Totally agree on the pre-2010 internet being more human. Now not only the platforms are centralized, half of the blogs you find are now AI generated incoherent garbage.
There is still good stuff, but now you have to work really hard to find it among AI slop, Ads, paywalls etc.
I hope the fediverse can establish a new form of the old internet. Lemmy instances are now the self hosted phpBB forums of this decade. And even on the corporate platforms there are some thriving niche communities.
Maybe it was just that the pre-2010 internet was driven primarily by nerds of some form. With the smartphone it went fully mainstream, and that broke it. It got streamlined and commodified and monetized to turn any kind of “engagement” into profits, instead of, well, just being a place where many random quirky people are doing their thing and sharing cool stuff.
Remember when “Homepage” was still a concept? Now I guess for most people it’s their Instagram profile, or something like that.
I blame content creators. The minute PewDiePie made a million, it was game over. There should’ve been a unified front from the start to reject the PewDiePie model. We didn’t see it for what it really was. The internet was always going to get taken over by profit-driven motives. The only way to stop that would’ve been making the internet a hostile place for people chasing profits.
Think about the timeline. Profit focus leads to ads and data collection. That leads to political groups using that data to run research and push propaganda. Corporations are gonna do what they do. Blame isn’t a light switch—it’s a pie chart. And if we don’t start naming the villain, we’re going to lose the next space too. Whatever space we think is ours. We have to stay sharp when the profit seekers show up, even if it’s just some cool comic book guy trying to sell a few books. They all end up in the same place.
Any space created by hackers and nerds should create a new religion of sorts with principals and values to prevent another take over of whatever space they create in the future.
Totally agree on the pre-2010 internet being more human. Now not only the platforms are centralized, half of the blogs you find are now AI generated incoherent garbage.
There is still good stuff, but now you have to work really hard to find it among AI slop, Ads, paywalls etc.
I hope the fediverse can establish a new form of the old internet. Lemmy instances are now the self hosted phpBB forums of this decade. And even on the corporate platforms there are some thriving niche communities.
Maybe it was just that the pre-2010 internet was driven primarily by nerds of some form. With the smartphone it went fully mainstream, and that broke it. It got streamlined and commodified and monetized to turn any kind of “engagement” into profits, instead of, well, just being a place where many random quirky people are doing their thing and sharing cool stuff.
Remember when “Homepage” was still a concept? Now I guess for most people it’s their Instagram profile, or something like that.
I blame content creators. The minute PewDiePie made a million, it was game over. There should’ve been a unified front from the start to reject the PewDiePie model. We didn’t see it for what it really was. The internet was always going to get taken over by profit-driven motives. The only way to stop that would’ve been making the internet a hostile place for people chasing profits.
Think about the timeline. Profit focus leads to ads and data collection. That leads to political groups using that data to run research and push propaganda. Corporations are gonna do what they do. Blame isn’t a light switch—it’s a pie chart. And if we don’t start naming the villain, we’re going to lose the next space too. Whatever space we think is ours. We have to stay sharp when the profit seekers show up, even if it’s just some cool comic book guy trying to sell a few books. They all end up in the same place.
Any space created by hackers and nerds should create a new religion of sorts with principals and values to prevent another take over of whatever space they create in the future.