Totally agree on the pre-2010 internet being more human. Now not only the platforms are centralized, half of the blogs you find are now AI generated incoherent garbage.
There is still good stuff, but now you have to work really hard to find it among AI slop, Ads, paywalls etc.
I hope the fediverse can establish a new form of the old internet. Lemmy instances are now the self hosted phpBB forums of this decade. And even on the corporate platforms there are some thriving niche communities.
Maybe it was just that the pre-2010 internet was driven primarily by nerds of some form. With the smartphone it went fully mainstream, and that broke it. It got streamlined and commodified and monetized to turn any kind of “engagement” into profits, instead of, well, just being a place where many random quirky people are doing their thing and sharing cool stuff.
Remember when “Homepage” was still a concept? Now I guess for most people it’s their Instagram profile, or something like that.
Totally agree on the pre-2010 internet being more human. Now not only the platforms are centralized, half of the blogs you find are now AI generated incoherent garbage.
There is still good stuff, but now you have to work really hard to find it among AI slop, Ads, paywalls etc.
I hope the fediverse can establish a new form of the old internet. Lemmy instances are now the self hosted phpBB forums of this decade. And even on the corporate platforms there are some thriving niche communities.
Maybe it was just that the pre-2010 internet was driven primarily by nerds of some form. With the smartphone it went fully mainstream, and that broke it. It got streamlined and commodified and monetized to turn any kind of “engagement” into profits, instead of, well, just being a place where many random quirky people are doing their thing and sharing cool stuff.
Remember when “Homepage” was still a concept? Now I guess for most people it’s their Instagram profile, or something like that.