- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.ml
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The article should be titled ‘Why social media isn’t fun anymore’, because that’s all the author is talking about.
It’s equal to “the internet” for people who don’t work in IT. Super sad actually.
There are entire counties where Facebook is “the internet”.
Ah, we’re doing one of those full circle things. I actually remember the time when AOL was “the internet.”
I too get irrationally annoyed when writers fail to make the distinction. There was an episode of Reply All a while back where they analyzed the “emotions of the Internet” … using Twitter. Twitter literally exists to maximize negative emotions! In no way was it representative of the experience (unless you’re a tech writer).
See title “Why the Internet Isn’t Fun Anymore”. Click link to see. Page loads and shows cookie consent popup over 2/3 of the page. Yeah, well played.
Ridiculous … for 11k of text.
I feel like I’ve found refuge here. Looking at my open tabs, what used to be Twitter, Reddit, and Insta is now my own hosted platforms. Plex for TV and Lemmy here for social. I have gmail still, but I’m leaving.
The communities are smaller, but I rarely feel as anxious, stressed, or annoyed as I did with the other platforms. Oh and no one is trying to get me to buy a washing machine either.
I thought so too until this week. These days I’m reconsidering. /c/all is as least as bad a shit hole with this unhinged hate on Jews as /r/all with their white supremacy fascism.
They’re not selling washing machines, they’re just trying to convert you to a Linux-using, FOSS-compliant Marxist-Leninist.
Dissenting opinion, I’m sure, but I see in Lemmy the same problems I saw with reddit at the time I left it: superficial content designed to generate superficial engagement driven by people on mobile devices. Lemmy, reddit, and virtually all other content aggregators fall into the same pattern of posting screenshots from Twitter and recycled memes that everyone’s seen. It’s like the author of the article says: the internet isn’t as interactive or novel as it used to be. Part of that is the centralization of media into a handful of supergiant corporations, but it’s also an extension of the technological landscape and how people today interact with the media they consume. Which as time goes on is more and more driven by mobile devices.
Blocking some of the meme communities is a big help in that regard.
Or just switch your default timeline to “subscribed”
“All” was always terrible on reddit, that hasn’t changed here.
imo there isn’t enough content on Lemmy to only whitelist certain communities. I prefer to just block the extra stuff I don’t want. All is fine if you take out most the low effort communities. I only have 10 or so communities blocked and it makes a noticeable difference. Much easier than subscribing to a bunch of communities for me.
I like all the dad-level humor with the awful, often punny Star Trek memes. They give me life.
Live long and prosper is the opposite of live fast, die young.
In the early 00s, here in my city, it was fun to go to a certain pedestrians-only avenue to drink with friends. Or a date. If you do it now - yes, post-COVID lockdowns! - you can’t hold a conversation for five fucking minutes without someone interrupting you with advertisement. As a result, people use that avenue nowadays strictly to commute.
I’ve ditched TV when I was 14. (I don’t regret it.) But plenty people told me that open TV, and then cabled TV, became unbearable due to the sheer amount of advertisement.
Unless I recognise the number, I’m not bothering to pick the phone up any more. I’m probably not the only one doing it.
Are you noticing the pattern? Perhaps the internet suffers a bit more with it because people are a bit freer to do what they want here, but the problem is not exclusive to the internet, it’s everywhere advertisers appear. The world has become less fun due to advertisers (“how do people DARE to have fun and ignore our «marketing opportunities»?”).
“You’re reading your last free article. Subscribe now…”
Anyone else feeling like all these platforms are being intentionally dismantled in order to prevent us uniting?
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 social media web was literally the start of the decline. There used to be thousands of niche internet forums, now everything is in a AOL style walled garden.
The thing I hated most with social media is that no one really wanted to email anymore.
I used to have several pen pals around the world. We would exchange long mails every couple of days telling each other about our lives. But the moment social media popped up, the one-on-one conversations started to shift to posts with something everybody got to comment on. And on top of that, they didn’t seem very personal anymore. Not like the friends I used to know.
Didn’t take long for those friendships to fizzle out. I’m still quite sad about it.I wonder if Discord is replacing that? Lots of teens have their private discord servers (or whatever they’re called) where they chat with each other. It reminds me of ICQ, MSN Messenger, Trillian, and the other chat protocols we used to have.
I never had the experience of email pen pals, but there are still ways people are connecting with each other authentically online.
Discord seems to be ethereal. If you’re on when things are happening, cool. If not…it’s just a wasteland, like walking into a bar at 10am and seeing holographic echoes of last night.
usenet was probably the first community I found on the internet, and I think the format is still a good template for human interaction. Reddit was, in a way, very similar in it’s “old” and pre-enshittified format and I believe that’s why it found success. It’s less about discovery and more about deep dive, niche communities where you can connect with real and remote people with the same interests.
I use the internet for so much more than social media; the only real downside (aside from the loss of communities like usenet/reddit as a common point of connection) is that the search engines have tipped over and are getting worse rather than better. They’re falling into the AI/ML autocorrect disaster hole where specific, technical queries are dumbed down to an 8 year old’s level of perception because that’s what the average user is searching for.
It’s not fun anymore because instead of just doing stupid, fun shit for the fun and weirdness of it, everyone is just trying to make money.
Yep, instead of it being a playground to have fun and community, it’s a Very Serious ThingTM where everyone is either striving for that cash or trying to produce domestic terrorists. It’s so shit.
