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.
It has destroyed society.
I miss the days of everyone trying to have their own websites. It provided much more variety and unique experiences. Even if the quality wasn’t as… great? But the Tripod, Geocities, Angelfire type sites in the world really let people be creative and build their own sites. I miss those days.
It’s not like they can’t. There are plenty of options available for people to make sites that are easier and much more capable than groceries or angelfire. People don’t use them.
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
The spirit of the internet was dead long before that.
It definitely desecrated the corpse, though.
“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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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.
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.
i think the difference is that before the internet was a social mesh of countless websites.
while today it’s just a handful of social media sites.
yhea, it’s capitalism, but social media is the main tool capitalism used.
Yes, but in order to properly learn our lesson to prevent this from happening again, we need to call out the root of the problem instead of/in addition to the tools or symptoms.
i think even without capitalism, social media works better on scale (even federated social media, does so but decentralised). you will join the bigger systems, and those systems are more likely to grow if they are bigger…
they will be much less toxic without capitalism though
The “bigger systems” pre-corporate internet (and somewhat in the transition) were sometimes fairly large forums dedicated to one niche (sometimes multiple, but in the same general field). Once Reddit specifically came along after YouTube/Google laid the groundwork for the corporatization of the Internet, it centralized basically every forum to one website. Now even today, forums still exist, but it’s nowhere near what they once were.
That’s also not to mention sites like Geocities allowing basically everyone to have their own website (which of course, is another version of centralization, but with much more control given to its users).
And it’s not like corporations didn’t try to take control of the internet before 2005/2006. Just look at AOL in the 90s for a prime example, along with Flash, ActiveX/Internet Explorer, Quicktime/Realplayer browser plugins for video, etc.
Without capitalism, we would still see the internet grow, as even in the late 90s, it felt as if you were being left behind in society if you didn’t have an internet connection, but the way in which it grew would look much more akin to how it looked in the 90s and early 2000s.
The internet sure was far from perfect back then, but it was ours’.
I do miss that early internet, it was more discovery and exploration and much less doomscrolling.
and I agree that corporations destroyed it.
i realised that the response StumbleUpon cannot exist nowadays,is because internet is just a handful of sites rather than countless small ones. God StumbleUpon was superior to wherever we have now
This is why I’m finding more and more that it’s easier to find local events the “old fashioned way” (word-of-mouth, flyers, local newspapers and zines, etc) rather than through social media. It used to be easier to see events local to me, but now the algorithm pushes events that I may like but aren’t local at all. Sometimes I do actually see something local, but it’s too late.
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 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.
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
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
3rd one is obsolete now and has been replaced with affection
Saved, thanks for sharing. I just learned how geologists date rocks 😎
Needs moar webrings.
No, not the only one -
The internet is just a microcosm of social media’s destruction of our entire social fabric
Social media is the front of the house.
What destroyed the internet are the cabal of Corporations monetizing every interaction and directing flows from the back of the house.
Unfettered Capitalism killed the internet experience.
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.
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
What was the state of the internet in 1994 that it would cause such resentiment?
“A cultural phenomenon during a period beginning around late 1993 and early 1994, when Internet service providers began offering Usenet access to many new users.”
"The flood of new and generally inexperienced Internet users directed to Usenet by commercial ISPs in 1993 and subsequent years swamped the existing culture of those forums and their ability to self-moderate and enforce existing norms. AOL began their Usenet gateway service in March 1994, leading to a constant stream of new users.
Hence, from the early Usenet community point of view, the influx of new users that began in September 1993 appeared to be endless."
I think that you left out the part that explains why it’s called September. Every year, when first-year university students got their hands on the internet for the first time, they would rampage through the noble message boards with their barbarian netiquetteless ways. Many dreaded the annual influx of newbies, and their worst nightmares were finally realized when the internet was opened up to the greater public.
My reflection on that period would lead me to suggest it was the mass “normie” invasion of nerd-space and the promotion of low-effort participation. I don’t remember anything specific about that particular timeframe, though.
The internet was better when it wasn’t big enough to be worth monetizing. And the signal to noise ratio has generally grown exponentially with participation. Which makes sense if you think about it.
My reflection on that period would lead me to suggest it was the mass “normie” invasion of nerd-space and the promotion of low-effort participation. I don’t remember anything specific about that particular timeframe, though.
So ultimately the sentiment has never changed?
Eternal September refers to September 1993, when a popular internet service provider (AOL) provided easy access to Usenet for its users, which immediately threatened the existing culture and lowered the quality of discourse.
Before this, September was only a temporary problem as a new batch of college freshman would arrive and be unaccustomed to the place.
94 was when it really took off and the hoi polloi started tuning in.
https://ourworldindata.org/internet
Be easy to make an argument for a few years later, but 1994 has always stuck in my mind as the take off point. By then there were “information superhighway” items all over the news, everybody got AOL disks, Windows 95 was right around the corner to take the pain out of PCs, stuff like that. That’s the year I’d point to and say the internet was no longer a nerd thing.
1994: I was still fiddling with a 286 (WITH a math coproccesor I installed!), way beyond my skills at the time. LOL, my gf and I had to drive across town a beg a local IBM guy to give us a copy of the BIOS on a floopy when ours crash. He acted like Neo giving Choi the disk, “Yeah, I know. This never happened. You don’t exist.”
The nerds got their wish granted in the most monkeys-paw way possible. For 20 years or so, computer nerds were trying to tell everyone about the internet. They saw the potential and what it could be. They were early adopters, and they wished that everyone could appreciate this wonderful thing they had discovered or helped invent.
Well, they got their wish…
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.
It’s not social media that did it. It’s monopolistic, unregulated, greedy, giant tech corporations that made the internet shitty.
Exactly, early social media was tons of fun. It was like the early internet but easier since anyone could make a profile with any info.
Then it had to be monetized. They had to glue eyeballs via attention, no matter what kind. Now it’s all rent seeking, innovation is 100% about what can produce an immediate return, no care for the long term. The grift economy…
It was not social media, that was about the people. It’s what the social media companies did in search of dollars that did it in. Greed. Full stop.
Community has been replaced by the trough.
Is that an Animal Farm quote?
