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.
I feel like it’s a mix of quite a few things, social media is DEFINITELY a big part of the problem but the monetisation of EVERYTHING is the main problem.
When the Internet was becoming more mainstream around the world (late 90s) most people who put content on there didn’t do it for money, they did it just to share knowledge/thoughts or just be part of a small niche community.
This meant while there was less content it was more meaningful, and it got to the point quickly as it didn’t need to show you ads etc.
Recipie sites show this perfectly, people used to just post family recipes in cooking forums, now it’s all personal blogs riddled with ads splattered between the person’s life story and multiple requests to subscribe to related guff.
Ultimately the goal of the Internet shifted from “sharing knowledge/communicating” to “show as many ads as possible”. This makes 90% of each site filler to stop you getting to the 10% too quickly, so you get snagged on ads etc.
This is why AI is great for companies, they can put in the important 10% and have it make up the 90%, but it’s just adding more noise to the Internet.
Also pair this problem with search engines that now take advantage of the noise to provide “summary” blurbs which mean you don’t even visit the sites directly so they don’t get the revenue, the search engines do, I think there is a term for this “one click results” or something.
Its such a shame, I loved the Internet from like 1995-2005, you could search for something and get really good information and facts on the subject quickly. Now the same sort of things are lost amongst the filler sites that just aggregate information and regurgitate it as their own, or just out uninformed opinions (maybe even AI results) as content as if it’s from experts etc.
I could go on for ages on the subject as there are so many facets to the problem but I can’t see any real solutions, it’s just a midden heap.
So I will preface my comment with the fact that I hate Internet ads and do everything within my power to block and/or avoid them. Aside from being annoying they’re a blatant security and malware risk, and I avoid them for that reason alone.
That being said, hosting websites gets pretty expensive pretty fast when lots of people come to your site, especially with the advent of much higher bandwidth media that goes along with better quality images and video.
In my opinion the fact that the majority of people just have an expectation that everything online should be free is THE problem. I was there when the Internet was free and open and without ads. That was the culture, and the root of the issue we have today is that that culture is the foundation of the general expectation that it should continue to be so.
But that’s not sustainable with the costs involved in hosting today. Shit costs money yo, why should other people bear that so you can search for recipes for free without it being annoying for you?
The fact that nobody is willing to pay for content via subscriptions or paid apps is literally why the ad-based model is the overwhelming majority of the Internet, and apps, and why data collection/sales is so rampant.
Web development and running a webpage is not easy. Even for those that are skilled enough that it’s easy for them, it takes a ton of time. Usually multiple people’s time for any site with enough visitors to make it a good site. App development is hard and takes a skill set that requires a lot of training or time investment to learn. Why should all that go for free for you?
Until people are willing to pay for content they find valuable the Internet will be a hell hole ridden with ads. YouTube ads are awful, but do you have any idea how much it costs to run YouTube? You think someone should just absorb that out of the goodness of their hearts? Ridiculous.
The goal of the Internet is still to share information and communicate, but all the hardware and bandwidth and time costs real dollars, and the only way for most sites to recoup that is via ads because people just won’t pay anything if given an option, they’ll just go to another site that has free content, because there’s SO MUCH stuff that you can generally find what you want, for free with ads, somewhere else.
There’s only two possible solutions that I see:
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everyone starts being willing to pay for content they find valuable. I don’t see this happening. There’s too many people that share your opinion without taking into account what it costs to actually run a modern website.
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some complicated type of system that directly pays websites for use, based off of usage from people. I think this is almost too complicated to implement that it’s likely impossible with today’s Internet. If we want to also maintain privacy/anonymity when surfing I can’t see how this can ever work - so unless we have some future system where people are uniquely identifiable on the Internet, and then some additional system that somehow “fairly” compensates websites for traffic from users, this won’t happen. It would need to involve ISPs, their customers, and web site owners in some coordinated payment system to work.
Not to sound too preachy but to me your comment comes off as super entitled.
I pay for apps that I think are valuable, even ones with no cost like Signal. Because I value what they provide. I subscribe to sites that I find valuable enough to do so when it’s an option. I abhor data collection and ads and I fight them without prejudice. But even I don’t think I pay enough directly to offset how much I cost providers, I’m sure I don’t, but that’s mostly laziness because it’s a pain to pay every site directly so I donate to the ones I really appreciate and use heavily. If I could pay my ISP for my link and then have a direct credit system that throws dollars and cents directly into website coffers as I use them, that would be great - but I don’t want to give up my privacy either, so… Yeah.
Long story short, ad-based content is going nowhere until there’s a fundamental shift in either people or how the Internet operates.
The Internet used to operate fine before this ad riddled slop was spoon fed to us.
I’m pretty sure back in the day you would get some ads on geocities sites and other free Web hosts, and it was fine, I don’t expect ads to vanish, you are making out like it’s an all or nothing proposition.
The paradigms for “content” is all wrong now, rather than the ads being needed to fund the content, the content is produced as a way to keep eyes on ads.
There are literally design/ux guides around how to best waste a users time to get more ads shown without getting them to leave, click bait shouldn’t even be a thing.
Now you can say “this is why we need to support people so they don’t need to do this”, but I don’t feel they do NEED to, they choose to do this as it maximises income, but why do you need to get paid for every thing you do?
Its like people used to Stream and make YT vids because they enjoyed it, uploading new vids whenever there was a reason to, not because some algorithm required it.
I’m not against people making a living from YT or streaming, or even the Internet, but there is a difference between someone who enjoyed doing something and made it big vs people who just want to make money and YT is the vehicle for it.
Too much of society is focused on money.
The Internet used to feel like a university with clever people sharing knowledge and discussing all manner of topics, with some fun student bars to hang out and chat.
Now it feels like a noisy bazzar full of pick pocketers and stall vendors with fake smiles yelling at you to support them and buy their merch (and or their sponsors).
Its a cess pit.
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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.
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“I’ve known Lemmy for a few hours and I feel like I’m back in the early spirit of the internet.”
Different system, same issues.
People are people.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.
I would not consider Lemmy social media. Forums are few and far between, IRC is barely still kicking and Usenet (as it was) simply doesn’t exist.
I was curious about Usenet awhile ago, was it still linked computers mirroring information like the old days? No, it more or less simply linked usenet providers at this point.
IRC is as active as it has always been. It was never a high throughput system, you can barely keep track of more than 5 people talking.
Forums are still kicking as well, you have car owner forums for basically any make and model, Hobby Forums, specialist Forums (house building kitchen or gardening just to name a few I consulted recently).
Yeah, they don’t have the scale of Facebook, they never had.
And lemmy, reddit, Mastodon and Co are very much social media. What are they if not?
Lemmy isn’t social. It’s just forums aggregated. One could use it as a social app, and some people do, but it really is not necessary or even really welcomed.
I have seen estimates of a reduction of 50 to 75 percent in the number of forums over the last 15 years. There are certainly a lot less. People go to reddit or discord these days.
Same with IRC but the decline is even higher.
I’d love to see the methodology for those estimates, because I see more every year, not less. IRC stays flat.
Go look at the major irc chat hosts. Add up daily users. Then compare that number to the estimated users in 2005-10.
They are similar.
Well no they are not. Netsplit follows IRC and tracks users and IRC servers. You can watch the decline over time. Quakenet alone had nearly 200,000 monthly active user alone back in 2005.
The split of freenode, the technical abilities of people, and the lack of a easy to use mobile client all made people turn away from IRC. Factor in discord and Reddit and you lose even more.
The number of servers from 2005 to today has dropped also. From 3500 to about a thousand.
I love IRC, but it has been on a decline for a long time. Particularly if you factor in the number of online users today versus back then in general. The percentage of them that uses IRC or even knows what it is, is much smaller.
I suppose you could argue that unpublished networks, onion sites, and other IRC outside of mainstream exist, but how many users do they have?
The early Internet was social media, but it wasn’t so corporatized to the point of being ruined.
Exactly. The internet was always social, connecting people. Capitalism and greed have ruined the internet.
I do agree, but indirectly, cause social media isn’t inherently bad; It has been manipulated and exploited by oligarchs into weapons for information scraping and data theft. Zuck… Musk… Don’t let them slink away into the shadow and blame the tech. There was a time when social media was mostly enriching and had a potential for community building, and they took that from us to profit massively. The internet is dying, and it’s those psychotic freaks that have done it.
Yes. It is dying because it was murdered.
There’s a bloody facebook wrapped in palantir sitting on the table.
Not social media per sé, but definitely “the algorithm” that was introduced around ~2014 and has been tweaked by the likes of Cambridge Analytica to now provide us with endless ragebait.
MySpace was social media and had none of the toxicity.
Exactly. The algorithm is literally designed to stop people from thinking about what they actually care about. Of course that has caused deterioration of every aspect of human society to some degree.
Truth. We need to massively regulate social media. If I had my way, I would prohibit any large social media site from offering any kind of content stream algorithmically targeted to a single user.
This wouldn’t be a restriction on speech. You could still have your website and publish whatever you wanted. You could still have sites where people can upload user content. But something like YouTube would look far different. YouTube could have one main page of content they show everyone, but they couldn’t have individual feeds for individual users. If you wanted to find content not on the main page, you would have to find it yourself. You would have to find channels, subscribe to them, share recommendations with friends, etc. If people want to create their own curated content feed, that’s fine. But they have to be the ones that do it.
We don’t even need to ban social media. What we need to completely ban is individually-targeted algorithmic content. That’s what’s lead us to the insanity we are currently experiencing. And this should apply to everyone, not just kids. If anything adults need this more than kids do.
MySpace was social media and had none of the toxicity.
Usenet was Social Media and it had allllll the toxicity.
Randall published this on February 20, 2008.
You just gave me the biggest flashback to a comic made by Endling.
What a blast from the past.
