I do not get enjoyment anymore out of being online, not at all. I used to really love being online; Gaming, Reddit, Discord and all that. Especially certain games and Reddit (games due to MMO and Reddit because of fun video’s, niche communities and such).
However, for the past several years I actually do not like being online and even sort of despise it. There’s no fun at all anymore, everything is either AI, ragebait, politics turned into fights and just overall misery around the world (wars, fascism, racism and general hatred).
Even the communities that should be fun end up often enough into the same things as mention previously (such as politics, ragebait and hatred). I have even tried different platforms (such Instagram, Tumblr, BlueSky, Mastodon). Even Lemmy itself ended up with a lot of the same issues Reddit has.
Yet with knowing this, I still end up being online. Reddit, Lemmy and occasionally Instagram. It’s this kind of FOMO thing: ‘’what if there’s news about X thing’’ or ‘’there might be something fun now’’. Not only that, life its self is also not so fun and kind of boring (office work, work from home and some life circumstances) and due to that still end up being online.
This post is kind of three things; a rant, offmychest and a question to the reader.
So I was wondering; do other people have a similar feeling about the internet not being so fun anymore as it used to be?
It’s been sold a few times and now a shadow of its former glory. I think they still do the thing where random users are selected each day to moderate comments, and anyone can log in and ‘meta-moderate’ those actions up or down. Can’t see why any caretaker would change that. Comments still scored negative to +5, collapsed at <3, invisible <1. It’s a good strategy for silencing crap, but it really promoted groupthink, because any comment that got visible would quickly be modded to +5 or -1. Still seems to have an editor-approval process for selecting stories from the firehose.
I think the main difference between /. circa 1998 and modern social media is that social sites in 1998 were small enough that the founder was a user, probably the main programmer, and probably fewer than 10 collaborators. Kids goofing around with their university’s free bandwidth and direct connection to the internet, before firewalls became a thing. They might have thought about making some money, but it wasn’t the main goal. More interested in a good experience for their users than in collecting all the possible users. My recollection is slashdot was one of the first sites to have programmatic content generation. I know I based my own first CMS off their ‘slashcode.’ In Perl.