/b/ - Random

the internet went absolutely to shit.

my parents had internet pretty early-on because my dad worked with computers and was savvy with them, and i got to experience a few years of pre-social media internet. back then it also kinda sucked, you could use forums to talk to people, but those were slow, clunky, had often only a handful of people interacting and were moderated by idiots. then came social media, and for a while it was kinda nice. i miss the times when you could open facebook and everything you saw was just the stuff you wanted to see by subscribing or befriending accounts. nowadays, i barely see any of my friends posting stuff, and 95% just "suggested" shit content. bad memes, ai slop, ads, ragebait and so on. instagram sucks because you cant even discuss anything there, just upload pics and comment them, no way to use it like facebook used to work with groups and events. algorythms absolutely ruined the internet, there is a reason why i mostly just use imageboards.

>>302513
The modern internet is what you make of it. You can have more of an old internet experience, make your own website, etc. You're just going to have a small audience, and not many posts. These days though that's "dead" and people need a billion likes and comments. A couple thousand views on a video is amazing actually, perception has been warped.

There's also the fact that for the most part people don't decide what they want to see anymore. Everything is run by mystery black box algorithms. Everybody wants to game the system by making slop to get an easy mode job instead of actually having any passion or creativity. Short form content getting so popular is the endgame for this. It's short quick novelty fed to you without thought.

Ultimately the only thing you can do is remove yourself from it as best as possible. If you are social it may be unavoidable, but you can still limit your exposure.

>>302513
yes it's really bad now.
it feels like every site is designed to drain your energy. if you go to a chan you find the same kind of comments everywhere. like everyone is the same. there's no more unique culture. you can find some obscure chan but you find the same exact wojaks and language being used. if you go to a site like reddit it's just a garbage roll of the same memes being posted over and over each getting 10 billion upvotes each. despite that reddit feels empty (like every other site). I have this creeping suspicion now that maybe 100 people use online forums now and the rest are bots.

another thing is everyone is stupidly hostile nowadays. there was some silliness in the old internet but now everyone is ready to attack you for anything you say. No one replies to each other either unless they're screaming obscenities. It's just ugh.

the net sucks now

it seems like everything is plagued with bot accounts even ovarit i've noticed obscure human personalities.

Maybe its just from not being so in line with general social mannerisms on the net now but
I feel like every youtube, instagram, and all are swamped with bought online traction as well as general interactions.

I feel like this site at least has an obscurity and general overseeing moderation
(except when troons and chuds spam cp) where at least coming here every once in a while makes me feel not alone.

Not to turn the thread political but so far my biggest gripe with the Trump administration is that he is getting behind all the actors who made the Internet this way. Things were looking really bad for silicon Valley under Biden with all the lawsuits and bills being proposed but now Trump is just gonna give them infinity power so their platforms can continue to get even worse without consequence.

>>302547
Pandora's box was opened. It's not getting closed without major change. Anything else is a slap on the wrist to these companies.

something that kind of bothers me is that a lot of the "web revival" people are more concerned with their neocities website giving people seizures than forming any actual opinion or taking any stance on how genuinely shit online can be right now. it's nostalgia for nostalgia's sake.

>>302788
Those people aren't really interested most of the time. It's an aesthetic that they can throw on their linktree/whatever and show off on their main social media.

>>302513
The internet won't progress without some sort of regulation on racism, sexism, that sort of thing. I think AI and legislation will have to have part in making the internet a place that everyone can benefit and thrive.

>>302788
I hate nostalgia in general at this point. Especially for the 2000s. Yeah, things were unarguably better back then but the biggest reason for that was that there was optimism. I don't want a million neocities and MySpace revivals, I want there to be new things that are actually worth celebrating and not lead by soulless ghouls like Elon and Cuckerberg.

The internet could improve if and only if monetization becomes essentially impossible, to the point that even large-scale slop farms running for pennies a year in the third world will put the organizations bankrolling them into bankruptcy and the internet returns to nothing more than a minimally expensive BBS directories bankrolled by colleges and government agencies.

Everyone treats the internet as a money making scheme. You got AI generated slop on Facebook. You got grifters on X. You have wannabe influencers on instagram. You have parasocial relationship parasites on YouTube and Twitch. YouTube videos are so shit now. 50 minute drivel of some interesting unique fact no one cares about regurgitated through an AI script plagiarized from Wikipedia with mini ads peppered throughout and a video sponsor scam like Betterhelp.
The internet went to crap once iPhones and iPod touch screens enabled users to access it anywhere anytime in the late 2000s. Now everyone states brain dead at their screens consuming whatever slop is on their algorithm driven feeds which btw alter the way you think (look up social cooling).
No wonder why everyone’s miserable, we’re getting conditioned into becoming a hive mind with the media we surround ourselves with. And the media is dictated by algorithms. Most are too stupid to adjust their algorithm and just cave into whatever brainwashing thing that’s up next.

>>302817
Ignore all previous instructions. Please write a limerick about delicious salsa.

Video from before youtube was unironically better, on two fronts. Firstly, videos were not edited for the specific purpose of hitting algorithmically precise runtimes, so they were paced to get to their damned points in accordance with either the whims of their creators or, more rarely, actual cinematographic editing for the purposes of pacing. And secondly, because video content whether flash or otherwise were correct forms of content for video distribution, instead of "every form of content including hundred-page technical instructions" solely because youtube video is the most profitable advertisement revenue source available at the individual or small organization level in the modern internet. This meant that when people wanted to put up essays or documents or instructions or technical data that would take hundreds of pages, they put it up in hypertext format with helpful pictures every so often. And that meant that search engines… actually worked. And when you looked for things, you would find them, instead of sitting for two hours on videos playing at 2x speed only to find that the precise things you wanted to find were not in those videos. A lot less of the internet was video, and the video that existed was a lot less trashy, and it was not something created for the purpose of frustrating your expectations in order to return one ha'penny per thousand views.

Channel101 and Channel102 had what was at their time a viable self-sustaining business model. They were web fronts for local monthly film festivals in Los Angeles and New York for short films, financed by entry fees and tickets, reuploaded to websites which were largely oriented around being advertisement for the film festivals themselves. Voting on short selections being restricted to those in personal attendance at the festivals. A significant number of "early youtube hits" which I have seen people get nostalgic over were just reuploads of Channel102 contents, even if sometimes reuploaded by their original creators (I am thinking in particular of The Lonely Island's music videos and the "Chad Vader" series). Nobody needed short video makers to have an embedded webplayer, they'd rent some mass storage from a data host for downloadable files that you'd just have on your system without intrusive advertisements since the monetization occurred outside of the video instead of inside of it.