Dead Internet (2023)

So many subs hellban young accounts to deal with spam. The only real way to get around it is create an account 6 months before you want to comment.

"At that golden fin de siècle of Y2K, where promised dreams felt limitless and infinite beneath the neon daze of confetti-striped streets, we looked ahead to a new age brimming with open expansiveness, optimistic"

GenX here, grew up in heyday. Drank the cool aid. Still dream wistfully about the past. The kids these days don't have any of the optimism of the internet revolution, they grew up with it and thus it is just another medium, something more to 'get away from'.

The enshitification is taking over everywhere.

Can enshitification be stopped?

It seems like recently the number of advertisements suddenly grew and now take 80% of the screen. Seems like not long ago there was one popup, now there is half dozen. And they move the screen around to cause text to jump around, unable to read at all.

A lot of social media, but especially FB, is being deluged with low-effort AI slop. Man-made horrors beyond your comprehension, and tens of thousands of bots upvoting or commenting the slop ("amen").

I see some interesting article on any of the major news papers, head to the comment section on their FB page, which is filled with pro-Trump posts from users with south-Asian or African locations. There's just bots absolutely everywhere.

To think that FB either can't, or just doesn't want to filter out this garbage.

I strictly use FB for the closes groups that have replaced many of the older forums, or local groups/pages for information and buying/selling.

EDIT: examples can be found here https://x.com/facebookaislop

>I haven't. Internet is nothing more than an addiction for me. Internet is dead and misanthropic nowadays. It's soulless and corporate. It used to be fun, artistic, creative, and educational. Now it's neither of those, with extremely few exceptions like Wikipedia.

I feel like the reality is that every recommendation algorithm have been cranked up to 11 to throw garbage at you. The "good old internet" is not completely gone, all the thing you mentioned, fun, artistic, creative & educational are still there.

I'd even say that when it come to educational it have actually massively gotten better, and still is, *but it is getting harder and harder to find it*.

Google search is garbage, Youtube throw you shorts clickbaity shit, so does twitter, and Facebook is a wasteland. Yet the interesting blogs are still there, the youtube content creators are still producing educational content, artists are still producing stuff.

*Search* has gotten worse. So you simply won't find as much as you used to, and your old channel is getting filled with SEO garbage and clickbait recommendation system preferences.

> filled our heads with candied dreams of endlessly-spanning information super-highways

* https://www.wikipedia.org

* https://www.openstreetmap.org

* https://github.com

* https://data.gov

* https://fred.stlouisfed.org

* https://ourworldindata.org

* ...

Plus the countless documentation websites that we technical writers lovingly toil away at day-in and day-out.

If you implicitly focus on consumer websites, then sure, there is a lot to be pessimistic about. But what professional in any field would say that they had easier access to information 34 years ago than today? How can we say that the information superhighway is not "mission accomplished" in that case? Or maybe the claim is that the information superhighway was most efficient in 2005 and we have regressed since that peak? Are we just upset because some people in the 90s set the unrealistic expectation that the internet would fix literally every bad thing about society and we bought into that silly claim?