Facebook IS NOT the internet. Meta is NOT the internet. Neither is Google or Tiktok. And everyone who knows tis not these folks, laughs at people who think world starts and ends with social media. Besides, yes, one can live without all this shit, and live well.
I think I hate the internet
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Re: I think I hate the internet
#92Many folks don’t remember how glorious the Internet was in the late 1990s. That version of the Internet had 90% of the cool stuff, but didn’t follow you around everywhere.
Re: I think I hate the internet
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
Look at the top comments on ANY article on HN. It's a bunch of people endlessly frustrated they never self actualized, hurling this frustration onto whatever random topic comes about. Constant whining about anything new or any change in the world...because of course everything was better in the past and anything new is worse. But things weren't better back then. These people were just happier in the past, because whe…
World Happiness Report finds this: "In general, most Western industrial countries are now less happy than they were between 2005 and 2010. Fifteen of them have had significant drops, compared to four with significant increases." "In eight of the ten global regions shown in Figure 2.2 (covering roughly 90% of the world’s population), those in the youngest age group have higher life evaluations now than in 2006–2010, e…
You're looking for data to validate your emotions, instead of the other way around. But the memetic emotional vibes of humanity are not objective.
The link you shared appears to me to be a conclusion in search of a evidence. Unfortunately the fields of psychology/sociology are ground zero for the replication crisis.
Only 36% of study findings in psychology are even replicable, and then that number drops even more for self reported surveys: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis
Ditto for Jonathan Haidt's entire body of work, which was based on shaky foundations.
What's more likely is you're measuring the cultural mood of the youth today influenced by current media climates (hipsterdom), instead of objective reality.
But if you genuinely think the youth of today would be happier getting firebombed during WW2, living through segregation, or working in an auto factory in the 1970s, I'd be happy to send them back there and let them see for themselves.
Re: I think I hate the internet
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
Look at the top comments on ANY article on HN. It's a bunch of people endlessly frustrated they never self actualized, hurling this frustration onto whatever random topic comes about. Constant whining about anything new or any change in the world...because of course everything was better in the past and anything new is worse. But things weren't better back then. These people were just happier in the past, because whe…
Are you saying that nothing has ever gotten worse or just nothing in the last twenty years?
Some things have objectively gotten worse. Not EVERYTHING as this site would lead you to believe.
Re: I think I hate the internet
#95I think we're finally realizing that the Internet is just one thing in an infinite universe of things. You, at any point, can go outside and do something else. Or don't go outside and still do something else
You don't have to "hate" the Internet. You can just choose not to participate in it.
Re: I think I hate the internet
#96I've been trying to come to terms with the modern internet just not being for me. It's honestly taken a bit of emotional processing, growing up a very lonely teen in the late 90s the internet was a haven and a lifeline. It's where I met a number of my current friends. It was my community. The modern internet and especially social media is just... bizarre. I open Facebook and it's all videos of body horror bullshit be…
> Bluesky was a decent little community for a minute.
I found it interesting before the mass-exodus from Twitter/X. Now it's mostly politics and negativity. Not much different in that regard from X, just at the other end of the political spectrum. X still has, for me at least, most of the relevant accounts.
Re: I think I hate the internet
#97Every time people use costs I really wonder what’s going on. My wife still uses an iPhone 13 and life for her is not particularly different from my iPhone 16. You don’t have to do any of this stuff: > I have to service and finance a £600 phone, pay a monthly contract and subscription to Apple, I then have to install an adblocker because otherwise sites are just unusable No one is going to connect you to a network fro…
> I then have to install an adblocker because otherwise sites are just unusable I've been raw-dogging the internet for years now and have had very little issues. Sure, some sites have ads. But if they don't generate revenue from those ads, then I'd expect those sites to no longer exist. It's a level of entitlement that's insane to me. If someone is hosting their own blog and use ads to help offset that, why should I…
" If someone is hosting their own blog and use ads to help offset that..."
It used to be that hosting your own blog was a hobby, not a cost-neutral or revenue-positive venture. Like any hobby, you did it for your own enjoyment and if other people enjoyed it, too, then that was a benefit and maybe you'd made the Word a little better.
So if you're not willing to pay a few pence per day to cover the cost of your hobby out of your own pocket, then the answer is "stop blogging" rather than "I shall inflict ads on those who dare to view my output".
Re: I think I hate the internet
#98Its the not internet, its bad incentives (profit) making once ok platforms shitty. But there are alternatives
Whatsapp - https://signal.org / http://element.io
Instagram - https://fotoapp.co/ / https://glass.photo
Twitter - https://joinmastodon.org/
Substack - https://tuhat.net
Facebook - maybe replace it with a mix of the others
Re: I think I hate the internet
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
We need legislation that requires all platforms to support a mandatory "algorithm opt out". News, social media, shopping, chatbots, everything - they all become far less predatory and addictive if there's no user stats driving the presentation. Sure your online experience would become boring and, horror of horrors, less profitable, but at least you wouldn't have to be googling anti-depressants in between your customi…
please no more legislation, especially for 'thing i dont like'
Won't somebody think of the struggling megacorporations?
Re: I think I hate the internet
#100You don't hate The Internet, you hate The Web. The Web can be forked and I don't know why people aren't working on this. An ad free, zuck-less ungoogle Web is possible. I don't like the current web either. I like The Internet though. I can get free satellite imagery of the world and tons of other cool stuff. This doesn't need to use The Web, except for some relatively simple and replaceable metadata channels.
What's to stop this nu-web going the same way?