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The internet is worse than it used to be. How did we get here, and can we go back?
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this post was submitted on 16 Sep 2024
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The genie is already out of the bottle BUT, one solution would be to raise the barrier to entry again.
Return the internet to the pre-"smart" phone era, in which a minimum bar of effort and knowledge needed to be present in order to connect and participate on the web.
In 2008~2010, the flood gates opened for all the normies to stampede in and everything has been downhill since then.
I agree to an extent, but the problem is not so much the normies themselves as it is the massive commercial market they represent. You might point to mainstream social media as evidence of a problem with the people themselves, but you would be overlooking the fact that the surveillance and attention economies have meant these social media platforms are deliberately designed to position people against one another to drive engagement so these companies can charge more to advertisers. Discourse on the internet isn't getting worse because there are more bad people online, it's getting worse because companies have a financial incentive to turn us into bad people when we are online.
The normies are not the problem, they are the victims. The abusers are the giant corporation manipulating the masses and monetizing a publicly funded infrastructure for their own gains.
The point isn't "it's their fault". But it changes the dynamic.
An enthusiast community can, for good and bad, largely self regulate. It's easier to keep corporate interests either out, or engaging on your terms.
Once the community grows to include a high enough proportion of casual participants, that ability goes away, because manipulations that don't work on inquisitive expert audiences do work on less informed ones, and less willing to question. It's harder to establish who actually knows what they're talking about by reputation, it's harder to weed out the trolls from the naive, and it's just generally harder to keep the focus of the community where you want it to be.
Corporations are one of the groups of bad actors manipulating that difference in dynamics, but the dynamics are different because of the large influx of people who don't understand as much and aren't trying to.
Aren't we already doing that though with Mastodon, Lemmy etc?
I'm not saying there are no enthusiast spaces. I'm just explaining some of the tradeoffs that come with too low of a barrier entry when forming a community.
You want to be welcoming and accessible, not intimidating, etc, and I'm not saying any of that is bad. But you lose some of the magic where the whole community is relatively enthusiastic and has a shared vision for what it is when it's easy for anyone to join and pull their own way.
We're in Eternal September now. Have been for a few decades.
Yeah. I think that's happening now. The public will discover the Fediverse, but I'm not sure if they'll be welcomed into every community here.
How about BBSs? If you want to spam at 1200 baud, you had better be dedicated.
As someone who lived through that era, I can assure you that throughput is no deterrence to shitheads, morons, asshattery, and annoyance.
(Also, if you think Fediverse or even Reddit mods are bad, let me introduce you to the 1988 BBS Sysop.)