It took them less than a decade to make us accept this new order online. From 2010 to 2015 more or less.
Personally, I miss when online communities were places where you shared things you found online. I miss when it was a place where you could personalize your profiles and where people still enjoyed reading blogs and things like that.
I miss when the internet was for people and not for corporations.
It was scary back then too, with pedos, hackers and so on, but it does hit differently when corporations are in control of how we interact with one another and they get to set the rules for what they can demand of you before connecting you with their platforms.
I do hope that someday this corporate chokehold on the internet will collapse and we will see a revival of true free and creative “social media” like it used to be. I miss the blogs and the forums and the art sharing sites that didn’t suck ass like they do nowadays.
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.
Sounds like the teaser for “CommieNet: The Nerds Strike Back”, but on a serious note, I think you are right.
In some sense, digital resources are non-scarce resources, they can be copied and multiplied. There is no capitalistic pressure innate to information, not in the way we consider other resources to be scarce.
But such a digital utopia still would have costs for hosting the content and it would need to stay afloat in the profit-oriented world with finite resources and hard costs for running servers. So it would have to be donation based, or subscription based. Ironically, inside it would have to be strict about prohibiting anything that is effectively monetizing anything that happens inside.
And someone would get the money earned from these subscriptions or fees and this would necessarily end up being some non-profit organization which would have to be somehow community driven, and would decide what is accepted in the space it has to take care of.
But this sounds like a kind of internal governance, like a whole state, a body of rules, that exists within the community of everyone participating in that special network. This council would have responsibility to prevent corruption on the network and at the same time prevent it’s own corruption.
I could go on, but I guess it’s pretty clear that creating a uncorruptible social space is exactly the same problem as creating an uncorruptible truly democratic society. If you figure this out for an internet platform, you have figured it out for the real world.
So I guess it’s not gonna happen ever. It goes always like this - something nice grows, at some point it starts to rot, implodes, from the ashes something new can emerge, rinse and repeat. Just humans being humans.
It took them less than a decade to make us accept this new order online. From 2010 to 2015 more or less.
Personally, I miss when online communities were places where you shared things you found online. I miss when it was a place where you could personalize your profiles and where people still enjoyed reading blogs and things like that.
I miss when the internet was for people and not for corporations.
It was scary back then too, with pedos, hackers and so on, but it does hit differently when corporations are in control of how we interact with one another and they get to set the rules for what they can demand of you before connecting you with their platforms.
I do hope that someday this corporate chokehold on the internet will collapse and we will see a revival of true free and creative “social media” like it used to be. I miss the blogs and the forums and the art sharing sites that didn’t suck ass like they do nowadays.
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.
Sounds like the teaser for “CommieNet: The Nerds Strike Back”, but on a serious note, I think you are right.
In some sense, digital resources are non-scarce resources, they can be copied and multiplied. There is no capitalistic pressure innate to information, not in the way we consider other resources to be scarce.
But such a digital utopia still would have costs for hosting the content and it would need to stay afloat in the profit-oriented world with finite resources and hard costs for running servers. So it would have to be donation based, or subscription based. Ironically, inside it would have to be strict about prohibiting anything that is effectively monetizing anything that happens inside.
And someone would get the money earned from these subscriptions or fees and this would necessarily end up being some non-profit organization which would have to be somehow community driven, and would decide what is accepted in the space it has to take care of.
But this sounds like a kind of internal governance, like a whole state, a body of rules, that exists within the community of everyone participating in that special network. This council would have responsibility to prevent corruption on the network and at the same time prevent it’s own corruption.
I could go on, but I guess it’s pretty clear that creating a uncorruptible social space is exactly the same problem as creating an uncorruptible truly democratic society. If you figure this out for an internet platform, you have figured it out for the real world.
So I guess it’s not gonna happen ever. It goes always like this - something nice grows, at some point it starts to rot, implodes, from the ashes something new can emerge, rinse and repeat. Just humans being humans.