The enshittification of the internet

[Crazy Jamie]

Yes, enshittification is apparently officially a word, defined as "the term used to describe the pattern in which online products and services decline in quality over time. Initially, vendors create high-quality offerings to attract users, then they degrade those offerings to better serve business customers, and finally degrade their services to users and business customers to maximize profits for shareholders."

In my experience this is absolutely a real thing. As much as technology has advanced broadly in the last twenty years or so, so many things about the actual internet experience have clearly, and in many cases deliberately, become worse. To give some tangible examples, Facebook barely shows you actual content from your friends anymore. Instead, it force feeds you posts from groups that you are not a part of and have shown no direct interest in, but which its algorithm thinks you will engage with. Not like. Engage with. Because that's the point. It has made finding content you actually want to engage with harder, so that you stay on the platform longer, which maximises advertising revenue. Amazon is another one. It doesn't really matter what you type in as a search term anymore. Chances are what you're looking for won't appear in the first five to ten hits, and if it does, it'll be a company you've never heard of and there'll be a decent chance it's fake. Twitter is the same with its feed that defaults to show you things from people you do not follow. Google is clearly so much worse than it used to be in terms of the results you get from searches. These are some examples from prominent platforms, but it is just everywhere. The internet has just become so much less accessible generally and the user experience is notably worse than it used to be.

This thread is first to highlight that, but also to discuss where it might lead. Sales of things like vinyls and physical books are on the increase and those mediums are getting more popular again. But beyond that, people do seem to be becoming more alive to the detrimental effect of reliance on technology generally, including (and perhaps especially) smart phones. Whilst that isn't exactly the same issue as the enshittification of the internet, I do think it's connected and contributes to the desire of people to more regularly switch off from the online world generally. But I wonder if that will result in more profound effects, such as the number of active users on these sites starting to notably decline in future. I don't know how realistic that is, particularly because companies like Amazon are so diversified in terms of their business models now that they are well placed to absorb any sort of backlash to any one of their revenue streams. I'm going to make attempts to make me and my family less reliant on technology in coming years, but I remain hopeful that there'll be wider societal moves in that direction too.

 

[Crystal]

You're spot on, Jamie. It's more like the centralization of the internet has ruined the internet itself. People relying on massive centralized social networks that control everything you do on those platforms and continually muddied their own waters has destroyed how the internet works. It's why I enjoy forums for social interaction online and will continue to do so, and yeah, sites like Amazon and the various knock-off marketplaces like Temu and Wish continue to degrade the internet experience even more. It is at the point where finding a reputable retailer online is tricky, and finding good social interaction with people you can have a good time with a struggle.

I like that you're doing all you can to pull yourself and your family more away from the internet and into a more well-rounded offline life. We all need that, IMO, and it speaks volumes that a lot of us are truly lost when the internet goes down or the power goes out. I'll put it out there, because of my position as a caregiver my existence is 90% indoors and connected just by virtue of having to look after my mother as she slowly slips away, I'm frustrated when the internet goes down except that I have local connected media via my NAS that I can still use, and I read a lot of books myself. But I need a lifestyle change as soon as my circumstances change. I'll always be online, I'll always have forums in my life, that's just a part of who I am, but I need more of a disconnect and more world in my world. It's great that you're focused on doing exactly that for yourself and your family, it's better, it's healthier it's...right.

 

[MC74]

In my case, I've been pulling myself away from the more toxic parts of the internet in favor of going about my own business, focusing more on the things that I enjoy and spending time with the people who are close to me. It's hard for someone like me to focus more on an offline life when I don't much of a life, nor any friends to spend time with irl, but I do feel like being a lot more selective in where I choose to spend my time is a good middle ground.

 

[Mark]

Yes, enshittification is apparently officially a word, defined as "the term used to describe the pattern in which online products and services decline in quality over time. Initially, vendors create high-quality offerings to attract users, then they degrade those offerings to better serve business customers, and finally degrade their services to users and business customers to maximize profits for shareholders."

In my experience this is absolutely a real thing. As much as technology has advanced broadly in the last twenty years or so, so many things about the actual internet experience have clearly, and in many cases deliberately, become worse. To give some tangible examples, Facebook barely shows you actual content from your friends anymore. Instead, it force feeds you posts from groups that you are not a part of and have shown no direct interest in, but which its algorithm thinks you will engage with. Not like. Engage with. Because that's the point. It has made finding content you actually want to engage with harder, so that you stay on the platform longer, which maximises advertising revenue. Amazon is another one. It doesn't really matter what you type in as a search term anymore. Chances are what you're looking for won't appear in the first five to ten hits, and if it does, it'll be a company you've never heard of and there'll be a decent chance it's fake. Twitter is the same with its feed that defaults to show you things from people you do not follow. Google is clearly so much worse than it used to be in terms of the results you get from searches. These are some examples from prominent platforms, but it is just everywhere. The internet has just become so much less accessible generally and the user experience is notably worse than it used to be.

This thread is first to highlight that, but also to discuss where it might lead. Sales of things like vinyls and physical books are on the increase and those mediums are getting more popular again. But beyond that, people do seem to be becoming more alive to the detrimental effect of reliance on technology generally, including (and perhaps especially) smart phones. Whilst that isn't exactly the same issue as the enshittification of the internet, I do think it's connected and contributes to the desire of people to more regularly switch off from the online world generally. But I wonder if that will result in more profound effects, such as the number of active users on these sites starting to notably decline in future. I don't know how realistic that is, particularly because companies like Amazon are so diversified in terms of their business models now that they are well placed to absorb any sort of backlash to any one of their revenue streams. I'm going to make attempts to make me and my family less reliant on technology in coming years, but I remain hopeful that there'll be wider societal moves in that direction too.

Hell of a way to put it, dude. I couldn’t agree more, and this is precisely why you’ll see me more active within this community than on any social media platform. It seems I’m not the only one, either, because the general consensus we’ve seen from the members here has been a sense of rejoice for the return of more “traditional” types of online communities. Even the Reddit users of this community don’t feel the same way about Reddit as they do forums like ours, and from what I’ve heard… that’s the closest to a “forum” that’s popular these days.

 

[MC74]

Hell of a way to put it, dude. I couldn’t agree more, and this is precisely why you’ll see me more active within this community than on any social media platform. It seems I’m not the only one, either, because the general consensus we’ve seen from the members here has been a sense of rejoice for the return of more “traditional” types of online communities. Even the Reddit users of this community don’t feel the same way about Reddit as they do forums like ours, and from what I’ve heard… that’s the closest to a “forum” that’s popular these days.

This is why I hope GWF sticks around. It's places like these that you can call a home. Places that you can just be yourself, and have a connection with people who are more down to earth compared to the rest of the internet.

 

[Crystal]

This is why I hope GWF sticks around. It's places like these that you can call a home. Places that you can just be yourself, and have a connection with people who are more down to earth compared to the rest of the internet.

I don't plan on letting this place go. I probably shouldn't admit this openly, but I've had a couple of months already where I've paid the server rather than buying myself groceries. So yeah, GWF is a priority, it's not going anywhere. And I didn't say that other part, ignore that.

 

[Smacktard]

We desperately need balkanization of the internet. I might sound like a luddite, but I genuinely feel like the world might start to heal if online communities were smaller, closer, and had more accountability between members and mod/admin staff.

But practically, how do you even do that? I don't think it's possible to reverse this tide.

 

[Quagmire]

We desperately need balkanization of the internet. I might sound like a luddite, but I genuinely feel like the world might start to heal if online communities were smaller, closer, and had more accountability between members and mod/admin staff.

But practically, how do you even do that? I don't think it's possible to reverse this tide.

I don't think you're far off. The biggest issue is it has been used to spread hate and lies instead of actual information and connection. Russia is a huge issue and is a big reason why the US has gotten as toxic as it is right now

 

[Mark]

We desperately need balkanization of the internet. I might sound like a luddite, but I genuinely feel like the world might start to heal if online communities were smaller, closer, and had more accountability between members and mod/admin staff.

But practically, how do you even do that? I don't think it's possible to reverse this tide.

Well, the simplified answer would be to eliminate algorithmic/AI moderation and replace it with community-based moderation. We didn’t encounter the bulk of the “modern community” problems even when the OG GW was at its peak, with 150+ moderators, 4 super moderators, 4 admins, and a few hundred forums. Yeah, there was the occasional dipshit who’d spam porn or gross-out imagery, but they were dealt with relatively quickly by a forum staff that at a minimum was able to make light of the situation. These days? If someone posts a guy’s asshole spread wide open, you’ll have 2/3 of the population mortified with the other 1/3 telling the staff to leave the OP alone and not infringe on their right to free speech. When you combine that element with algorithmic moderation with maybe a handful of humans overseeing it, you eliminate accountability, because the buck is easily passed off to the imaginary mod or some faceless mod that you might see the occasional announcement from. It’s very reminiscent of the real world, where people avoid the speed traps on the road and gun it as soon as they’re past it. It emboldens people to bring out their worst characteristics, and simultaneously dehumanizes every other member within the community because suddenly… we’re all just user ID’s and blobs of text, not people on the other end of the screen.

Then, you have the content itself, which is a whole different battle. Somewhere along the way, people forgot the message “don’t feed the trolls”. Could it be that the trolling has taken a turn into hate speech? Not likely. People were always called out on their race, sexuality, religion, etc. The big difference now is that there’s so much hate, and it has permeated every facet of the internet, so, people are just overwhelmed by it. If I alone cracked a joke on you for being Canadian, you’d throw some shit at me for being American, and that would be the end of it. Today? We’d dive into Trump, Trudeau, tariffs, and every other imaginable deviation that takes the conversation away from two dipshits playfully trash-talking the other’s country of origin to “holy shit, this is crossing into real-life issues, it isn’t just the fact that he called me a moose fucker that uses maple syrup to jack off”. There is a major issue with people being offended by or feigning offense by content posted online, but, it’s really no wonder why when you factor in the vitriolic nature of the internet as a whole.

Finally, we have the change of landscape in general. It’s profitable for me to talk shit about you being Canadian if my target audience is a bunch of Americans that wanna see Canada tariffed to death so they don’t feel like the only ones being taxed until they’re bone dry. It’s profitable for you to talk shit about me if your audience is anti-American, because everything you could say about me would be received by the masses as “it’s about time those Yankees get their shit thrown back at them”. There’s too much money involved with controversy, essentially. All it takes is the right audience and you can turn any hate speech into money. On the flip side, with the right amount of money, you can say whatever the fuck you want and remain untouched. It’s a double, triple, quadruple edged sword nowadays. Everyone gets cut up and divided.

 

[Smacktard]

Well, the simplified answer would be to eliminate algorithmic/AI moderation and replace it with community-based moderation.

That doesn't really solve the problem though; that's a symptom of the problem. A lot of moderation is still done by actual people, but anonymous people who you never interact with on a daily basis, and who don't really gave a shit about you or your problems. Reddit and Facebook are two examples of this.

Finally, we have the change of landscape in general.

Yes, but how? I don't think it's possible. It's the tech equivalent of trying to convince city folk to go live in rural country side. The Internet has "advanced", for better in some ways, and worse in others. I don't think there's any turning back the clock in a significant way.

There is a major issue with people being offended by or feigning offense by content posted online, but, it’s really no wonder why when you factor in the vitriolic nature of the internet as a whole.

Ostracism in an online community back in the day actually meant something. Or, it felt like it did. Nowadays, if you get blocked, you move on to a different account/board/subreddit/page/whatever. It has such little impact. It doesn't encourage a change in behavior, like in the past, but rather a redirection of that same behavior.

 

[Mark]

That doesn't really solve the problem though; that's a symptom of the problem. A lot of moderation is still done by actual people, but anonymous people who you never interact with on a daily basis, and who don't really gave a shit about you or your problems. Reddit and Facebook are two examples of this.

You’re not wrong, but, I was aiming more at the fact that when the community and the staff are one and the same, it adds an additional layer of accountability that doesn’t necessarily exist when Joe Schmo is doing quality control over your posts. If I have to moderate content here, I’m going to approach the subject differently as a fellow member of the community because I have more at stake, so to speak. If you and Crystal are beefing over a particular game, I’m not going to come into the discussion wildly swinging the ban hammer around… I’m gonna hit y’all with the “alright, y’all, what’s the deal, and what can we do to resolve this?” approach instead. A random mod isn’t going to give two shits who’s right or wrong, they’re just going to follow the textbook definition of the rules and dare someone to have a problem with it.

Yes, but how? I don't think it's possible. It's the tech equivalent of trying to convince city folk to go live in rural country side. The Internet has "advanced", for better in some ways, and worse in others. I don't think there's any turning back the clock in a significant way.

Well, one step at a time. Look at the creation of this place for example… it could have very easily deviated into a cesspool no different than any other niche community, but, we set objectives for ourselves. We can’t reverse course, but, we can decide what direction we want to go collaboratively and head that way.

Ostracism in an online community back in the day actually meant something. Or, it felt like it did. Nowadays, if you get blocked, you move on to a different account/board/subreddit/page/whatever. It has such little impact. It doesn't encourage a change in behavior, like in the past, but rather a redirection of that same behavior.

That’s not necessarily a new problem, though. How many people do we know of that created dupe accounts or aliases at OG GW and went about their business acting like a totally different person? The major difference is, we actively discourage that kind of stuff by encouraging people to discuss their issues. Focusing on a resolution instead of immediately administering consequences changes the dynamic between forum staff and members.

 

[Crystal]

If you and Crystal are beefing over a particular game,

Magic Knight Rayearth is an awesome Saturn game (and an awesome anime) and anyone who says otherwise is a meaniehead! Fight me!

 

[Mark]

Magic Knight Rayearth is an awesome Saturn game (and an awesome anime) and anyone who says otherwise is a meaniehead! Fight me!

Warned for trolling.

 

[Crystal]

Warned for trolling.

But you're spot on, I wouldn't go immediately banning people here over a spat. I care too much about the people here to just start banning for shit. But if forums were federated moderators came from a global pool of forum moderators out there in the larger forum...verse...and they saw a spat, they wouldn't know who was what and that we've been together for donkey's years. Passionless, emotionless, disjointed enforcement that takes nothing into account and is prone to mistakes and misunderstandings. No thanks. Give me smaller community forums.

 

[Quagmire]

Magic Knight Rayearth is an awesome Saturn game (and an awesome anime) and anyone who says otherwise is a meaniehead! Fight me!

One of my million games I need to play (also Saturn is low key the most underrated system IMO)

 

[Crystal]

One of my million games I need to play (also Saturn is low key the most underrated system IMO)

It 100% is...also stupidly expensive to collect for. Still looking for some hard to find games that are just way beyond my price range, like Super Tempo and the one I'll just never be able to get, Radiant Silvergun.

 

[Smacktard]

I was aiming more at the fact that when the community and the staff are one and the same, it adds an additional layer of accountability that doesn’t necessarily exist when Joe Schmo is doing quality control over your posts. If I have to moderate content here, I’m going to approach the subject differently as a fellow member of the community

Yeah, but what I'm saying is that THAT is a symptom of the problem. You're able to maintain that sort of friendly dynamic because you *know* the people here. We aren't anonymous. We have reputations, quirks, intricacies, whatever. Even when the forum was at its largest, there was a lot of transparency (wrt to ban/warning disputes, etc.) and mods of individual forums still knew the people who posted in them. That doesn't exist anymore BECAUSE the sizes are too massive. You can't have that level of familiarity on forums with millions of users. You can't forego AI moderation completely when your mod team is only like 10 people for the tens of thousands of daily posts.

So the question is still: how do we go back to cultivating *smaller*, more niche forums?

Look at the creation of this place for example… it could have very easily deviated into a cesspool no different than any other niche community, but, we set objectives for ourselves. We can’t reverse course, but, we can decide what direction we want to go collaboratively and head that way.

This place is an exception. It's the old forums, and we're partial to them because we grew up with them and knew them. We aren't establishing a community, we're *returning* to one. How do you convince the billions of people with no sense of community to go off and form their own internet communities and make sure they don't grow too big, and maybe even find the servers out of their own pockets? It just doesn't seem plausible to me on a large scale.

 

[Smacktard]

One of my million games I need to play (also Saturn is low key the most underrated system IMO)

MKR is so good. It's my favorite Saturn game so far. Some people take issue with the Working Designs translations, but I found the game very charming and the dialogue unique and interesting enough that it made me want to keep playing. Whether it's accurate to the anime or not, Crystal would know better

 

[Crystal]

MKR is so good. It's my favorite Saturn game so far. Some people take issue with the Working Designs translations, but I found the game very charming and the dialogue unique and interesting enough that it made me want to keep playing. Whether it's accurate to the anime or not, Crystal would know better

It's kind of an aside to the anime, but I'd call it close enough.

 

[Mark]

Yeah, but what I'm saying is that THAT is a symptom of the problem. You're able to maintain that sort of friendly dynamic because you *know* the people here. We aren't anonymous. We have reputations, quirks, intricacies, whatever. Even when the forum was at its largest, there was a lot of transparency (wrt to ban/warning disputes, etc.) and mods of individual forums still knew the people who posted in them. That doesn't exist anymore BECAUSE the sizes are too massive. You can't have that level of familiarity on forums with millions of users. You can't forego AI moderation completely when your mod team is only like 10 people for the tens of thousands of daily posts.

So the question is still: how do we go back to cultivating *smaller*, more niche forums?

You can’t unless the masses want to, unfortunately. People settle for the convenience of Reddit. They settle for the Facebooks and Twitters because that’s where their friends are. If you want to change the way people interact with each other, you have to encourage them to step outside of their newfound familiarities on those other platforms and remind them that there are other ways. Of course, this doesn’t touch on the corporate stranglehold that the big names have on social media, but, it’s a start. Facebook didn’t start off as the top search result on Google for connecting with likeminded people, it was a gradual process.

This place is an exception. It's the old forums, and we're partial to them because we grew up with them and knew them. We aren't establishing a community, we're *returning* to one. How do you convince the billions of people with no sense of community to go off and form their own internet communities and make sure they don't grow too big, and maybe even find the servers out of their own pockets? It just doesn't seem plausible to me on a large scale.

This circles back to the big city point you made… you can’t exactly tear the city down and force people to hang out in a room with no walls, but, you can remind them of the importance of being connected to their neighbors and their community. From there, you have the foundation for a community within a city, that community evolves into a neighborhood, and eventually it becomes its own jurisdiction.

 

[Crystal]

It's why the centralization of the internet is and always has been a terrible thing. Sounds great, everything you need in just a handful of sites, but look at the control they exercise over everything, and look at the lack of privacy and the lack of community feel in the modern internet. It's not about providing the most value to their users, it's about getting them to provide as much data to them as they can get, spend as much time as possible to generate as much ad revenue, and spend as much money on their services as possible. It's why we need small, independent sites. Pretty much impossible to stop it at this point, but the more decentralized the better.

 

[Smacktard]

You can’t unless the masses want to, unfortunately. People settle for the convenience of Reddit. They settle for the Facebooks and Twitters because that’s where their friends are

People generally don't really *like* those, though. Sure, they're convenient for some things, but like Jamie mentioned in the first post, they've gotten worse over time. Rarely do you see friends' content on Facebook. Big subreddits suck ass. People want alternatives, the question is how to make them, and then how to convince them to *use* those alternatives.

 

[MC74]

MKR is so good. It's my favorite Saturn game so far. Some people take issue with the Working Designs translations, but I found the game very charming and the dialogue unique and interesting enough that it made me want to keep playing. Whether it's accurate to the anime or not, Crystal would know better

OMG, we have another fan of the game!

 

[Mark]

People generally don't really *like* those, though. Sure, they're convenient for some things, but like Jamie mentioned in the first post, they've gotten worse over time. Rarely do you see friends' content on Facebook. Big subreddits suck ass. People want alternatives, the question is how to make them, and then how to convince them to *use* those alternatives.

Honestly, I see organic growth as the only way to make it happen. It’s just like this place… if you build it, they will come. If they don’t? Fuck ‘em. If we launch a community right now and send an email out to a million people, it’ll be a shitshow, but it’ll fill up the member list quick, and there’s no telling why the registered members joined. However, if we launch one and curate who we contact and where we reach out to people… we target a more specific audience, one that could share more of the same ideology towards being part of a smaller community.

I just don’t see a way to break away from that centralized system we see now, not without those networks imploding first, which seems to be gradually happening. Look no further than how fragmented it’s becoming with BlueSky and Truth and whatever else has become a substitute for Twitter. Those communities that branch off won’t survive their own echo chamber, and they’ll either devolve into smaller segments of people or immigrate back to the big ones reluctantly. It’s kinda like the GW spin-offs back in the day, if you think about it. People weren’t happy with this or that, made their own community, some flourished, some didn’t, and eventually we all ended up back at GW.

 

[Fool's Requiem]

Once Reddit became a publicly traded company, the site took a nosedive in quality.

To appease the shareholders, they made running a third party app prohibitedly expensive to the point where everyone just just theirs down. It forced the rest of us to use their shitty app that is littered with ads and make it hard to come across new content on my main page. I see shit from days ago pop up. It's just like Facebook now.

 

[Quagmire]

Once Reddit became a publicly traded company, the site took a nosedive in quality.

As is with most places

To appease the shareholders, they made running a third party app prohibitedly expensive to the point where everyone just just theirs down. It forced the rest of us to use their shitty app that is littered with ads and make it hard to come across new content on my main page. I see shit from days ago pop up. It's just like Facebook now.

If you have android there are workarounds, I think there was one for ios but not sure. I am still using reddit sync patched and there is an easy way to patch their app to be less shitty

I see no adds on phone or computer through ublock (and maybe use of res)

 

[Fool's Requiem]

If you have android there are workarounds, I think there was one for ios but not sure. I am still using reddit sync patched and there is an easy way to patch their app to be less shitty

I had it set up to allow BaconReader to work for a while, but then there was some update that finally broke it for good and I couldn't fix it. Also, NSFW posts are still automatically blocked by Reddit unless you use their official app and website. Even third party apps that remain aren't allowed to have NSFW stuff.

I see no adds on phone or computer through ublock (and maybe use of res)

I don't see ads on a Browser, but I see it on the app all the time. Downvoting doesn't do anything and there is no way to block the accounts that post those ads.

 

[Quagmire]

I had it set up to allow BaconReader to work for a while, but then there was some update that finally broke it for good and I couldn't fix it. Also, NSFW posts are still automatically blocked by Reddit unless you use their official app and website. Even third party apps that remain aren't allowed to have NSFW stuff.

The workaround for the NSFW stuff is to create your only subreddit, make it private and then you're good (being a moderator is what fixes it)

If you're interested I can pass along the redditsync instructions, I used to use Baconreader and then I moved over to reddit sync, it was a similar enough move that it wasnt hard to get used to

 

[Fool's Requiem]

The workaround for the NSFW stuff is to create your only subreddit, make it private and then you're good (being a moderator is what fixes it)

how does that work with threads in other subs?

 

[Crazy Jamie]

You can’t unless the masses want to, unfortunately.

I agree, and that requires either a sudden shift in public perception, which I think is extremely, or it needs a generational shift. A large part of the problem is the generations that came before us. We did our time on internet forums, went through the phase of taking it all too seriously, and came out the other side. But those whose first meaningful interaction with others via the internet was actually on Facebook, Twitter etc? They didn't have that experience, and now look at how, for example, our parents' generation speak to each other on Facebook. It's just all so immature and inexperienced. I'm not suggested that you're likely to turn to MAGA just because you complain on Facebook about your dog being scared of people setting off fireworks, but the reality is that those sorts of people are highly susceptible to algorithm based content that is intended to stoke anger and similar emotions. They think that all they need to be careful of on the internet is Nigerian princes wanting some money, when in reality they are entirely unaware of just how much the internet manipulates them, let alone have any idea of how to actually deal with that.

I think what is needed for change is the next generation. I really hope our kids look at the way that we and other older generations use the internet, and look at it the same way that we looked at our parents smoking. A reaction that is in large part driven by a "it's so obvious that it's harmful, why would you not stop now even if you didn't know it was harmful at the time?" line of thinking. The problem, of course, is that teenagers right now are big targets for these companies and are being assimilated into these communities and apps quite easily. There are some movements to reduce that impact, but it's so hard given the influence that these companies have. Hence why I think it takes time and will probably need the next generation to push back on it.

 

[Quagmire]

how does that work with threads in other subs?

Dont know but I've heard it fixes it, I dont think I needed to do it, I think the sync patch fixed it, but cant say for sure

 

[MC74]

I agree, and that requires either a sudden shift in public perception, which I think is extremely, or it needs a generational shift. A large part of the problem is the generations that came before us. We did our time on internet forums, went through the phase of taking it all too seriously, and came out the other side. But those whose first meaningful interaction with others via the internet was actually on Facebook, Twitter etc? They didn't have that experience, and now look at how, for example, our parents' generation speak to each other on Facebook. It's just all so immature and inexperienced. I'm not suggested that you're likely to turn to MAGA just because you complain on Facebook about your dog being scared of people setting off fireworks, but the reality is that those sorts of people are highly susceptible to algorithm based content that is intended to stoke anger and similar emotions. They think that all they need to be careful of on the internet is Nigerian princes wanting some money, when in reality they are entirely unaware of just how much the internet manipulates them, let alone have any idea of how to actually deal with that.

I think what is needed for change is the next generation. I really hope our kids look at the way that we and other older generations use the internet, and look at it the same way that we looked at our parents smoking. A reaction that is in large part driven by a "it's so obvious that it's harmful, why would you not stop now even if you didn't know it was harmful at the time?" line of thinking. The problem, of course, is that teenagers right now are big targets for these companies and are being assimilated into these communities and apps quite easily. There are some movements to reduce that impact, but it's so hard given the influence that these companies have. Hence why I think it takes time and will probably need the next generation to push back on it.

Yep, 100% agreed it's going to take a generational shift. Problem is, with the way the world is gone, that is going to be one hell of a tall order.

 

[Mark]

The problem, of course, is that teenagers right now are big targets for these companies and are being assimilated into these communities and apps quite easily.

Targets. That’s it right there. They are prey for people our age, the Zuckerberg’s of the internet, that knew exactly which pitfalls to avoid themselves… but knew exactly how to conceal them from the next generation to capitalize off of it themselves. A good example? Look at the progression from the Hugh Hefner type of media mogul to the Joe Francis (Girls Gone Wild) types. They saw the glitz and glamour of Playboy parties growing up, and wanted to be front and center like Hugh… only, they ended up like Icarus and received their earned reputation as a scumbag, which paved the way for the next generation to stay behind the scenes and give the illusion of ownership to the content creators, like OnlyFans is. That doesn’t mean there isn’t a scumbag cashing checks at the expense of your naked neighbor, that just means he recognized that being a public figure in that realm equates to a totally different degree of standard. Zuckerberg saw what Tom Anderson accomplished with MySpace, and said “alright, I’ll raise you…”, and here we are now.