pay for subscriptions for services like this has long been fraught. Surveillance capitalism was built because donations don’t cut it, and no one wanted to spend a few bucks a month for Google or Facebook access.
https://neocities.org/ is great too
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Thank you for sharing. It’s painful to realize in hindsight that those websites were peak internet.
They lack polish, but they were all a labour of love. No enshittification, no selling things, no corporate influence, no shit posting.
Everything had a purpose, every post took effort, and it was all about sharing experiences or knowledge.
I really miss that internet.
EDIT: correcting gibberish 🤭
Content > design
YUP! This is exactly why I’m so passionate about it. Awfulness still happens, but it feels organic like the original days of the web.
The early Internet was social media, but it wasn’t so corporatized to the point of being ruined.
To expand on that, all media with a negligible barrier to entry is social media. Which describes the internet as a whole. The commodification of such media is both unnecessary and parasitic. The only thing “social media” adds is accessibility.
Social media, at it’s heart, is inevitable. We will always find a way to share pictures, information, videos, etc. with each other. It’s such basic functionality when you really think about it. We’re social creatures and this is the most important thing we would do with technology.
The issue is specifically with platforms; how they consolidate power and who owns them.
I don’t know what to do about it, it’s one of the biggest problems we are going to continue to face in our time. I can’t really armchair solutions for it now, but I think it’s of the utmost importance that we recognize it and discuss it.
Social media is not inherently bad, it’s the platforms.
Exactly. The internet was always social, connecting people. Capitalism and greed have ruined the internet.
I don’t care if people want to make money, and I’m even fine with ads (within reason) but all this ExTrAcTiNg VaLuE is making the Internet unusable and damaging humanity.
It’s all about the money honey…
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.
Came here to say exactly this. Capitalism breeds consumerism - and consumerism destroys everything.
I predicted back in 2000 that the net would become a big complex system of cable channels, you pay for every site you visit. It’s sure AF going that way.
Something wonderful is gone forever. Thanks America.
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
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.
Pretty much but don’t let that stop you from posting in other place. I try to make habit of posting in game forums of games I’m playing in. Sometime they have decent off-topic section where you can talk about other stuff. Only normies stick to social medias, us nerds stick to real internet.
Hell yeah forums
No, not the only one -
The internet is just a microcosm of social media’s destruction of our entire social fabric
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.
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In its Facebook and onward phase, yes I agree. Prior to that we had this wonderful site called Livejournal where you could privately blog to a select group of friends, and it was the absolute best way to brain dump, have people give you real advice, and make the best online friends. Yes it had much controversy when it was bought by a Russian company, I can point you to a podcast if you want more detail on that, and certainly there was drama sometimes, but I would give a lot to just talk to my friends as a group that way again and really know each other deeply that way again, and other than the odd very ignorable ad, you weren’t forced to be part of an algorithm or AI horseshit or fake news or verified accounts or any of that garbage. You could buy a permanent account for 100 dollars for the added features, but that was basically started to keep the site running after it took off. It really was beautiful and helpful and loving and felt organic and true for that time.
Have you ever noticed how hard it is for novels or TV or any other fictional platform to include anything about smartphones or using social media? When it is mentioned it feels very awkward and forced into the narrative.
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.
