Why the Internet Isn’t Fun Anymore

gator_fever · Nov 18, 2024 at 9:20 PM

philnotfil said: ↑

An interesting read about how corporate internet has chased all the fun away in its chase for dollars.

Why the Internet Isn’t Fun Anymore

Lately on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, my timeline is filled with vapid posts orbiting the same few topics like water whirlpooling down a drain. Last week, for instance, the chatter was dominated by talk of Taylor Swift’s romance with the football player Travis Kelce. If you tried to talk about anything else, the platform’s algorithmic feed seemed to sweep you into irrelevance. Users who pay for Elon Musk’s blue-check verification system now dominate the platform, often with far-right-wing commentary and outright disinformation; Musk rewards these users monetarily based on the engagement that their posts drive, regardless of their veracity. The decay of the system is apparent in the spread of fake news and mislabelled videos related to Hamas’s attack on Israel.

Elsewhere online, things are similarly bleak. Instagram’s feed pushes months-old posts and product ads instead of photos from friends. Google search is cluttered with junky results, and S.E.O. hackers have ruined the trick of adding “Reddit” to searches to find human-generated answers. Meanwhile, Facebook’s parent company, Meta, in its latest bid for relevance, is reportedly developing artificial-intelligence chatbots with various “sassy” personalities that will be added to its apps, including a role-playing D. & D. Dungeon Master based on Snoop Dogg. The prospect of interacting with such a character sounds about as appealing as texting with one of those spam bots that asks you if they have the right number.

The social-media Web as we knew it, a place where we consumed the posts of our fellow-humans and posted in return, appears to be over. The precipitous decline of X is the bellwether for a new era of the Internet that simply feels less fun than it used to be. Remember having fun online? It meant stumbling onto a Web site you’d never imagined existed, receiving a meme you hadn’t already seen regurgitated a dozen times, and maybe even playing a little video game in your browser. These experiences don’t seem as readily available now as they were a decade ago. In large part, this is because a handful of giant social networks have taken over the open space of the Internet, centralizing and homogenizing our experiences through their own opaque and shifting content-sorting systems. When those platforms decay, as Twitter has under Elon Musk, there is no other comparable platform in the ecosystem to replace them. A few alternative sites, including Bluesky and Discord, have sought to absorb disaffected Twitter users. But like sproutlings on the rain-forest floor, blocked by the canopy, online spaces that offer fresh experiences lack much room to grow.

I particularly agree with this observation:

The best internet was the one with lots of interaction. Now I see people plug their faces into Youtube shorts for hours at a time, never once leaving a comment or sharing a video with a friend. Just a way to turn off their brains for a while.
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PITBOSS · Nov 18, 2024 at 11:58 PM

cocodrilo said: ↑

How do I get to the Dark Web? There must be some good stuff there. Or is that just something from a movie?
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Btw, your posts have become funnier over the years.

92gator · Nov 19, 2024 at 3:20 AM

PITBOSS said: ↑

Btw, your posts have become funnier over the years.
Click to expand...

They've gotten angrier imo.

He used to be clever and pithy.

Lately--at least pre-election--mostly spittling mad.

But then, a LOT of lefties have seemingly backed off of their rabid TDS demeanor since the election (shockingly, ironically, paradoxically....).

Go figure. Whatever the cause, it's a welcome development.

Hopefully it's so with coco too.

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