- Social media created an immediate soap box for everyone, and a way for unhealthy ideas to propagate quicker and more virally. It encourages vanity, inhibition, and unrealistic expectations. Then there’s the whole corporate element, where the mainstream of these platforms are truly just systems of data collection and manipulation.
- Dead internet theory coming in nicely
- The early advent of the internet had high hopes it would be used for the sharing of information. It indeed is, but the most widely used search engines are weighted to point you towards curated and questionable sources of information. This is purposeful, and often capitalistically motivated versus educational.
- There’s more, but I’m tired and didn’t expect to type all this out, so I’ll leave it for the comments.
Really don’t understand why so many commenters here say it’s just a part of the internet…
No? There was a time XMPP connected me to most my fiends, whether they had Facebook Messenger, Google, … And these days it’s all WhatsApp.
E-Mails used to be a thing. But now my bank and half the businesses refuse to communicate via email and I get 20 apps and logins to various mailboxes to spend an hour each month to fetch my bills. While my eMail inbox is all spam.
Forums and Blogs were a thing, but they’re mainly displaced by Discord, and everyone writing for a more general audience is on big-tech platforms or Medium.
The internet got way more centralized. From DNS to half the (still existing) independent websites who all homed in on Cloudflare… So even the infrastructure of the internet changed. They also do less open network exchanges and traffic gets moved it to private interchanges. And the whole internet was devised to be a very diverse and kinda open network. Now 90% of it is 5 big companies.
And you pretty much can’t google anything anymore. In the old days I’d just ask Google what the error message on my phone means, or if my Dell laptop can take a 32GB RAM stick (despite it not being listed in the compatibility list). And I’d regularly find good answers. Not so much as of today. I’ll get 10 results written by some AI harvesting my clicks and that’s it. The proper answer written by some random person on Reddit or somwhere else is gone.
It’s really not just the www or social media. It’s everywhere.
Yeah, even in the last decade this has steadily gotten worse. It feels like more and more things are being forcibly centralised for express purpose of making data harvesting easier - and the people doing it aren’t even really trying to hide it either.