The emergence of social media has destroyed all the small communities to standardize communication and information.
It’s a bit of a digital version of rural exodus. And since 2017/2018, I’ve noticed that everything that, in my opinion, represented the internet has disappeared.
I’ve known Lemmy for a few hours and I feel like I’m back in the early spirit of the internet.
Nah. Just corpos.
You don’t consider Lemmy to be social media?
It’s not social media that did it. It’s monopolistic, unregulated, greedy, giant tech corporations that made the internet shitty.
Does anybody not think that?
It’s not 2017-18 social media, friend. It’s just late state capitalism.
And the lion’s share of it can be traced to increasing real estate and rent prices.
social media has destroyed the spirit of the internet?
I’ve known Lemmy for a few hours and I feel like I’m back in the early spirit of the internet.
I mean, Lemmy is social media. You might dislike centralized social media or something, but…
Yeah its definitely just you…
https://medium.com/@darianoneil/because-the-internet-how-social-media-ruined-music-ec2022282aa4
https://listverse.com/2021/05/24/top-10-ways-social-media-is-ruining-the-world/
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2024/01/long-youtube-videos-tiktok/677130/
https://knowyourbest.com/social-media-ruined-society/
https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/how_social_media_brings_out_the_worst_in_us
Not social media. Capitalism.
The internet was ALWAYS social (e.g. telnet). It wasn’t ruined by people using technology to connect, it was ruined by capitalism finding new, insidious ways to monetize the human social drive.
This is why I’m finding more and more that it’s easier to find local events the “old fashioned way” (word-of-mouth, flyers, local newspapers and zines, etc) rather than through social media. It used to be easier to see events local to me, but now the algorithm pushes events that I may like but aren’t local at all. Sometimes I do actually see something local, but it’s too late.
i think the difference is that before the internet was a social mesh of countless websites.
while today it’s just a handful of social media sites.
yhea, it’s capitalism, but social media is the main tool capitalism used.
Which Douglas Rushkoff book is this concept again? I’ve lost track.
The internet keeps dying again and again. It started as a research project turned into a way to aid research. Then the sphere grew as nerds found a space to connect with other nerds. It was a community space where people knew each other. The only big source of trouble was each year, in September, when a new crop of kids gained access to the internet at their college. They had to be educated in the social structures and ethos of the culture they were stepping into.
Then, in the early nineties, the spirit of the internet died, in the Eternal September, as ISPs encouraged non-nerds to enter the cyber world. The community was flooded with more new people than could ever be trained to follow the cultural standards that had been established, and so they simply overwhelmed the capacity of the society to maintain itself.
Then those people began creating a new culture, a multiculture, with communities and sites forming around anyone with a bit of passion they wanted to share with the world wide web. People taught themselves web development just to share pictures of their families and poetry about their favorite trees.
But then, the spirit of the internet died. Advertisers wanted to take advantage of the new space to which everyone seemed to be devoting so much attention. They started monetizing sites. Creating sites became less and less about sharing your passion, and more and more about generating ad revenue.
And the internet persisted. Despite the disgust of the users, nothing seemed to stop the influx of capital into the community. And then came encryption, allowing people to even buy and sell things online. The internet died again, becoming a giant mall, a place you went to find stuff to buy rather than people to talk to.
And then came social media. It took the idea loved by so many of the early pioneers of the internet, that everyone could have their own site, dedicated to whatever they loved most, and centralized it. Friendster, sixdegrees, MySpace, and so on. With this change, the spirit of the web died again, commercializing even the idea of your personal page, your digital representation of yourself.
It has died. It will die again. Nothing can be relied upon.
Social media is a great idea, honestly. What’s ruined it is the same thing that ruins everything - money men.
The old internet was just an intermediate stage between the standardised internet, and before the internet when you had to find a clear channel through the ionosphere. Congratulations, however old you are, you’ve lived long enough to be bitter that the world has changed.
Now if we’re talking about the specific way it’s developed with a new generation of robber barons controlling everything, obviously few here will disagree.
Forums are dead, replaced by unsearchable fb and discord and searchable reddit. Discord being completely unsuitable and other two being propaganda platforms and most users use them to farm e-fame.
And nobody agrees to drop them for any reason either. A few years back entire fb sized sites were dropped and replaced over the smallest of infractions.
Its not so much social media that ruined it, as capitalism and centralization.
Forums themselves are a form of social media, and they’re (mostly) great. For Reddit and Lemmy, debatably the best part is the social elements, like the comments sections. The problem isn’t the interaction or the “social” nature of it. Its that these platforms have turned into psudo-monopolies intent on controlling people and/or wringing them for every penny.
Thats not to say toxicity and capitalistic exploitation didn’t exist before either. The term “flame war” is older than a lot of adults today. Unlike today though, platforms were both more decentralized meaning they were easier to manage and users could switch platform, and were less alorithmic meaning that users could more easily avoid large, bad-faith actors. You’ll notice the Fediverse have both these qualities, which is part of why its done so well.
IMO, the best fix to this, would be twofold. A) break up the big monopolies and possibly the psudo-monopolies. Monopolies bad, simple enough. B) Much more difficult, but I believe that what content a site promotes, including algorithmically, should be regulated. Thats not to say sorting algorithms should be banned, but I think we need to regulate how they’re used and implemented. For example, regulations could include things like requiring alternative algorithms be offered to users, banning “black box” algorithms, requiring the algorithns be publicly published, and/or banning algorithms that change based on an individual’s engagement. Ideally, this would give the user more agency over their experience and would reduce the odds of ignorant users being pushed into cult-like rabbit-holes.
I don’t blame social media at all. The Internet was, and still is, a communications platform. Some form of “social media” has always existed on the internet even if they were not called that back then.
I blame doing shit for the sole purpose of making money to be what has fucked up the internet. At least it’s only fucked on the surface. The real Internet still exists, it’s just not right out in the open where any random normie can find it.
The early Internet was social media, but it wasn’t so corporatized to the point of being ruined.
Social media, at it’s heart, is inevitable. We will always find a way to share pictures, information, videos, etc. with each other. It’s such basic functionality when you really think about it. We’re social creatures and this is the most important thing we would do with technology.
The issue is specifically with platforms; how they consolidate power and who owns them.
I don’t know what to do about it, it’s one of the biggest problems we are going to continue to face in our time. I can’t really armchair solutions for it now, but I think it’s of the utmost importance that we recognize it and discuss it.
Social media is not inherently bad, it’s the platforms.
To expand on that, all media with a negligible barrier to entry is social media. Which describes the internet as a whole. The commodification of such media is both unnecessary and parasitic. The only thing “social media” adds is accessibility.
