- cross-posted to:
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- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
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I think we’re all a bit disillusioned with it now. I feel like on the 2000’s era internet we all were showing up bright eyed and optimistic about the possibilities. We lived in a world without the internet and having it felt like a superpower. But in the 2010’s and especially around 2016, the misinformation pump got turned on hard and we saw the internet bring some truly sinister real world events to fruition. SEO started getting used more and more through the 2010’s. Social media companies started finding nasty ways to profit off of us by being more selective in what we see. And now this has been the year of enshittification with big companies finally making moves that actively worsen our experiences in order to cash in on a lot of investment money that never turned into anything real. Basically I think what happened is a mixture of people becoming more cynical and the internet becoming over-automated and now this year businesses finally realizing that potential profit is worthless without acting on it.
With all that said though, the Fediverse feels like our chance to finally fight back. Lemmy still only has around 60k monthly active users. We need to try to bring that number up.
Why bring it up? More people rarely add more value past N. I suppose the better question is what is N? I’m loving lemmy right now, do we really need the cesspit that was large subreddits?
Well, for context, Mastodon has around 1.5 million monthly active users. Twitter/Reddit are around 450 million monthly active users. You can enjoy Lemmy’s small size but also see that at 60k monthly active users it hasn’t even reached a size comparable to many other famous small sized forums. I don’t know what N is. I personally think the Fediverse should be the replacement for corporate social media and that social media can be essential in how information spreads through society. It can decide elections. It can shift society’s views on issues. I think it does us a disservice to go the hipster route and cling to our small niche thing and resist growth. The beauty of Lemmy is that there will always be small communities regardless. Anyone who wants a small community need only defederate from the big servers and stick to a small, niche server.
Why 2016 specifically? was there a significant event that happened in that year?
Yes, it all started with a gorilla named “Harambe”…
sheds a single tear as I unzip my trousers
thank you for that anti-black racism
really appreciate having my entire race constantly insulted
What?
Trump is what they’re pointing out, but I think they’re forgetting all the prior years of complete false information during bush and Obama. This isn’t something just recently popping up, it’s been going on for a while now, Trump just made it a lot louder.
deleted by creator
There wasn’t an alt-right because it was just “the right”. The alt-right now was quite literally just the Conservative party back then in 2001
Cambridge Analytica scandal maybe?
is that the one related to trump as well?
Yeah. They ran a social media influencing campaign based data aggregated from approx 270 million people. It’s debated on the degree of influence this data had.
One thing is certain though. Around 800 000 people had surrendered their data (admittedly through a seemingly benign Facebook app) to an app posing as just one of your usual fun personality quizzes. This data opened the floodgates through association to about 269 million other people due to the way FB APIs were set up.
This data was then used to create psych profiles that got utilized for targeted advertising.
Two of the biggest campaigns that used this data were Trump 2016 and the Brexit referendum.
Inflation went up, interest rates went up, venture capital money dried up (and Russia/ China pulled out of crypto/risky investments). All the “market capture” corps turned off the free use lures and started to monetize their users at the same time. There are smaller startups that still have free use lures, but which will be big next is a toss-up.
I wish all the rich people would go fuck off to doing whatever they were doing before ruining computers for everyone.
Lemmy has pretty much of a soul, same for other fediverse platforms.
I’m new around here but i like the atmosphere a lot. I created my account after posting this article.
Welcome!
The internet has become soulless and i hate it
It didn’t. It’s more alive than ever.
It’s just you visiting wrong places, not paying attention to the correct ratio of negative and positive content.
It didn’t. It’s more alive than ever.
The web as a whole is more alive than ever, but many of those old school places aren’t. They still exist, but most of the userbase doesn’t.
I have some hobbies, which used to have a thriving online communities on forums and blogs. For the average internet user, that wanted to read up about such hobbies, they would gravitate towards those forums or blogs. This has fundamentally changed with the popularity of sites such as reddit, facebook, youtube & discord. The conversations that were had on the forums moved to the above platforms and as such a lot of the deeper nuances of conversation were lost.
A specific hobby of mine had a dozen active forums to read. Now all but one are mostly dead. The only one in my native language is also gone. My country’s native communities moved to facebook, which is now only used for announcements and some simple questions being asked again and again.
There has been a complete reversal of internet discourse on many topics. Instead it’s (again) back to having discussions with your friend group and building up connections locally.
It’s not a simple thing, but the solution to is to do yourself what you wish existed. I’m shifting away from social media to my own site that I can personalize as I want. It feels nice.
