- 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.
The Internet is not a place. It doesn’t have weather or climate. It doesn’t have AQI. It has no life. It is not a destination or someplace you can go to.
The Internet provides a means of communication. As usual, capitalism and awful people use it to facilitate their twisted, greedy, and hateful purposes.
Which is obvious. Once given to the public that was an an obvious direction to go. Even when I was a kid I was aware of neo-nazi sites as far back as the very early 90’s. What I wasn’t aware of was loving, welcoming places. Hate finds a way to move faster and fill in gaps better than love. Like if hate is water, love is jello.
Mmm, jello…
Eloquent. I have but one vote.
By the internet you mean social media?
You are talking about a piece of the internet. The commercial one… Not the rest
The Internet has arguably saved now lives than it’s taken. You have to remember the Internet is also the backbone that hospitals and researchers use to share data and research. social media and bad/malicious journalism has had a terribly negative effect, but that’s a subset of the entire Internet. It’s like saying electricity is bad because it provides am infrastructure for bad things to happen, placing the blame on the infrastructure rather the individuals (or corporations) that are doing the bad thing.
Juuuuust wait for measles and get back to us. Or. Remember covid. You couldn’t be more wrong. You could also say “More” instead of now. Still wholly incorrect.
Measles and Covid were spread by the Internet? I remember hearing a bunch of misinformation spread in TV broadcasts. I remember RFK changing the vaccination recommendations. I remember reading far more factual information online than false on both of those topics. The nature of pandemics is they kill people. Shitty people can’t be bothered to listen to reason, even though they were told and showed the facts. The Internet is just one medium that information is disseminated, but the bigger factors are the likes of FOX news and other 24/7 news stations.
So you agree. Vaccines saved people, not the internet, but the web leads people into echo chambers and rabbit holes, doing the exact opposite. Thanks.
It’s one medium that can lead people to misinformation, but the pros far outweigh the cons. Education, sharing of vital information in real time, communication, and connections before unavailable with friends and relatives exist because of the Internet. It’s rapidly being policies down a dark rabbit hole of shit policies. Blaming bad journalism and bad actors on the Internet is like blaming the roads when someone is killed by a drunk driver.
If only there were things like education, books, etc.
They do exist but they’re not as easily accessible. I remember reading through the dated information of encyclopedias doing projects in school. Information on the Internet is readily available and updated in a timely manner as new information is gathered.
There are also plenty of books and other education resources that are full of bad information. There are many things taught in schools that aren’t true.
The source of information is the problem, not the medium it lives on.
Dunno how unpopular that opinion is, because it’s becoming more and more factually correct each day. Hell, actual counterculture nowadays is avoiding the internet
I often find myself wondering why I spend so much time on lemmy. Not being corpo bullshit doesn’t automatically make it good. “Not as bad” can still be bad, like how 1g of lead is “not as bad” for your health as 1g of polonium
Pro: All the world’s knowledge and information in the palm of your hand.
Con: Set up like a disorganized library, requiring a basic foundation of intelligence, education, wisdom, and skepticism to know how to find and then parse good info from bad.
Pro: Has facilitated sharing of vital knowledge between experts and laymen.
Con: Has allowed idiots, statistically few and far between scattered across the world, to unionize.
The internet is not the same thing as large corporate social media platforms.
Not fully, not yet
This is one of those times when Lemmy users act like they are different and better than everyone else. But it doesn’t take a lot of time to find people being toxic on Lemmy.
Hell, I started to sporadically use Instagram again because of friends and - at least in regards to what I see - it’s a much happier less toxic place than this. Not great, plenty of things I could criticize, but I can handle being there a lot longer. But everyone just wants to throw blame at corps and judge themselves free of any wrongdoing. Same behavior as when it comes to climate and environmentalism.
This place started with the intent of being different and better than reddit, but now it’s almost indistinguishable in terms of user behavior and attitude. Everything is an argument, everything is a fight, everyone knows better than everyone else and acts condescendingly.
Really don’t understand why so many commenters here say it’s just a part of the internet…
No? There was a time XMPP connected me to most my fiends, whether they had Facebook Messenger, Google, … And these days it’s all WhatsApp.
E-Mails used to be a thing. But now my bank and half the businesses refuse to communicate via email and I get 20 apps and logins to various mailboxes to spend an hour each month to fetch my bills. While my eMail inbox is all spam.
Forums and Blogs were a thing, but they’re mainly displaced by Discord, and everyone writing for a more general audience is on big-tech platforms or Medium.
The internet got way more centralized. From DNS to half the (still existing) independent websites who all homed in on Cloudflare… So even the infrastructure of the internet changed. They also do less open network exchanges and traffic gets moved it to private interchanges. And the whole internet was devised to be a very diverse and kinda open network. Now 90% of it is 5 big companies.
And you pretty much can’t google anything anymore. In the old days I’d just ask Google what the error message on my phone means, or if my Dell laptop can take a 32GB RAM stick (despite it not being listed in the compatibility list). And I’d regularly find good answers. Not so much as of today. I’ll get 10 results written by some AI harvesting my clicks and that’s it. The proper answer written by some random person on Reddit or somwhere else is gone.
It’s really not just the www or social media. It’s everywhere.
Yeah, even in the last decade this has steadily gotten worse. It feels like more and more things are being forcibly centralised for express purpose of making data harvesting easier - and the people doing it aren’t even really trying to hide it either.
The internet is an amplifier. If you were going to be stupid locally, it enables you to be stupid at a global scale. If you were already going to be greedy, you can be greedy at a global scale. If you were going to be gullible, horny, angry, sad, spiteful, kind, contemplative, quiet, loud, and so on, and so on…
horny, … sad
I’m surprised you were able to find my blog in your search results.
Rule 6. Please provide with some reasons.
Rule 6? I’m here for the rule 34!
…oh, I guess I just became your source of rule 6.
Just explain why you want rule 34. 🤷♂️
I mean…do I need more of an explaination besides “Boobs”?
Sorry, I missed that one. Please give me a few moments to update the post body.
You’re talking only about the world wide web, not the internet. Unless you want to go back to snail mail and phone switchboard operators for global communication.
I don’t want any communication to be honest. I get just as much junk mail irl as I do in email. I only recently stopped getting 5 calls a day from scammers because I assume they got busted. I don’t even want switchboards. I want to be left the fuck alone.
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.
Very unpopular, upvoted. Unlike most things that are gatekept by the rich, anyone with an internet connection has access to most of the same content…
I completely agree yet I’m still here injecting it directly into my veins to avoid feeling stuff.
Do you also feel this pertains to Fediverse despite the lack of direct corporate influence? Or do you think this is different?
