Idk if this is the right community for this conversation, but it’s been on my mind and I want to share it with someone.
In the 00’s every new thing we heard about the internet was exciting. There were new protocols, new ways to communicate, new ways to share files, new ways to find each other. Every time we heard anything new about the internet, it was always progress.
That lasted into the early teens and then things started changing. Things started stagnating. Now we’re well into the phase where every new piece of news we hear is negative. New legislations, new privacy intrusions, new restrictions, new technologies to lock content away and keep us from sharing, or seeing the content we were looking for. New ways to force ads.
At one point the Internet was my most favorite thing in the world. Now I don’t know if I even like it anymore. I certainly don’t look forward to hearing news about it. It’s sad, man. We’ve lost a lot. The mega corps took the internet from us, changed it from a million small sites that people created because they had big ideas, or were passionate about small ones, and turned it into a few enormous sites with no new ideas, no passion, just an insatiable desire for money.
We’re at the end of an era, and unlike the last 20 years of progress, I don’t think most of us will like what the next era brings.
Yup. Wikipedia is a good example for an instance that solely exists to support people.
There are plenty sites of this. Take a look at some websites that are teaching you skills without asking for money and so on.
That’s how I remember the internet. Sharing knowledge. Of course bigger sites need to make ends meet somehow and that fine with me. But as you already said - more more more.
I’d say that the old Internet is still there. It’s just sharing space with the much bigger, much more mainstream, capitalist juggernaut now, with limited overlap.
Other than online shopping, my Internet use hasn’t changed all that much since 2008, other than having to add a bunch of anti-tracking stuff to my web browser.
Yeah. I just know that forums aren’t a thing any more. Old fashioned browser games are rare.
Otherwise a lot of valuable news sites became clickbait ad bloated monsters. Only a few are still good.
But yeah… it gets easily overshadowed