I can't agree more with this.
Anyway, the real internet is and always has been/will be smaller forums brought together by a common interest. Think back to the MMORPG private server communities of the 00's/10's. Kind of hacker news fits into that bucket today but even still a lot of the brainrotted brigading and average takes from reddit I'm seeing more often here (not calling out this post in particular; referring to the comment sections mostly).
That's not actually a contradiction.
With additions, it's quite common for someone to do $THING not because of any durable sense of happiness, but to "feel normal" because not doing it feels empty or wrong.
The juice ain't worth the squeeze.
We're older now, being young was great, we had infinite time to roam and discover and have nice things (and our first real six-string, and trying different things and not thinking about tomorrow). The youth nowadays also has infinite time, and they fill it in their own way. They like how things are, even though we don't like it and yearn for the days of yore.
It is the way of things.
1/4th of the humans in the world (many of them youth) are mindlessly scrolling short form content for almost 2 hours a day (and this is just Tik Tok). That’s a problem!
The internet had so much potential. Shame.
I have said it many times. Look at the original iPhone presentation. It was a device that was very deliberate. It wasn't made to addict, it was made to be productive. Get in, do the thing you want and then move on. If only it stayed that way.
Although it did have facebook, it was facebook delivered by Microsoft engineers and was missing a lot of features.
Social media will be viewed as a failed experiment in the future.
Also, the scale of the media they must process means 'the algorithm' is a feature not a bug. It was always going to devolve into echo chambers.
It is funny seeing writers from the 1950's through to the 2000's all figure out the horrors this would unleash even if they didn't have a clue on the specifics of the technology.
I agree it will be seen as a failure but I suspect it is only once it has a point of absolute devastation that it cannot be ignored any more. I don't know what that will look like or when but it will be horrible.
We'll have to walk away from the attention economy, that'll be a journey that each has to take singly, but we don't have to walk back to the 1980's. We can build something that works for communication, but that doesn't work for advertising.
We can steganographically hide it in AI slop, and we can trick our enemies into hosting it for us for free. It might even be fun.
ColdStream•33m ago