- Social media created an immediate soap box for everyone, and a way for unhealthy ideas to propagate quicker and more virally. It encourages vanity, inhibition, and unrealistic expectations. Then there’s the whole corporate element, where the mainstream of these platforms are truly just systems of data collection and manipulation.
- Dead internet theory coming in nicely
- The early advent of the internet had high hopes it would be used for the sharing of information. It indeed is, but the most widely used search engines are weighted to point you towards curated and questionable sources of information. This is purposeful, and often capitalistically motivated versus educational.
- There’s more, but I’m tired and didn’t expect to type all this out, so I’ll leave it for the comments.
It’s not the internet, per se. It’s the corpo owned hell pits of engagement time, data-mining, targeted advertising, and metrics that’s to blame. Forums were pretty cool. Had some bad experiences there, but nowhere near as bad as today.
Those corpo hell pits are completely in bed with lawmakers, and are now rewriting the rules. They will do all they can to stamp out all corners of the free internet.