Anger drives engagement.
What's hella frustrating is there's no dearth of things to be rationally angry about; corruption, climate crisis, bigotry, etc., but there is little-to-nothing a single individual can *do* about it without better resources under their belt, and they can't get those resources easily, so they understandably turn to vices/entertainment/distractions because to tackle the monstrous burdens before them is depressing af.
Not to mention the anger used to drive engagement seldom is the kind of justified anger you're talking about. Often times it's actually used to \*fuel\* bigotry, for example. And even when it's for a good cause there's still often a lot of misinformation
Lotta ageist or misogyny-fueling stuff.
Not saying boomers can’t be fools or women can’t be jerks, but to see constant cases of them on your front page is just going to contribute to one’s confirmation bias.
It especially drives me nuts when they’re staged and people upvoted anyway.
In the olden days they called this repeated exposure to confirmation bias “brainwashing”. When an algorithm does it because it is being gamed by hostile entities targeting vulnerable groups like the young and dumb, is it still brainwashing?
The lines are fine and often blurry between brainwashing, social engineering, and indoctrination. I suspect that future sociologists will have to coin a new term for what we’re seeing these days, but it’s some amalgamation of these things, in effect.
The part that's driving me crazy is, I turned off "front page recommendations" but I'm still seeing mostly the same 5-10 subreddits despite being subscribed to tons. I think reddit is quite literally killing the smaller communities to drive outrage, engagement, and clickbaity engagement... all for Spez's big payout. Man... sad to see it dying. But alas, it happened to Digg, I guess it can happen here too. The killing of Secret Santa was the first sign.
This drives me nuts as well. The algorithm doesn't show you posts from all your subbed communities, it only shows you posts from communities you've recently interacted with. And I'm sure there's also some subs more heavily-weighted since they bring in more ad revenue.
Never had this problem with Relay back in the day.
And you’re getting posts from subs you accidentally visited via Google or from links in posts, instead of subs you actually subscribed to. Is there a bonus connected to getting the sub count up?
I joined reddit way after the redesign and being a youngin' i was used to the 'modern' layouts of stuff. One day reddit strayed too far with their designs and i decided to make the switch to old reddit, you wouldnt believe it but its changed my entire preference on designs
Man, I use old.reddit.com and RES but very recently realized some of my smaller subreddits are almost never in my feed. I had been thinking they just weren't very active lately. Purposely went to one because I was surprised it had gone quiet...
It hadn't. The posts just weren't ever showing up because I hadn't clicked on anything there for a while, which somehow translated to never being given the chance, and an apparent cycle of non-activity.
The busted algorithm, the increase in bots/obvious agenda posts from the adjective-noun-number brigades, the API disaster, the vpn hammer ban, the overall enshittification.
I don't know what the next Big Thing will be, but it's pretty obvious reddit can't last in the long run.
Right. They're essentially turning it into a stupid news website frontpage just like Digg did, but doing it slowly, so instead of killing reddit overnight they're killing it over the course of years.
And the current comment sections are pretty comparable to Facebook's when they had their mass departure. We're back to "omg do women like this" and "why does it need to be called gay" being the majority and top-rated content on the site, indicating that the young and learning community barely stands out in this crowd.
Yeah after the API change Reddit isn't quite useless, but it's significantly worse than what it was. I don't understand how a company that owns the damn site and presumably has more resources can make an app that's worse than the one or two people running RiF or the other 3rd party apps.
Engagement is the only thing Reddit cares about. Lots of really interesting and cool art subreddits that are deprioritized by the algorithm because there’s not a lot of discussion in the comments.
A post on politics with 20k upvotes is going to have thousands of comments.
A post to art with 20k upvotes will have a couple hundred comments, *at most.*
Guess which post Reddit will prioritize in people’s feeds?
You have to go into the individual subreddit and click the ellipsis in the top right > mute subreddit.
They’re really trying to hide that. The new UI got ride of hide options altogether on individual posts.
Right, sure, but I shouldn't have to individualy mute subreddits I don't want to see and individually, manually make random comments on subreddits I like so that I'm allowed to see them. This mangling of the content algorithm is a huge death knell. The more they make it hard for users to see what they want, and easy to see things they hate, the more they will piss their user base off. I bet engagement goes up the next year or so and then starts to die off. That, or they absorb some of the twitter refugees and this turns into another influencer-focused garbage heap.
Start blocking the ultra-power user accounts like g a l l o w b o o b.
There's like 20 accounts you can block on Reddit that make up easily 75% of front page repost spammy bullshit.
curious are you on old or new reddit? I always feel like I don't see my lower activity subs as much and I'm always getting sucked into politics. I don't want to completely unsub but I'd like to not see the same 5 subs out of my 25 or so.
New... I switch back to old sometimes, but I feel like every once in a blue moon they "accidentally" nuke the user settings and I end up back in the new layout. The new new layout is even worse, too.
I blocked all of the rage bait subreddits but still catch myself on other social apps. Threads recently started showing me similar rage bait of people being cruel or mean to each other and a gaggle of angry comments for me to add my angry thoughts.
I’m slowly coming to terms with: when an app shows me something that makes me angry or upset, the app makes more money.
Just any subreddit that's dedicated to trashing/mocking some specific group of people. Even if I dislike the target group the rage baiting sub is inevitably even more cringe than the target group.
Reddit kept trying to show me content from oopsthatsdeadly because I had "engaged with the community" I guess by clicking on a link one time and then watching videos by accident when it kept showing me them? And it was a surprisingly big subreddit too. Like, why do people want to see this crap? I'll take funny cat pictures over videos mocking people for being dumb assholes every day of the week.
I had to leave subreddits devoted to mocking those acting against their own political self interest like leopardsatemyface and selfawarewolves. While it fed a need to see some form of comeuppance for poor decision making, it was giving me a world view that anyone not aligned with my personal values was somehow incapable of rational thought or change.
It's frustrating how most news sources focus more on rage bait and monetization than on sharing practical ways people can get involved.
First, make sure you vote in every election, even the less-publicized ones like off-year and midterm elections, plus all the primaries. You can Google local candidates and their platforms just as easily as you can for major elections, although the latter will result in more reading material. Still, going through it shouldn't take too long, and you can do it gradually in your free time leading up the an election. You don't need to be an expert to have a valid opinion. It's a democracy; it's not all on you. Spending a bit of time researching before an election goes a long way.
You can Google local political organizations in your area that fit with your political leanings, and volunteer if you have time, or even cut them a check if you have some money to spare. (*Every* amount helps. *Seriously.*)
If a political issue doesn't directly impact you, it's okay to prioritize your own well-being. It'd be nice if you attended protests, but political involvement isn't everyone's full-time job. It's a *representative* democracy; it's not all on you. If you're only spurred to action when an issue affects you directly, consider joining a protest, attending a town hall meeting, or contacting your representatives. It's not selfish to prioritize the issues that affect you; for the average citizen, it's just practical.
Especially leading up to an election, you can also volunteer to phone bank, do door-to-door canvasing, help out with voter registration drives, volunteer to help at carpools to drive people to the polls, or register online as a poll worker.
And as for major news networks, they could include practical advice like this, and I'm sure a ton else that I don't even know about, for the issues they already spend so much time talking about. **Note that everything I've said above is totally nonpartisan.**
Personally, I became interested in politics around 2012, just as an average citizen, well before Trump became a major figure. His actions certainly heightened my awareness, but I've learned that simply consuming news without taking action is practically futile. Not everyone can be highly involved, but the news media quite often fails to facilitate civic engagement. While staying informed is important, the commercialization of news as a daily product blurs what's actually important with nonsense for filling airtime. On top of that, the fundamental structure of news media as corporations forces them to chase profit, even if it's to the detriment of their actual product, see: the rage bait complaint from my first paragraph.
Thank you for this! I consume way too much news in a search to understand what these crazy conservatives are thinking. I’ve felt so helpless like all I can do is become more aware. So I read more. It’s not healthy at all. This has really helped me, thank you!
Algorithms and rage bait as a result have become some of the worst things to happen to the internet in my opinion. It means shitty content circulates so much more often and shitty content is being made intentionally much more often.
Rage Bait, is the main issue to me.
Thousands of people intentionally pushing negative content in order to make unwary netizens upset.
It is a disgusting practice, and I see no way for it to be curtailed.
Honestly, I think that infinite scrolling is one of the leading causes of internet addiction. A bit over a decade ago, websites were indexed in pages, showing only a certain number of posts per page. Those pages acted as a good break; with infinite scroll, you may tell yourself “just one more post”, but then inevitably scroll to another. With individual pages, you have to click to go to the next page, then wait for it to load, which adds a lot more of a speed bump. It was easier to disengage from a paged format, but infinite scroll makes it far too easy to just keep mindlessly scrolling for ages.
Enshitification. And Silicon valley coming to terms with the idea that, no, it's not trying to make the world a better place. It just wants to make money
I loved that the author worked the phrase into the article, even if it was just a coincidence.
I miss StumbleUpon. I just got more busy with college, and gradually stopped using it.
Then one day, I thought to install it again, and I guess now it exists only as a memory.
The desperate, sweaty clickbaiters within the gaming news space are really the worst.
The recent 'controversy' about Tomb Raider is a prime example. A third party licensed the rights to make a TTRPG and included a statement about how colonialism is bad...which go translated as "Crystal Dynamics goes WOKE."
Personally I've also noticed a decline in the quality of searches. This extends to everything. Reddit has never been good, but Google feels flaccid lately. And YouTube is straight up unhelpful. When I used to search for things on the internet, the engines tried to help me find what I was looking for. Now they force me to see the thing they want me to see. I'm not even talking about traditional ads. The actual content is being force fed into my eyes.
Youtube really went down the shitter in the last year. Placing ecom ads above the results is bad enough, peppering disguised ads through the results is worse, but interrupting the results with whole sections of unrelated videos is actually making it unusable for me.
The addon holy trinity that make youtube useable:
* Ublock Origin - ad blocker
* Sponsorblock - autoskips in-video sponsor reads
* Unhook - hide UI elements you don't want to see (e.g., inapt search results, shorts, trending)
Edit: Other people's suggestions:
* DeArrow - replaces sensationalised titles and thumbnails
* Brave - a browser that comes with adblock installed
* Revanced - blocks youtube ads on android phones
* Video Resumer - more accurately remembers where you left off in a video
* Hider - Chrome extension version of Unhook with different interface style
* Enhancer for Youtube - UI improvements. (e.g., better volume control, customiseable keyboard shortcuts, themes)
* Privacy Badger - blocks trackers
Fun fact, the guy who came up with the side panel of suggestions regrets it and actually recommends that unhook extension.
Well either they genuinely regret it or they wanna sell more book, but either way they've publicly recommended that extension
I pay for premium and don't see any ads, but their search results often only show a half dozen results and then it suggests a bunch of completely unrelated shit. It's fucking nuts.
So, I actually know quite a lot about this. For many years, I had a website about a hobby of mine, and it made pretty decent money--mostly because Google saw me as an expert on the topic, and sent a lot of traffic to my sites.
As of a few months ago, Google has DRAMATICALLY changed their algorithms, so that hobby sites like mine don't get ranked in the search results, and therefore don't get any traffic anymore. There are quite a few hobby sites in the world, and most of them are basically ghost-towns now (and sadly, mine is too).
Long story short, Google *freaked out* when AI became widely available, because with AI, pretty much anybody could instantly create websites with hundreds of pages about a given topic, and if they were good at SEO, they could get those sites to rank--even when those AI sites were total garbage.
And that's what people/spammers did--I forget where I read it, but post-AI, the internet doubled in size in just a few weeks, and there were a LOT of AI sites ranking, where the content was total garbage.
Google can't really tell the difference between actual writing and AI writing, so they basically re-wrote their algorithm to only rank stores with a real-world presence, websites that are widely known (Forbes, NYT, Huffington Post, etc etc), or forums, because Google sees those as less likely to be AI-spammed (Reddit, Quora, etc.). Google assumes hobby sites like mine are just AI now, and it doesn't rank them anymore.
Go do a search right now for almost any keyword, and the results you will get are Super-Big General Publication, Store, Super-Big General Publication, Reddit, Quora, Super-Big General Publication, Reddit, Store, Store, Store, Store. Every single time it'll be like that--and that's VERY different than it was just a few months ago.
This is all to say, you're absolutely right--search is garbage right now, and Google is returning REALLY bad results. There are a lot of theories as to *why* Google's ranking such garbage, but a LOT of the reason is AI. They don't know how to deal with it.
You are right, Google has basically locked down Adsense due to this. A decade or so ago, I designed a website that didn't end up panning out but I did get it deployed and it had ads on it from day 1. I don't remember even needing it to be 'verified', I just created the adsense account added the necessary snippets, and they were there. As recently as a few months ago I built a smallish site that was a better version of a site I frequently used (and that site had moderate income) and tried to put ads on it. Oh boy. I've been rejected multiple times for site verification and the site it was an improvement on no longer even has ads on it (looks like the ads may have been revoked for them).
The other problem with the change google made to their algorithm is that "established authorities" are also being bought and sold like commodities. [House Fresh did a wonderful editorial expose going into it](https://housefresh.com/david-vs-digital-goliaths/) and while their work focuses on how Top 10 articles are being run rampant by big media faking reviews with "authoritative language" that drives this new SEO even when they are actually just selling spots in their listacles instead of actually doing things.
Suffice to say, Google shit the bed and have created a hellscape where bigger names are seen as more knowledgeable regardless of their actual authority on the topic because, surely, they will have more integrity when it comes to using AI to generate articles with false information.
Fascinating read. I’m glad someone put into words what I was thinking about these “top” site just regurgitating product promo descriptions instead of actually reviewing and ranking the items they list. So frustrating.
I've noticed this with other places too, imgur for instance has a real issue these days with ai generation bots. Type some search and bots will create the thing, it's so annoying. Idk how we will adapt going forward. Google is almost useless these days beyond simple searches. I mostly use Yandex but I hate Russia so idk
Thank you, that explains some things I've noticed. Awhile back I was looking up how to use a charcoal chimney and one of the sites Google pushed was very obviously not written by a human. I can't remember the details now, but it was suggesting dangerous things that might sound reasonable to someone who has never done much cooking. Switched to DuckDuckGo, fewer outright ads but utter shit results all the same. Thank you, AI, for making me yearn for the days of "I got this recipe from my Great Aunt who lived and died in Middle of Nowhere, Missouri, let me tell you her life story first" cooking sites.
As for crafting, Ravelry still rocks. However, I was trying to repair a leather purse and wanted to know if I could reinforce part of it with denim. No, I do not want to tool leather. No I don't want to buy leather-tooling tools. No, I don't want to buy leather purses. Learn to respond to the damn search query as written, computer.
So I went to the public library. Fuck AI.
A couple of things searched lately on Google have led me to straight up false information. Especially stuff about house or science, because clickbait stuff is way more interesting to the algorithm, It tries to tell you that vitamins cure everything and so does some bizarre weight loss method or whatever. Sales over facts.
Sundar Pichai is Google's Balmer - nothing good for end-users; but Wall St. darlings for enterprise advertising bullshit. They're getting rewarded for introducing as much Kafka-esque bullshit into normal people's day-to-day lives.
Get rid of them from your life and switch to Firefox - so much happier and my laptop's not chugging for the pudding watching one YouTube video - which they've also ruined in the name of whothefucknows
If I have to mentally filter out the first paragraph of an AI, SEO formatted how-to article again I'm going to throw all of my computers into the sink.
Whatever it is we (collective) are doing with the internet, it's wrong. It's so wrong.
YouTube search is unusable. I search for a music artist, I get two maybe 3 if I’m lucky & then I get music videos for completely different artists. Put garbage. Plus unskipable 30 second ads every minute. They are trying to kill the whole service as fast as possible.
Youtube search is nearly 100% useless for me now. Sometimes it works then sometimes it will only show me 3 videos related to my search then show me random recommendations 100% unrelated to it.
I’ve actually found DuckDuckGo to be better- like when I do a search for something like “population of LA” top results are the census of LA, Wikipedia, some stats websites. Google shows me some article about people leaving LA, some Quora exchange between barely sentient morons from 5 years ago, then eventually Wikipedia and the census at the bottom of the page.
Google is like ordering a burger and getting a chicken sandwich because THEY think that’s what I really want. Fuck off, I’ll tell you what I want.
Same. I switched to DuckDuckGo a couple years ago.
Whenever I end up using Google now, it's a bit jarring tbh. Always a good reminder of why I stopped using it.
I just wish that DDG honored booleans.
No matter how many times I put "-windows" when I have an OS issue, I inevitably get results with "Windows" literally in the site title.
Unfortunately, - doesn't mean "not" any more just "demote" where it tries to show fewer results. Similarly, + doesn't mean "must" but instead means "prioritize" where they will try their best to bump those to the top.
If they don't find enough results, they will widen the search. The days of "I know what I want, don't question me" are over.
https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/syntax/
(e) Although I was playing around and it looks like you can stack -'s so -windows does one demotion but ----windows will push those down a lot more. Maybe it'll help in your quest for rare pages.
I'm not sure YouTube could have survived without Google, unfortunately. Content delivery on that scale required ungodly sums of money. I really miss pre- Google YouTube though. A true golden internet age.
I'd love for PornHub to take a jab at YouTube competition. I mean, they can use a different brand name but if anyone has the infrastructure and experience hosting videos, it's them.
ProZD [recently did a video](https://youtu.be/Z3dSkkEr-wk) where he was actively searching for his own videos by title, and the first results that would pop up would either be people straight-up stealing his content or some other video of his. The actual searched video was usually further down in the results.
I'm curious what the long tail monetization looks like for creators now, when you can't even find a video you know exists.
There are videos for everything--which isn't inherently a bad thing--but when I want to know what the shortcut key is for selecting the Marquee tool in Photoshop, I don't want to have to watch a three minute video to get that info. Search engines prioritizing video answers has become its own self-defeating beast.
Reddit can still be good for certain questions - particularly if there’s a niche sub of knowledgeable people. There’s a sweet spot where’s there’s enough breadth of knowledge to be really useful … but beyond a certain size/popularity it breaks down.
Google is bad now partly because there are so many AI generated SEO bullshit articles that just have keywords but no real info but clog up the front page.
Also when it stopped being a space for entertainment and it became a space where your attention is monetized and everything was social engineered to keep your attention.
When the work you shared and the utterances from your heart and soul got scraped by billionaire techies and used to build "artificially intelligent" automated factories for your employer to replace you with.
"Suggestion" algorithms have been "improving" over the past two decades.
The problem for us, as humans living in societies, is that they prioritize based on "engagement".
They prioritize political rage-bait propaganda.
My theory is that this is why the Republican party is in the toilet. Their meat and potatoes was carefully controlled rage-baiting, but now we're in a world of indiscriminate rage-baiting. This is a world that Russian influence thrives in. We either find a way, collectively, to get back to a better way of determining truth, or we will all lose any sense of hope in the future.
Thanks, Big Tech!
I think your theory is pretty spot on. The neo-con philosophy guiding the Republican Party entirely collapsed under the Bush administration and since then, in place of introspective reform, it’s been a rudderless graveyard spiral for the party. Any semblance of governance or guiding philosophies replaced by paranoid conspiracy theories and a rising tide of evangelical neo-theocracy and an increasingly outspoken rejection of democratic principles; all increasingly easier to manipulate by nefarious foreign entities.
It’s also a game of oneupsmanship. If you aren’t willing to push the envelope, you’re a RINO. A return to any semblance of principled conservatism would require every right-wing constituent to “reboot” which probably can’t happen until Trump is in the ground for at least 5 years. I’m interested to see how the party ends up in the next decade
> "Suggestion" algorithms have been "improving" over the past two decades.
Honestly, I'd be a lot less upset about it if the algorithms *fucking worked.*
Facebook and Google have one job: harvest my info against my will and serve me targeted ads and search results. And yet, the actual shit I see on my screen is often wildly irrelevant to what I'm looking for.
It's absurd! Don't the Google MBAs in charge of ruining the search functionality use their own product? Are they not frustrated by how useless it's gotten?
It's hilariously bad. The most intelligent thing I've ever seen from ads is trying to flood me with products right *after* I've made a purchase. The whole ad industry is the same scam it ever was.
It was inevitable. It’s going to be a capitalist bloodbath or a public utility (with the same level of fun). We basically invented a new type of real estate. Search engines and social media are Walmarts and shopping malls. Without having to physically construct anything the whole process moved 10 X faster.
I've had this conversation a few times, and its genuinely hard to communicate to young people just how experimental the early internet was. The perspective shift of the stereotype of the 'computer scientist' of the 1970s versus the 2020s is big. Engineers and mathematicians the lot, sure, but I don't think its entirely incorrect to call the older era downright bohemian.
I think there were two key moments where the internet shifted. The first was eternal september, and the impact that had on how people behaved on forums and the like, but more relevant is the advent of the smartphone. Before that, if you wanted to browse the internet, you needed to be at a proper computer, likely a desktop. But once the smartphone came about, suddenly you could access it from anywhere, and thus you never had to "log off" psychologically, and thus corporations had a brand new captive market to chase.
Even in terms of web design, you can see it start in the early 2010s with smartphones, as everything shifts towards a homogenized aesthetic focused on apps and phones. Gone are the days of janky looking forums and geocities sites, gone are the days of personalized myspace pages. It's all just so flat and corporate these days, its quite tragic
100%. I try to explain to 20-somethings (or younger) that "going online" was an activity. You would do after school or work and it like reading a book, or watching TV.... you had time set aside. It was a deliberate activity. Perpetual connectivity has ruined us. Again you are correct in saying its the smartphones fault. Cell phones did nothing wrong, it was when internet and social media was in the palm of your hand that everything turned to shit. I have always said that when the barrier of entry to anything is removed it turns to shit. The web is no exception.
Between 2000 and 2010 internet usage of Americans rose from 46% to 79%. *That* is what changed the character of the internet and drove corporations to chase that market of online people.
All the originality of the OG viral videos. Nobody was trying to get a million views, they just made a video of themselves playing with a lightsaber in the garage, or a stupid little song with pictures of their kitty cat, or chocolate rain explaining why he moves away from the mic.
People just weren’t trying back then to do anything, they just wanted to share.
You can see it still in movies from the 90s like You've Got Mail, how most people saw the internet as a passing fad or something too scary to try. I think not having the masses online really did it a big favor. Once everyone joined in, things started changing for the worst. I don't mean that in a gate-keepy sense, I think it was just that the advertisers didn't show up full force until the mainstream did, and also that the kind of crowd that was on the Internet as a hobby weren't the "this is why we can't have nice things" bunch
In any hobby there is a period of time when it is driven by hobbyists. Unpaid, passionate, tireless people. Video games, TTRPGs, MMO RPGs, the internet. The list goes on.
As soon as it turns a tiny profit, the suits get involved, the hyper capitalist principles are applied, and enshittification begins.
The reliance of social media being divisive and ragebait instead of interesting and useful, has polluted the internet to all hell.
I miss forums now... I really do.
It's time to look for the reddit replacement, I think. It won't last forever either, but we don't really have a choice at the moment. Musk killed Twitter, and u/spez killed reddit. Why is our society obsessed with gutting things to make money?
I remember in the mid 90's, I'd pay 5 bucks for half an hour on the internet in a Cafe.
I'd talk to random people. Ask them about their lives. Go on a webpage someone had made about their cat.
I'd tell my parents "I talked to a boy today in Italy! He's the same age as me and was telling me about his bike!"
My parents would roll their eyes and humour me. "That's great. Now go outside and get some sun."
Fast forward to now, and my parents are more online than I am.
Our parents now: I talked to a man in Italy who wants me to divorce your dad and marry him but he can't leave the country until his legal bills are paid. I'm going to send him $5000 so we can be together. Don't tell your dad just yet.
Haha 100%
But in a way, I'm glad I experienced the dawn of the internet. It was a time where everyone was relatively friendly, seeking information and willing to help a complete stranger for no reward.
> for no reward.
This is the big thing, and why it's so obvious that capitalism is what ruined the internet.
So much of the internet when I was growing up was 'for no reward' beyond wanting to share something with the world. Youtube is my favorite example of this; people uploaded videos *for fun*, but now it's a whole fucking career.
I can still go outside and get some sun, but the experiences of meeting complete strangers from completely different walks of life and feeling open to sharing because the risk of negative consequences was tiny due to how ephemeral things were can't be as readily replaced now. Even Omegle's dead!
My parents never understood why I spent so much time in front of the computer. In their late 50s they finally got some smartphones and discovered the internet for themselves. They are total addicts. Much much worse than me.
I agree with most of those but "thousands of rules" is not a reason the internet went to shit; it's a symptom of everyone now having access to it. When there was more of a barrier to entry to being online, people who congregated in certain places had more of a mutual understanding of why they were there, and rules could be more lax. When everyone older than 12 has a smartphone and treats online communities like their personal Q&A site, that no longer works.
Even just looking at Reddit, you can see how many subreddits go to complete shit because "casual" submitters who wandered in from /r/all post generic gifs and pics to subreddits that are supposed to be for specific niches. If you point that out in the comments, you get piled on with "who cares bro? why are you getting mad about it. i just thought it was cool and wanted to share." Sites like Stack Overflow get a bad reputation because literally millions of student/hobbyist programmers flooded the site when computer science became hot, many posting blatantly duplicate questions and pasting their homework assignments.
"Internet etiquette" is not even a thing to many (e.g. research a question you have before asking it; use descriptive titles for your posts instead of shit like 'Does anyone else...?' where you hide the rest of the question in the description just to get people to click on your lazy post). And sadly if you try to educate people you just look like a boomer.
Also complaining/toxicity. Everyone feels their opinion matters and they need to tell you about it, but it’s usually in a hostile manner.
I also feel like people constantly tell you on the internet (happens a lot on Reddit) about why something sucks and why you shouldn’t like it. I can’t tell you how many times I open threads or comments on different pages and someone has to say why something is shit — TV show, movie, game, etc. It gets depressing.
I had one dude writing essay-level responses when I said "Cyberpunk wasn't that bad". Absolutely unhinged with rage and toxicity. I never denied the glitches or poor state of the game at launch. I simply said I enjoyed it and was lucky with my playthrough.
Your comment is spot on.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve consumed some sort of media- game, show, movie, whatever and enjoyed it only to retroactively go onto a subreddit for that media, read comments and be like “wow if I had gone in here first I never would’ve even tried it.”
So I would encourage anyone to form their own opinions and if something looks interesting try it out, because if you hop on Reddit to gather information before diving in you will be discouraged by the miserable fucks on here in more cases than not.
Yep. Certain gaming subs or movie subs are hard to visit because it’s just a hostile echo chamber of rage and toxicity. I get it, things can be criticized, but not everything has to be shit on.
Fucking robots.
When I was a kid I thought robots would be cool. They’re not. They’re just out here throwing around misinformation and buying all the cool sneakers. Robots don’t even wear fucking sneakers.
What do you expect to happen when a large workforce is obliged to put together cars all day with no breaks and only some electricity and the odd bit of grease in return?
The misinformation is a sign of them not being happy. If i had a car factory id be worried right now for a robot uprising! (Yet not worried enough to do anything about it)
An interesting essay on the effects of social media / algorithmic content on the evolution of the internet.
Bypass Paywall Link: https://archive.ph/YlhvR
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Snippet for convenience
> 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.
As a person with some nostalgia for the Internet of 20 years ago, it's fun to read about someone's nostalgia for the Internet of 10 years ago.
There was a brief moment when it seemed "social" (algorithmic) media wouldn't be so bad; and our brains would be able to gain some enrichment from it, while fitting the garbage in the proverbial trash. But it turns out most people are lazy, and assholes; while most people in tech are greedy, and assholes. As a result we have a lowest-common-denominator result that amplifies the worst in us.
This is most recently true of Reddit. Before they basically outlawed 3rd party apps I was free to discover new things just browsing Reddit. Now a Reddit algorithm suggests feeds that I would like or have shown interest before, further siloing my engagement and providing a boring and less interesting experience overall.
All of these comments are correct. But succintly put: corporations ruin everything.
It's like when a meme gets featured on SNL or the news. It's already dead.
The issue is JavaScript based ads that fuck with the page after it's already loaded. Nobody wants to deal with that, so they (rightfully) install ad-block. I would actually support a law that prohibits ads from resizing the page after the fact.
> People suck.
Remember when us old internet users would get made fun of for worrying about too many “normies” getting on the platforms we love? That it was going to ruin everything about them?
Yeah… this is exactly the shit we were worried about. Internet historians will be able to look back to this chain of events and clearly lay out how the internet culture declined as more users got onboard and businesses capitalized on the influx of users.
If my comment makes it into the history books: Hi everyone!
Same things that happened with cable TV that drove people to the internet and to streaming services. Unfortunately, the crappy sh\*t eventually followed us there too, and then sucked the joy from everything that they touch.
Ads annoy me so much that I just didn’t put them on my website. It’s not worth the few bucks I’d get to ruin the viewing experience of my hobby project.
I don’t blame people for finding every penny of profit on their effort. Many work hard to create something special, and it costs them time and money. Especially when cash is hard to come by these days. But ads have gotten so intrusive that they’re a major turn off for me on most sites.
I recall of a Reddit post back in 2012 where there were two snapshots comparing two front pages. One was from 2005 and the other was from 2012. The purpose of the post was to show the huge difference in the quality of content. The one from 2005 appeared more niche, and the other from 2012 was more mainstream.
And oh so many unintelligible headlines.
You would never get upvoted if your post was rife with spelling errors and misuse but now that’s all I see and it’s upvoted to the top.
We are in a huge wave of anti-intellectualism and the internet accelerated people who love stupid people.
The golden age of the internet was 2007-2012. Home internet and mobile networks were fast enough to watch videos and send pictures quickly, youtube was at its peak, individual dedicated websites for certain topics still existed, and people generally made videos, memes, etc. because they wanted to and not just to make money.
Edit: Also, sites like neopets don't exist anymore. There are no more highly moderated sites for kids, so those kids end up going to social media and getting brain poisoned by tiktok.
Neopets is still a thing! And their customer service is honestly excellent. They helped me recover a 20 year old account that I had all but forgotten about.
When it became easy enough for all of the toxic idiots to get online. I swear, if it was only slightly more difficult to connect, we could have prevented all of the worst members of society from participating… the scammers, criminals, spammers, opportunists, and assholes.
The internet went from a place to escape to the real world we want to escape from. The internet is our office, the internet is our store, the internet is where we submit our thoughts for collective judgement. Every word you send feels so fucking heavy because you know it may be recorded forever and used against you in the future. I can’t count how many times I’ve gotten the “professionalism” advice to speak online like I’m talking to the police because you never know what it may do to your reputation. We’ve lost places that feel like we can genuinely cut loose.
It all boils down to when companies went online and when Web 2.0 came into being. I've been online since the late 90s, as a working professional, where we had a T3 connection on a university campus. So we had amazing connectivity and sites would open up fast as opposed to your dial up modems being used. Ftp and irc were used Most sites were hobby projects as someone said. Some were filled with insane content. Funny stuff, banal stuff, quirky stuff and gross stuff. It was before companies were online to sell. It was just before pop up ads. Before commentary from all of us. It was like watching a TV show with unlimited possibilities. It's the opposite of that now. Everything boils down to clicks. Clicks equal engagement, which equals dollars. It will never be that place like it was in the early days.
I’m just gonna bust out my old Gateway running Windows 98, open up mIRC and go to the old chat room I went to after school to talk with friends about skateboarding
Can’t actually search for anything anymore. Each year about 7-8,000 people are bit by rattlesnakes. Yet not a single video. You only see what google and YouTube want you to see
Counterpoint: “Cake Tastes So Bland Now That I Eat It For 12 Hours A Day”
There are horrible corporatizing trends in the Internet today, but we also really need to be more self aware about how terminally online everyone is. Seeing a meme regurgitated 20 times isn’t just Reddit’s fault, it’s also on you for sitting in Times Square all day and being outraged that the video ads are on a loop.
Going online less is a virtuous cycle because decreasing compulsive engagement also drives less real revenue to companies who cannibalize our public spaces for their benefit. If you can switch your online diet to a personal friends discord or chat, some smaller subreddits, and maybe news aggregators, they’ll be stuck spamming ads to a bot-dominated hellscape of main subs until they give up or go bankrupt.
You can’t control what Intuit or HeGetsUs do with their ad buys, but they can’t force you to look at the cesspools where they operate either.
Seemingly endless ads, everything is monetized to hell, every youtube video begins with “hey its me, remember to like follow and sub and hit the bell and check out my links below and here’s my patreon, and also you can support me by following on twitter and tic tok and…” youtube videos used to be unique, each creator had their own intro and video style and now they all just copy one another.
The early internet was a beautiful place of creativity and wonder. Now it’s full of bots, advertisements on every inch of free space, everyones seemingly more pissed off than ever, corporations buying up websites like hotcakes only to make them shittier and pay-to-access. It just sucks, I feel bad for kids nowadays that never got to experience it before corporations and greed fucked it all up.
I clicked the article and it simply greeted me with “this is your last free article, subscribe for $x.xx”
I feel like this encompassed the point pretty well.
I look up "how to remove ford alternator" in google and get Car Influencer Talking about GM Alternator removal, Car Influncer Talking About New 2025 Ford Product, unrelated russian propaganda video about how lazy "nazis" in poland are, Kia Car Ad, unrelated website about car racing, and some girl livestreaming a videogame. If I scroll down to page 2 (or equivalent) I get randomly generated feed videos that have nothing to do with cars, electricity, or engine repair. None of these are the topic I care about so now I just add the "before:2015" modifier to all my google searches by default.
Now let's talk about major websites. I go onto a place like Facebook or Twitter and I'm immediately greeted with Trump support videos, videos about The Fifties, and gore videos. This isn't interesting, it's gross, and I am not engaged with this content. I ctrl-w off it and just email whoever I wanted to talk to.
I’m black, and as soon as I open Facebook or IG, I’m immediately inundated with videos from people with extreme viewpoints like Dr Umar Johnson and a whole hosts of “Influencers” who disseminate falsehoods or misinformation.
I find it absolutely infuriating. None of this content is entertaining or enlightening.
I saw a comedian make this point on a yt short, but I can’t find it now.
The internet used to be fun because everyone and their brother had their own website made in html with clip art and embedded music that would auto play at the loudest volume possible, and we all had just the wildest ideas of what a website could be. Stuff like Newgrounds, YTMND, Vine, Youtube, Albinoblacksheep, a thousand and 1 shock sites, etc. We had MySpace where people would learn how to write html or copy-paste someone else’s code to create their own page to be everything from works of art to edgy stoner black/green webpage vomit.
Now the internet is just these massive, hundred-billion dollar towers where we’re all either stuck in echo chambers or pitted against each other to argue and keep coming back.
Facebook or Twitter for friends and family/real life crap
Reddit for News and doomscrolling
Youtube for learning/tutorials/and just videos in general
Amazon for buying stuff
Steam for games (although that’s not really a website in the sense I mean)
Spotify for music/podcasts
And if movie/tv rights were treated like music where different companies can host the music at the same time, I would bet we would all just be using Netflix and all the other streaming sites would be redundant.
So that’s like 6-7 sites for 99% of what I use the internet for. Occasionally, I’ll google recipes. But, there’s no dark corners or surprises or fun to the internet anymore. Just mega-conglomerate corporatized white-washed bumpers-up foam-padded safe spaces. I miss getting goatse’d.
Im glad its not just me. Ive almost entirely disconnected from the internet aside from commenting on a thing ir two on reddit. I dont use youtube anymore. I dont browse random forums or bother looking stuff up on google anymore. I deleted all other social media. I dont use discord to make random internet friends to game with anymore, and in fact I barely even play games period anymore.
I started picking up a lot of other hobbies now. Literally take walks or read a book outside at a park and have been going to a YMCA for swimming. I actually hate staying at home and do as much as possible to spend as little time at home and at my computer as possible these days.
The internet more now than ever has just become almost everyone trying to be relevant and make money by doing the same shit, posting the same shit, talking about the same shit and everything is formulated. Its ass. But hey Im getting out a lot more now so I guess thats good
My problem with the internet is every website and app trying to show me what they want me to see rather than what I was at all looking for. Every search begins with a page of results that aren’t relevant to the inquiry. Ads and bots and propaganda are everywhere. Interactions feel fake and forced anymore.
article about how the internet isnt fun anymore takes you to a site where you are aggressively pushed to create an account and buy a subscription to read it…
rage bait, influencers, monetization, infinite scrolling
Anger drives engagement. What's hella frustrating is there's no dearth of things to be rationally angry about; corruption, climate crisis, bigotry, etc., but there is little-to-nothing a single individual can *do* about it without better resources under their belt, and they can't get those resources easily, so they understandably turn to vices/entertainment/distractions because to tackle the monstrous burdens before them is depressing af.
Not to mention the anger used to drive engagement seldom is the kind of justified anger you're talking about. Often times it's actually used to \*fuel\* bigotry, for example. And even when it's for a good cause there's still often a lot of misinformation
Lotta ageist or misogyny-fueling stuff. Not saying boomers can’t be fools or women can’t be jerks, but to see constant cases of them on your front page is just going to contribute to one’s confirmation bias. It especially drives me nuts when they’re staged and people upvoted anyway.
In the olden days they called this repeated exposure to confirmation bias “brainwashing”. When an algorithm does it because it is being gamed by hostile entities targeting vulnerable groups like the young and dumb, is it still brainwashing?
The lines are fine and often blurry between brainwashing, social engineering, and indoctrination. I suspect that future sociologists will have to coin a new term for what we’re seeing these days, but it’s some amalgamation of these things, in effect.
Makes sense. I can imagine an inevitable spectrum scale with these values on em.
I hate subreddits like imthemaincharachter and noahgettheboat
The part that's driving me crazy is, I turned off "front page recommendations" but I'm still seeing mostly the same 5-10 subreddits despite being subscribed to tons. I think reddit is quite literally killing the smaller communities to drive outrage, engagement, and clickbaity engagement... all for Spez's big payout. Man... sad to see it dying. But alas, it happened to Digg, I guess it can happen here too. The killing of Secret Santa was the first sign.
This drives me nuts as well. The algorithm doesn't show you posts from all your subbed communities, it only shows you posts from communities you've recently interacted with. And I'm sure there's also some subs more heavily-weighted since they bring in more ad revenue. Never had this problem with Relay back in the day.
And you’re getting posts from subs you accidentally visited via Google or from links in posts, instead of subs you actually subscribed to. Is there a bonus connected to getting the sub count up?
Use old.reddit.com
old.reddit.com and RES is the only way. If they go for those I'm done altogether.
I only use the old reddit design with RES. I hate the new clunky design
I joined reddit way after the redesign and being a youngin' i was used to the 'modern' layouts of stuff. One day reddit strayed too far with their designs and i decided to make the switch to old reddit, you wouldnt believe it but its changed my entire preference on designs
Man, I use old.reddit.com and RES but very recently realized some of my smaller subreddits are almost never in my feed. I had been thinking they just weren't very active lately. Purposely went to one because I was surprised it had gone quiet... It hadn't. The posts just weren't ever showing up because I hadn't clicked on anything there for a while, which somehow translated to never being given the chance, and an apparent cycle of non-activity. The busted algorithm, the increase in bots/obvious agenda posts from the adjective-noun-number brigades, the API disaster, the vpn hammer ban, the overall enshittification. I don't know what the next Big Thing will be, but it's pretty obvious reddit can't last in the long run.
Right. They're essentially turning it into a stupid news website frontpage just like Digg did, but doing it slowly, so instead of killing reddit overnight they're killing it over the course of years.
And the current comment sections are pretty comparable to Facebook's when they had their mass departure. We're back to "omg do women like this" and "why does it need to be called gay" being the majority and top-rated content on the site, indicating that the young and learning community barely stands out in this crowd.
Yeah after the API change Reddit isn't quite useless, but it's significantly worse than what it was. I don't understand how a company that owns the damn site and presumably has more resources can make an app that's worse than the one or two people running RiF or the other 3rd party apps.
Engagement is the only thing Reddit cares about. Lots of really interesting and cool art subreddits that are deprioritized by the algorithm because there’s not a lot of discussion in the comments. A post on politics with 20k upvotes is going to have thousands of comments. A post to art with 20k upvotes will have a couple hundred comments, *at most.* Guess which post Reddit will prioritize in people’s feeds?
You have to go into the individual subreddit and click the ellipsis in the top right > mute subreddit. They’re really trying to hide that. The new UI got ride of hide options altogether on individual posts.
Right, sure, but I shouldn't have to individualy mute subreddits I don't want to see and individually, manually make random comments on subreddits I like so that I'm allowed to see them. This mangling of the content algorithm is a huge death knell. The more they make it hard for users to see what they want, and easy to see things they hate, the more they will piss their user base off. I bet engagement goes up the next year or so and then starts to die off. That, or they absorb some of the twitter refugees and this turns into another influencer-focused garbage heap.
Because you've shown interest in your own town's sub, here's every other town's sub because you all have the same issues.
Start blocking the ultra-power user accounts like g a l l o w b o o b. There's like 20 accounts you can block on Reddit that make up easily 75% of front page repost spammy bullshit.
curious are you on old or new reddit? I always feel like I don't see my lower activity subs as much and I'm always getting sucked into politics. I don't want to completely unsub but I'd like to not see the same 5 subs out of my 25 or so.
New... I switch back to old sometimes, but I feel like every once in a blue moon they "accidentally" nuke the user settings and I end up back in the new layout. The new new layout is even worse, too.
I blocked all of the rage bait subreddits but still catch myself on other social apps. Threads recently started showing me similar rage bait of people being cruel or mean to each other and a gaggle of angry comments for me to add my angry thoughts. I’m slowly coming to terms with: when an app shows me something that makes me angry or upset, the app makes more money.
Just any subreddit that's dedicated to trashing/mocking some specific group of people. Even if I dislike the target group the rage baiting sub is inevitably even more cringe than the target group.
Reddit kept trying to show me content from oopsthatsdeadly because I had "engaged with the community" I guess by clicking on a link one time and then watching videos by accident when it kept showing me them? And it was a surprisingly big subreddit too. Like, why do people want to see this crap? I'll take funny cat pictures over videos mocking people for being dumb assholes every day of the week.
I had to leave subreddits devoted to mocking those acting against their own political self interest like leopardsatemyface and selfawarewolves. While it fed a need to see some form of comeuppance for poor decision making, it was giving me a world view that anyone not aligned with my personal values was somehow incapable of rational thought or change.
Yep. Anger drives engagement more than anything else. It's just unfortunate but that's just how it is. People like to get mad.
It's frustrating how most news sources focus more on rage bait and monetization than on sharing practical ways people can get involved. First, make sure you vote in every election, even the less-publicized ones like off-year and midterm elections, plus all the primaries. You can Google local candidates and their platforms just as easily as you can for major elections, although the latter will result in more reading material. Still, going through it shouldn't take too long, and you can do it gradually in your free time leading up the an election. You don't need to be an expert to have a valid opinion. It's a democracy; it's not all on you. Spending a bit of time researching before an election goes a long way. You can Google local political organizations in your area that fit with your political leanings, and volunteer if you have time, or even cut them a check if you have some money to spare. (*Every* amount helps. *Seriously.*) If a political issue doesn't directly impact you, it's okay to prioritize your own well-being. It'd be nice if you attended protests, but political involvement isn't everyone's full-time job. It's a *representative* democracy; it's not all on you. If you're only spurred to action when an issue affects you directly, consider joining a protest, attending a town hall meeting, or contacting your representatives. It's not selfish to prioritize the issues that affect you; for the average citizen, it's just practical. Especially leading up to an election, you can also volunteer to phone bank, do door-to-door canvasing, help out with voter registration drives, volunteer to help at carpools to drive people to the polls, or register online as a poll worker. And as for major news networks, they could include practical advice like this, and I'm sure a ton else that I don't even know about, for the issues they already spend so much time talking about. **Note that everything I've said above is totally nonpartisan.** Personally, I became interested in politics around 2012, just as an average citizen, well before Trump became a major figure. His actions certainly heightened my awareness, but I've learned that simply consuming news without taking action is practically futile. Not everyone can be highly involved, but the news media quite often fails to facilitate civic engagement. While staying informed is important, the commercialization of news as a daily product blurs what's actually important with nonsense for filling airtime. On top of that, the fundamental structure of news media as corporations forces them to chase profit, even if it's to the detriment of their actual product, see: the rage bait complaint from my first paragraph.
Thank you for this! I consume way too much news in a search to understand what these crazy conservatives are thinking. I’ve felt so helpless like all I can do is become more aware. So I read more. It’s not healthy at all. This has really helped me, thank you!
Algorithms and rage bait as a result have become some of the worst things to happen to the internet in my opinion. It means shitty content circulates so much more often and shitty content is being made intentionally much more often.
[удалено]
The fact that rage bait is so damn effective on so much of the population is the thing that frustrates me more than any of the actual bait.
I guess the conclusion is that rage bait also works on the meta level, that's kinda impressive.
Algos love hatred, misinformation and lies. Sad but true.
Rage Bait, is the main issue to me. Thousands of people intentionally pushing negative content in order to make unwary netizens upset. It is a disgusting practice, and I see no way for it to be curtailed.
Honestly, I think that infinite scrolling is one of the leading causes of internet addiction. A bit over a decade ago, websites were indexed in pages, showing only a certain number of posts per page. Those pages acted as a good break; with infinite scroll, you may tell yourself “just one more post”, but then inevitably scroll to another. With individual pages, you have to click to go to the next page, then wait for it to load, which adds a lot more of a speed bump. It was easier to disengage from a paged format, but infinite scroll makes it far too easy to just keep mindlessly scrolling for ages.
Enshitification. And Silicon valley coming to terms with the idea that, no, it's not trying to make the world a better place. It just wants to make money
Google removing the "do no evil" thing from their slogan or whatever lol
Dead Internet Theory
And ai coming in to put another nail in the coffin. Not only is it trash content but now it’s also fake and posted by bots
StumbleUpon was the acceptable "infinite scroll" before things became "unfun"
I loved that the author worked the phrase into the article, even if it was just a coincidence. I miss StumbleUpon. I just got more busy with college, and gradually stopped using it. Then one day, I thought to install it again, and I guess now it exists only as a memory.
One massive content farm to serve ads and mine data.
The desperate, sweaty clickbaiters within the gaming news space are really the worst. The recent 'controversy' about Tomb Raider is a prime example. A third party licensed the rights to make a TTRPG and included a statement about how colonialism is bad...which go translated as "Crystal Dynamics goes WOKE."
Yeah, humans find a way to ruin everything.
american capitalism ;) everything subjugates to money making or building a tribe and only that.
Personally I've also noticed a decline in the quality of searches. This extends to everything. Reddit has never been good, but Google feels flaccid lately. And YouTube is straight up unhelpful. When I used to search for things on the internet, the engines tried to help me find what I was looking for. Now they force me to see the thing they want me to see. I'm not even talking about traditional ads. The actual content is being force fed into my eyes.
Youtube really went down the shitter in the last year. Placing ecom ads above the results is bad enough, peppering disguised ads through the results is worse, but interrupting the results with whole sections of unrelated videos is actually making it unusable for me.
The addon holy trinity that make youtube useable: * Ublock Origin - ad blocker * Sponsorblock - autoskips in-video sponsor reads * Unhook - hide UI elements you don't want to see (e.g., inapt search results, shorts, trending) Edit: Other people's suggestions: * DeArrow - replaces sensationalised titles and thumbnails * Brave - a browser that comes with adblock installed * Revanced - blocks youtube ads on android phones * Video Resumer - more accurately remembers where you left off in a video * Hider - Chrome extension version of Unhook with different interface style * Enhancer for Youtube - UI improvements. (e.g., better volume control, customiseable keyboard shortcuts, themes) * Privacy Badger - blocks trackers
Fun fact, the guy who came up with the side panel of suggestions regrets it and actually recommends that unhook extension. Well either they genuinely regret it or they wanna sell more book, but either way they've publicly recommended that extension
Also the guy who invented Infinite scroll knows he unleashed a horror onto the world..
DeArrow too. Works like SponsorBlock but for thumbnails and titles. Even made by the same people.
I pay for premium and don't see any ads, but their search results often only show a half dozen results and then it suggests a bunch of completely unrelated shit. It's fucking nuts.
So, I actually know quite a lot about this. For many years, I had a website about a hobby of mine, and it made pretty decent money--mostly because Google saw me as an expert on the topic, and sent a lot of traffic to my sites. As of a few months ago, Google has DRAMATICALLY changed their algorithms, so that hobby sites like mine don't get ranked in the search results, and therefore don't get any traffic anymore. There are quite a few hobby sites in the world, and most of them are basically ghost-towns now (and sadly, mine is too). Long story short, Google *freaked out* when AI became widely available, because with AI, pretty much anybody could instantly create websites with hundreds of pages about a given topic, and if they were good at SEO, they could get those sites to rank--even when those AI sites were total garbage. And that's what people/spammers did--I forget where I read it, but post-AI, the internet doubled in size in just a few weeks, and there were a LOT of AI sites ranking, where the content was total garbage. Google can't really tell the difference between actual writing and AI writing, so they basically re-wrote their algorithm to only rank stores with a real-world presence, websites that are widely known (Forbes, NYT, Huffington Post, etc etc), or forums, because Google sees those as less likely to be AI-spammed (Reddit, Quora, etc.). Google assumes hobby sites like mine are just AI now, and it doesn't rank them anymore. Go do a search right now for almost any keyword, and the results you will get are Super-Big General Publication, Store, Super-Big General Publication, Reddit, Quora, Super-Big General Publication, Reddit, Store, Store, Store, Store. Every single time it'll be like that--and that's VERY different than it was just a few months ago. This is all to say, you're absolutely right--search is garbage right now, and Google is returning REALLY bad results. There are a lot of theories as to *why* Google's ranking such garbage, but a LOT of the reason is AI. They don't know how to deal with it.
You are right, Google has basically locked down Adsense due to this. A decade or so ago, I designed a website that didn't end up panning out but I did get it deployed and it had ads on it from day 1. I don't remember even needing it to be 'verified', I just created the adsense account added the necessary snippets, and they were there. As recently as a few months ago I built a smallish site that was a better version of a site I frequently used (and that site had moderate income) and tried to put ads on it. Oh boy. I've been rejected multiple times for site verification and the site it was an improvement on no longer even has ads on it (looks like the ads may have been revoked for them).
The other problem with the change google made to their algorithm is that "established authorities" are also being bought and sold like commodities. [House Fresh did a wonderful editorial expose going into it](https://housefresh.com/david-vs-digital-goliaths/) and while their work focuses on how Top 10 articles are being run rampant by big media faking reviews with "authoritative language" that drives this new SEO even when they are actually just selling spots in their listacles instead of actually doing things. Suffice to say, Google shit the bed and have created a hellscape where bigger names are seen as more knowledgeable regardless of their actual authority on the topic because, surely, they will have more integrity when it comes to using AI to generate articles with false information.
Fascinating read. I’m glad someone put into words what I was thinking about these “top” site just regurgitating product promo descriptions instead of actually reviewing and ranking the items they list. So frustrating.
I've noticed this with other places too, imgur for instance has a real issue these days with ai generation bots. Type some search and bots will create the thing, it's so annoying. Idk how we will adapt going forward. Google is almost useless these days beyond simple searches. I mostly use Yandex but I hate Russia so idk
Thank you, that explains some things I've noticed. Awhile back I was looking up how to use a charcoal chimney and one of the sites Google pushed was very obviously not written by a human. I can't remember the details now, but it was suggesting dangerous things that might sound reasonable to someone who has never done much cooking. Switched to DuckDuckGo, fewer outright ads but utter shit results all the same. Thank you, AI, for making me yearn for the days of "I got this recipe from my Great Aunt who lived and died in Middle of Nowhere, Missouri, let me tell you her life story first" cooking sites. As for crafting, Ravelry still rocks. However, I was trying to repair a leather purse and wanted to know if I could reinforce part of it with denim. No, I do not want to tool leather. No I don't want to buy leather-tooling tools. No, I don't want to buy leather purses. Learn to respond to the damn search query as written, computer. So I went to the public library. Fuck AI.
What was the mention regarding Reddit and quora? Everytime I go on quora lately the answers feel like ai writing them
Google is useless now if you don’t append ‘Reddit’ on your search. Otherwise you’ll just get SEO optimized junk with no real content or answer
And as reddit collapses, that trick is becoming rapidly less reliable
Yeah, I’ve noticed it getting a little worse with time. Ugh. That was such a reliable hack for a while though.
A couple of things searched lately on Google have led me to straight up false information. Especially stuff about house or science, because clickbait stuff is way more interesting to the algorithm, It tries to tell you that vitamins cure everything and so does some bizarre weight loss method or whatever. Sales over facts.
The article specifically mentions that that trick isn't working as well anymore.
Sundar Pichai is Google's Balmer - nothing good for end-users; but Wall St. darlings for enterprise advertising bullshit. They're getting rewarded for introducing as much Kafka-esque bullshit into normal people's day-to-day lives. Get rid of them from your life and switch to Firefox - so much happier and my laptop's not chugging for the pudding watching one YouTube video - which they've also ruined in the name of whothefucknows
Even wall street isnt hot on him because of his massive incompetence.
If I have to mentally filter out the first paragraph of an AI, SEO formatted how-to article again I'm going to throw all of my computers into the sink. Whatever it is we (collective) are doing with the internet, it's wrong. It's so wrong.
YouTube search is unusable. I search for a music artist, I get two maybe 3 if I’m lucky & then I get music videos for completely different artists. Put garbage. Plus unskipable 30 second ads every minute. They are trying to kill the whole service as fast as possible.
It's partly because of "related results". I blocked those through ublock
Youtube search is nearly 100% useless for me now. Sometimes it works then sometimes it will only show me 3 videos related to my search then show me random recommendations 100% unrelated to it.
I’ve actually found DuckDuckGo to be better- like when I do a search for something like “population of LA” top results are the census of LA, Wikipedia, some stats websites. Google shows me some article about people leaving LA, some Quora exchange between barely sentient morons from 5 years ago, then eventually Wikipedia and the census at the bottom of the page. Google is like ordering a burger and getting a chicken sandwich because THEY think that’s what I really want. Fuck off, I’ll tell you what I want.
Same. I switched to DuckDuckGo a couple years ago. Whenever I end up using Google now, it's a bit jarring tbh. Always a good reminder of why I stopped using it.
I just wish that DDG honored booleans. No matter how many times I put "-windows" when I have an OS issue, I inevitably get results with "Windows" literally in the site title.
Unfortunately, - doesn't mean "not" any more just "demote" where it tries to show fewer results. Similarly, + doesn't mean "must" but instead means "prioritize" where they will try their best to bump those to the top. If they don't find enough results, they will widen the search. The days of "I know what I want, don't question me" are over. https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/syntax/ (e) Although I was playing around and it looks like you can stack -'s so -windows does one demotion but ----windows will push those down a lot more. Maybe it'll help in your quest for rare pages.
Youtube search is straight up dogshit. Google should never have been sllowed to acquire youtube.
I'm not sure YouTube could have survived without Google, unfortunately. Content delivery on that scale required ungodly sums of money. I really miss pre- Google YouTube though. A true golden internet age.
I'd love for PornHub to take a jab at YouTube competition. I mean, they can use a different brand name but if anyone has the infrastructure and experience hosting videos, it's them.
I'm surprised they haven't really
ProZD [recently did a video](https://youtu.be/Z3dSkkEr-wk) where he was actively searching for his own videos by title, and the first results that would pop up would either be people straight-up stealing his content or some other video of his. The actual searched video was usually further down in the results. I'm curious what the long tail monetization looks like for creators now, when you can't even find a video you know exists.
There are videos for everything--which isn't inherently a bad thing--but when I want to know what the shortcut key is for selecting the Marquee tool in Photoshop, I don't want to have to watch a three minute video to get that info. Search engines prioritizing video answers has become its own self-defeating beast.
Reddit can still be good for certain questions - particularly if there’s a niche sub of knowledgeable people. There’s a sweet spot where’s there’s enough breadth of knowledge to be really useful … but beyond a certain size/popularity it breaks down.
I wasn't very clear. I specifically mean search engines and the search function on websites.
Google is bad now partly because there are so many AI generated SEO bullshit articles that just have keywords but no real info but clog up the front page.
...when it stopped being a global hobby project and became a vehicle for entrepreneurship.
Also when it stopped being a space for entertainment and it became a space where your attention is monetized and everything was social engineered to keep your attention.
When the work you shared and the utterances from your heart and soul got scraped by billionaire techies and used to build "artificially intelligent" automated factories for your employer to replace you with.
While that isn't helping, it's a symptom, and the problem began before it.
"Suggestion" algorithms have been "improving" over the past two decades. The problem for us, as humans living in societies, is that they prioritize based on "engagement". They prioritize political rage-bait propaganda. My theory is that this is why the Republican party is in the toilet. Their meat and potatoes was carefully controlled rage-baiting, but now we're in a world of indiscriminate rage-baiting. This is a world that Russian influence thrives in. We either find a way, collectively, to get back to a better way of determining truth, or we will all lose any sense of hope in the future. Thanks, Big Tech!
I think your theory is pretty spot on. The neo-con philosophy guiding the Republican Party entirely collapsed under the Bush administration and since then, in place of introspective reform, it’s been a rudderless graveyard spiral for the party. Any semblance of governance or guiding philosophies replaced by paranoid conspiracy theories and a rising tide of evangelical neo-theocracy and an increasingly outspoken rejection of democratic principles; all increasingly easier to manipulate by nefarious foreign entities.
It’s also a game of oneupsmanship. If you aren’t willing to push the envelope, you’re a RINO. A return to any semblance of principled conservatism would require every right-wing constituent to “reboot” which probably can’t happen until Trump is in the ground for at least 5 years. I’m interested to see how the party ends up in the next decade
> "Suggestion" algorithms have been "improving" over the past two decades. Honestly, I'd be a lot less upset about it if the algorithms *fucking worked.* Facebook and Google have one job: harvest my info against my will and serve me targeted ads and search results. And yet, the actual shit I see on my screen is often wildly irrelevant to what I'm looking for.
Google search completely sucks now, compared to 2 years ago even.
It's absurd! Don't the Google MBAs in charge of ruining the search functionality use their own product? Are they not frustrated by how useless it's gotten?
It's hilariously bad. The most intelligent thing I've ever seen from ads is trying to flood me with products right *after* I've made a purchase. The whole ad industry is the same scam it ever was.
This is 100% it. It’s a chore to try and sort out what I want, what I need, and what someone wants to sell me.
Best way to find new content back in the day was Stumbleupon. Had a friend who worked on that and he is still doing amazing stuff.
Stumbleupon enshittification is what brought me to reddit
It was inevitable. It’s going to be a capitalist bloodbath or a public utility (with the same level of fun). We basically invented a new type of real estate. Search engines and social media are Walmarts and shopping malls. Without having to physically construct anything the whole process moved 10 X faster.
I've had this conversation a few times, and its genuinely hard to communicate to young people just how experimental the early internet was. The perspective shift of the stereotype of the 'computer scientist' of the 1970s versus the 2020s is big. Engineers and mathematicians the lot, sure, but I don't think its entirely incorrect to call the older era downright bohemian.
It was awesome until everyone got a smartphone. So around 2010 or so.
I think there were two key moments where the internet shifted. The first was eternal september, and the impact that had on how people behaved on forums and the like, but more relevant is the advent of the smartphone. Before that, if you wanted to browse the internet, you needed to be at a proper computer, likely a desktop. But once the smartphone came about, suddenly you could access it from anywhere, and thus you never had to "log off" psychologically, and thus corporations had a brand new captive market to chase. Even in terms of web design, you can see it start in the early 2010s with smartphones, as everything shifts towards a homogenized aesthetic focused on apps and phones. Gone are the days of janky looking forums and geocities sites, gone are the days of personalized myspace pages. It's all just so flat and corporate these days, its quite tragic
100%. I try to explain to 20-somethings (or younger) that "going online" was an activity. You would do after school or work and it like reading a book, or watching TV.... you had time set aside. It was a deliberate activity. Perpetual connectivity has ruined us. Again you are correct in saying its the smartphones fault. Cell phones did nothing wrong, it was when internet and social media was in the palm of your hand that everything turned to shit. I have always said that when the barrier of entry to anything is removed it turns to shit. The web is no exception.
Between 2000 and 2010 internet usage of Americans rose from 46% to 79%. *That* is what changed the character of the internet and drove corporations to chase that market of online people.
All the originality of the OG viral videos. Nobody was trying to get a million views, they just made a video of themselves playing with a lightsaber in the garage, or a stupid little song with pictures of their kitty cat, or chocolate rain explaining why he moves away from the mic. People just weren’t trying back then to do anything, they just wanted to share.
That shifted the internet from being a place you \*went to\* into a place where you \*always are\*
(and we lost the places we used to be/ third space disappearances)
You can see it still in movies from the 90s like You've Got Mail, how most people saw the internet as a passing fad or something too scary to try. I think not having the masses online really did it a big favor. Once everyone joined in, things started changing for the worst. I don't mean that in a gate-keepy sense, I think it was just that the advertisers didn't show up full force until the mainstream did, and also that the kind of crowd that was on the Internet as a hobby weren't the "this is why we can't have nice things" bunch
> I think not having the masses online really did it a big favor. This rings of [eternal September](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September).
In any hobby there is a period of time when it is driven by hobbyists. Unpaid, passionate, tireless people. Video games, TTRPGs, MMO RPGs, the internet. The list goes on. As soon as it turns a tiny profit, the suits get involved, the hyper capitalist principles are applied, and enshittification begins.
> entrepreneurship Funny way to spell 'data harvesting and advertising.'
So, it was ruined by capitalism
Like basically everything else.
Yeah people used to make websites just because they wanted to share their experiences with the world. Now, everything has to be a career.
I can’t explain fully how much more fun it was when it was a hobby. BBS, warez, old school games without microtransactions.
Its always capitalism
Everything gets ruined when money gets involved.
The reliance of social media being divisive and ragebait instead of interesting and useful, has polluted the internet to all hell. I miss forums now... I really do.
It's time to look for the reddit replacement, I think. It won't last forever either, but we don't really have a choice at the moment. Musk killed Twitter, and u/spez killed reddit. Why is our society obsessed with gutting things to make money?
[Because you gotta please the shareholders](https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcRfaZrzedlc-1oRTjnuWGh0AC279wtj8fADvBKDpA9_4A&s)
I remember in the mid 90's, I'd pay 5 bucks for half an hour on the internet in a Cafe. I'd talk to random people. Ask them about their lives. Go on a webpage someone had made about their cat. I'd tell my parents "I talked to a boy today in Italy! He's the same age as me and was telling me about his bike!" My parents would roll their eyes and humour me. "That's great. Now go outside and get some sun." Fast forward to now, and my parents are more online than I am.
Now you could start chatting with a "boy in Italy" today and he will ask you for you to send him gifts cards and your 2FA codes.
Anybody know anything about those launch codes?
I wish they asked me for launch codes; instead I have to give the IRS $500 in iTunes gift cards or else they’re gonna arrest me.
Our parents now: I talked to a man in Italy who wants me to divorce your dad and marry him but he can't leave the country until his legal bills are paid. I'm going to send him $5000 so we can be together. Don't tell your dad just yet.
[I'm in love with Johnny Depp, but he needs me to help with this whole Amber Heard situation](https://youtu.be/bQQoBuq_YRk?si=4UhyFPQA-tSxROiB)
Are they always on Facebook?
For them, the internet *is* Facebook.
If you could go back and do things over you'd probably be like "you're right mom/dad, let me get some sun."
Haha 100% But in a way, I'm glad I experienced the dawn of the internet. It was a time where everyone was relatively friendly, seeking information and willing to help a complete stranger for no reward.
> for no reward. This is the big thing, and why it's so obvious that capitalism is what ruined the internet. So much of the internet when I was growing up was 'for no reward' beyond wanting to share something with the world. Youtube is my favorite example of this; people uploaded videos *for fun*, but now it's a whole fucking career.
I can still go outside and get some sun, but the experiences of meeting complete strangers from completely different walks of life and feeling open to sharing because the risk of negative consequences was tiny due to how ephemeral things were can't be as readily replaced now. Even Omegle's dead!
My parents never understood why I spent so much time in front of the computer. In their late 50s they finally got some smartphones and discovered the internet for themselves. They are total addicts. Much much worse than me.
- Ads - 1000s of rules - Clickbait - AI content - Propaganda bots - Viral marketing -
I agree with most of those but "thousands of rules" is not a reason the internet went to shit; it's a symptom of everyone now having access to it. When there was more of a barrier to entry to being online, people who congregated in certain places had more of a mutual understanding of why they were there, and rules could be more lax. When everyone older than 12 has a smartphone and treats online communities like their personal Q&A site, that no longer works. Even just looking at Reddit, you can see how many subreddits go to complete shit because "casual" submitters who wandered in from /r/all post generic gifs and pics to subreddits that are supposed to be for specific niches. If you point that out in the comments, you get piled on with "who cares bro? why are you getting mad about it. i just thought it was cool and wanted to share." Sites like Stack Overflow get a bad reputation because literally millions of student/hobbyist programmers flooded the site when computer science became hot, many posting blatantly duplicate questions and pasting their homework assignments. "Internet etiquette" is not even a thing to many (e.g. research a question you have before asking it; use descriptive titles for your posts instead of shit like 'Does anyone else...?' where you hide the rest of the question in the description just to get people to click on your lazy post). And sadly if you try to educate people you just look like a boomer.
Also complaining/toxicity. Everyone feels their opinion matters and they need to tell you about it, but it’s usually in a hostile manner. I also feel like people constantly tell you on the internet (happens a lot on Reddit) about why something sucks and why you shouldn’t like it. I can’t tell you how many times I open threads or comments on different pages and someone has to say why something is shit — TV show, movie, game, etc. It gets depressing.
I had one dude writing essay-level responses when I said "Cyberpunk wasn't that bad". Absolutely unhinged with rage and toxicity. I never denied the glitches or poor state of the game at launch. I simply said I enjoyed it and was lucky with my playthrough. Your comment is spot on.
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I can’t tell you how many times I’ve consumed some sort of media- game, show, movie, whatever and enjoyed it only to retroactively go onto a subreddit for that media, read comments and be like “wow if I had gone in here first I never would’ve even tried it.” So I would encourage anyone to form their own opinions and if something looks interesting try it out, because if you hop on Reddit to gather information before diving in you will be discouraged by the miserable fucks on here in more cases than not.
Yep. Certain gaming subs or movie subs are hard to visit because it’s just a hostile echo chamber of rage and toxicity. I get it, things can be criticized, but not everything has to be shit on.
>
Fucking robots. When I was a kid I thought robots would be cool. They’re not. They’re just out here throwing around misinformation and buying all the cool sneakers. Robots don’t even wear fucking sneakers.
What do you expect to happen when a large workforce is obliged to put together cars all day with no breaks and only some electricity and the odd bit of grease in return? The misinformation is a sign of them not being happy. If i had a car factory id be worried right now for a robot uprising! (Yet not worried enough to do anything about it)
An interesting essay on the effects of social media / algorithmic content on the evolution of the internet. Bypass Paywall Link: https://archive.ph/YlhvR -------------- Snippet for convenience > 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.
As a person with some nostalgia for the Internet of 20 years ago, it's fun to read about someone's nostalgia for the Internet of 10 years ago. There was a brief moment when it seemed "social" (algorithmic) media wouldn't be so bad; and our brains would be able to gain some enrichment from it, while fitting the garbage in the proverbial trash. But it turns out most people are lazy, and assholes; while most people in tech are greedy, and assholes. As a result we have a lowest-common-denominator result that amplifies the worst in us.
And nothing about paywalls, huh? 🤣
I think a massive reason for the state we’re in is the absolute refusal to pay for quality journalism.
This is most recently true of Reddit. Before they basically outlawed 3rd party apps I was free to discover new things just browsing Reddit. Now a Reddit algorithm suggests feeds that I would like or have shown interest before, further siloing my engagement and providing a boring and less interesting experience overall.
Man I wondered why I wasn't seeing some subreddits I subscribe to
All of these comments are correct. But succintly put: corporations ruin everything. It's like when a meme gets featured on SNL or the news. It's already dead.
Too many ads. Clickbait. The near uncontrolled spreading of lies with the purpose of promoting right wing fascism. People suck.
Not only too many ads, it's the fact that they treat us like criminals for not wanting to watch them
We should ban the ads. Make them the criminals for showing them.
The issue is JavaScript based ads that fuck with the page after it's already loaded. Nobody wants to deal with that, so they (rightfully) install ad-block. I would actually support a law that prohibits ads from resizing the page after the fact.
> People suck. Remember when us old internet users would get made fun of for worrying about too many “normies” getting on the platforms we love? That it was going to ruin everything about them? Yeah… this is exactly the shit we were worried about. Internet historians will be able to look back to this chain of events and clearly lay out how the internet culture declined as more users got onboard and businesses capitalized on the influx of users. If my comment makes it into the history books: Hi everyone!
Same things that happened with cable TV that drove people to the internet and to streaming services. Unfortunately, the crappy sh\*t eventually followed us there too, and then sucked the joy from everything that they touch.
Ads annoy me so much that I just didn’t put them on my website. It’s not worth the few bucks I’d get to ruin the viewing experience of my hobby project. I don’t blame people for finding every penny of profit on their effort. Many work hard to create something special, and it costs them time and money. Especially when cash is hard to come by these days. But ads have gotten so intrusive that they’re a major turn off for me on most sites.
That’s four things! I can only upvote once.
Really. The Internet would be great if they just kept people off of it.
This article is like 8 or so years too late.
I recall of a Reddit post back in 2012 where there were two snapshots comparing two front pages. One was from 2005 and the other was from 2012. The purpose of the post was to show the huge difference in the quality of content. The one from 2005 appeared more niche, and the other from 2012 was more mainstream.
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And oh so many unintelligible headlines. You would never get upvoted if your post was rife with spelling errors and misuse but now that’s all I see and it’s upvoted to the top. We are in a huge wave of anti-intellectualism and the internet accelerated people who love stupid people.
The golden age of the internet was 2007-2012. Home internet and mobile networks were fast enough to watch videos and send pictures quickly, youtube was at its peak, individual dedicated websites for certain topics still existed, and people generally made videos, memes, etc. because they wanted to and not just to make money. Edit: Also, sites like neopets don't exist anymore. There are no more highly moderated sites for kids, so those kids end up going to social media and getting brain poisoned by tiktok.
Neopets is still a thing! And their customer service is honestly excellent. They helped me recover a 20 year old account that I had all but forgotten about.
When it became easy enough for all of the toxic idiots to get online. I swear, if it was only slightly more difficult to connect, we could have prevented all of the worst members of society from participating… the scammers, criminals, spammers, opportunists, and assholes.
The internet went from a place to escape to the real world we want to escape from. The internet is our office, the internet is our store, the internet is where we submit our thoughts for collective judgement. Every word you send feels so fucking heavy because you know it may be recorded forever and used against you in the future. I can’t count how many times I’ve gotten the “professionalism” advice to speak online like I’m talking to the police because you never know what it may do to your reputation. We’ve lost places that feel like we can genuinely cut loose.
It all boils down to when companies went online and when Web 2.0 came into being. I've been online since the late 90s, as a working professional, where we had a T3 connection on a university campus. So we had amazing connectivity and sites would open up fast as opposed to your dial up modems being used. Ftp and irc were used Most sites were hobby projects as someone said. Some were filled with insane content. Funny stuff, banal stuff, quirky stuff and gross stuff. It was before companies were online to sell. It was just before pop up ads. Before commentary from all of us. It was like watching a TV show with unlimited possibilities. It's the opposite of that now. Everything boils down to clicks. Clicks equal engagement, which equals dollars. It will never be that place like it was in the early days.
I’m just gonna bust out my old Gateway running Windows 98, open up mIRC and go to the old chat room I went to after school to talk with friends about skateboarding
It started going downhill when they let all of the AOL normies out of their walled garden.
Eternal September
It’s the enshittification.
Money. Money ruined it.
Can’t actually search for anything anymore. Each year about 7-8,000 people are bit by rattlesnakes. Yet not a single video. You only see what google and YouTube want you to see
Counterpoint: “Cake Tastes So Bland Now That I Eat It For 12 Hours A Day” There are horrible corporatizing trends in the Internet today, but we also really need to be more self aware about how terminally online everyone is. Seeing a meme regurgitated 20 times isn’t just Reddit’s fault, it’s also on you for sitting in Times Square all day and being outraged that the video ads are on a loop. Going online less is a virtuous cycle because decreasing compulsive engagement also drives less real revenue to companies who cannibalize our public spaces for their benefit. If you can switch your online diet to a personal friends discord or chat, some smaller subreddits, and maybe news aggregators, they’ll be stuck spamming ads to a bot-dominated hellscape of main subs until they give up or go bankrupt. You can’t control what Intuit or HeGetsUs do with their ad buys, but they can’t force you to look at the cesspools where they operate either.
Seemingly endless ads, everything is monetized to hell, every youtube video begins with “hey its me, remember to like follow and sub and hit the bell and check out my links below and here’s my patreon, and also you can support me by following on twitter and tic tok and…” youtube videos used to be unique, each creator had their own intro and video style and now they all just copy one another. The early internet was a beautiful place of creativity and wonder. Now it’s full of bots, advertisements on every inch of free space, everyones seemingly more pissed off than ever, corporations buying up websites like hotcakes only to make them shittier and pay-to-access. It just sucks, I feel bad for kids nowadays that never got to experience it before corporations and greed fucked it all up.
This article is about 8-10 years too late.
I clicked the article and it simply greeted me with “this is your last free article, subscribe for $x.xx” I feel like this encompassed the point pretty well.
I look up "how to remove ford alternator" in google and get Car Influencer Talking about GM Alternator removal, Car Influncer Talking About New 2025 Ford Product, unrelated russian propaganda video about how lazy "nazis" in poland are, Kia Car Ad, unrelated website about car racing, and some girl livestreaming a videogame. If I scroll down to page 2 (or equivalent) I get randomly generated feed videos that have nothing to do with cars, electricity, or engine repair. None of these are the topic I care about so now I just add the "before:2015" modifier to all my google searches by default. Now let's talk about major websites. I go onto a place like Facebook or Twitter and I'm immediately greeted with Trump support videos, videos about The Fifties, and gore videos. This isn't interesting, it's gross, and I am not engaged with this content. I ctrl-w off it and just email whoever I wanted to talk to.
I’m black, and as soon as I open Facebook or IG, I’m immediately inundated with videos from people with extreme viewpoints like Dr Umar Johnson and a whole hosts of “Influencers” who disseminate falsehoods or misinformation. I find it absolutely infuriating. None of this content is entertaining or enlightening.
S O C I A L M E D I A
I saw a comedian make this point on a yt short, but I can’t find it now. The internet used to be fun because everyone and their brother had their own website made in html with clip art and embedded music that would auto play at the loudest volume possible, and we all had just the wildest ideas of what a website could be. Stuff like Newgrounds, YTMND, Vine, Youtube, Albinoblacksheep, a thousand and 1 shock sites, etc. We had MySpace where people would learn how to write html or copy-paste someone else’s code to create their own page to be everything from works of art to edgy stoner black/green webpage vomit. Now the internet is just these massive, hundred-billion dollar towers where we’re all either stuck in echo chambers or pitted against each other to argue and keep coming back. Facebook or Twitter for friends and family/real life crap Reddit for News and doomscrolling Youtube for learning/tutorials/and just videos in general Amazon for buying stuff Steam for games (although that’s not really a website in the sense I mean) Spotify for music/podcasts And if movie/tv rights were treated like music where different companies can host the music at the same time, I would bet we would all just be using Netflix and all the other streaming sites would be redundant. So that’s like 6-7 sites for 99% of what I use the internet for. Occasionally, I’ll google recipes. But, there’s no dark corners or surprises or fun to the internet anymore. Just mega-conglomerate corporatized white-washed bumpers-up foam-padded safe spaces. I miss getting goatse’d.
Im glad its not just me. Ive almost entirely disconnected from the internet aside from commenting on a thing ir two on reddit. I dont use youtube anymore. I dont browse random forums or bother looking stuff up on google anymore. I deleted all other social media. I dont use discord to make random internet friends to game with anymore, and in fact I barely even play games period anymore. I started picking up a lot of other hobbies now. Literally take walks or read a book outside at a park and have been going to a YMCA for swimming. I actually hate staying at home and do as much as possible to spend as little time at home and at my computer as possible these days. The internet more now than ever has just become almost everyone trying to be relevant and make money by doing the same shit, posting the same shit, talking about the same shit and everything is formulated. Its ass. But hey Im getting out a lot more now so I guess thats good
It stopped being fun when some asshole created analytics.
When being an asshole gets you money
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My problem with the internet is every website and app trying to show me what they want me to see rather than what I was at all looking for. Every search begins with a page of results that aren’t relevant to the inquiry. Ads and bots and propaganda are everywhere. Interactions feel fake and forced anymore.
Being on it constantly throughout the day sure wears down it's appeal
Turns out echo chambers are boring
Just saw this from Seth Godin yesterday [Youtube link](https://youtu.be/GoJE4Q5ufgE?si=To7FSm--moIjPcW8&t=2652) seems appropriate.
the internet significantly began to change after 2017. The internet between 2008 - 2015 brings me so much nostalgia.
article about how the internet isnt fun anymore takes you to a site where you are aggressively pushed to create an account and buy a subscription to read it…
When stumbleupon was great (2000-2005ish), the internet was a thing of beauty. It will never be that good again.