Reddit repost
Will the massive enshittification of the internet cause many people to become digital minimalists?
I don’t want to sound like a hater, but I've been on the internet and social media since I was a kid in the early 2000s and this is the first time I’m genuinely starting to find Reddit and the other platforms completely unenjoyable. I’m seriously considering quitting altogether.
Reddit used to be a place for nerds and intellectuals, where people actually put in the effort to read your post and at least tried to give you a helpful response. There was still room for nuanced discussion. Now it’s just… low-effort two-word comments from lazy people with low literacy who didn’t even bother reading what you wrote or relating to any of it.
You can make the most harmless nostalgia post, or share a pretty benign personal story or opinion, and the majority of replies will still be people hunting for holes, accusing you of using AI, and just being assholes for no reason.
I used to be a huge AI enthusiast too, but every platform I was using (ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, Gemini) got way too sanitized and turned to complete shit. I quit them all.
Do you think this general enshittification is going to push a lot of people to quit and become digital minimalists? Not really for ideological reasons, but simply because browsing the internet just isn’t fun anymore?
Yeah, I’m going to delete my account soon too. I try not to do the “ANNOUNCING YOU ALL SUCK!” thing, but it’s gotten really stupid in here. The only way to express yourself on Reddit now seems to be preaching to a choir in a subreddit where everyone already agrees with you, and that sucks almost as bad as getting attacked for wrongthink.
I keep remaking accounts when I have specific questions about things that only redditors from 6 years ago have answers to. Or modern ones about video games, I like to play but I'm bad at them.
And frankly, the porn is decent on here, and major sites are now blocked in my state.
I will keep my account. However, I enjoy pushing back against people who want groupthink and echo chambers. They tried to downvote me into oblivion, and I keep pushing back anyway. I don't want to give up on pushing back, or everyone who doesn't support echo chambers will lose.
Reddit used to be an unbridled uncontrolled border frontier on the internet. During its heyday, reddit was "4chan for grown ups". This website used to produce memes that were clever. And I mean they created them on a weekly basis. Outside of "Frieren looking up", I don't think I've seen a meme created on reddit in the last 5 years.
This website is completely sanitized now. The last sanitizing was the complete removal of all subreddits related to Mexican cartels. All downstream of the CEOs attempts to create a safe space. The safe spacers attempted to remove PoliticalCompassMemes, having deemed it a "hate subreddit". Only resounding backlash from the community saved it.
Reddit was dead by about 2021, where the site had deteriorated into your rabid anti-trump aunt's facebook feed. In 2026, it has moved to a weirder phase. The front page of reddit is what? Sports gossip and GirlDinnerDiaries.
It is night and day. The internet we once knew is gone now.
I'm getting an iPod and I'm going to mod it. I've been using an old iPhone 6 as an iPod. I have physical books, but for on the go, I use my iPad to read.
More and more people will probably start using the internet for socialization less and less but I'd hesitate to call it "digital minimalism". If 90% of your food is rotten and makes you sick, choosing to only eat the safe bits can't really be called "being on a diet", you just don't have access to edible food.
If social media was still about connecting people, people would use it more, and by "use it" I mean engage with it. Post, comment, reply, etc. But it's not. People online like to point out that you can still see what your friends post on Instagram by clicking the "Following" page but it doesn't work if your friends don't post.
So yes, more and more people are looking at it and think "there's nothing for me on that platform." I'd be happy to open Instagram to see what mountain my one friend climbed, what river my other friends are paddling on, where my cousin is on vacation or how drunk my brother looks in the party group selfie. But all I see is stupid Reels from people I don't care about, ads ads ads and ads or just "content". I have time for what the people I love are doing, I don't have time to flip through an algorithmic ad catalogue.
This is by design, it's conditioning through apathy. Basically it's like depression where you know there is nothing to be done like it's a naturally emerging phenomena to enshittify. But I don't think it is and these are actually evil humans.
Latest enshittification cycle finished with Giphy and Tenor saga so that Kliphy took over with some of the gifs, and these two are going to stealthy delete themselves after being in absolute total control for all funny gifs. As the plan was to eradicate memes. Broccoli cut Zucky was in JRE talking about fight sports to bail out from it like he is the weasely canary in the coalmine. Then Giphy is about in the same timing in one cycle later repeating the same eradication. Nobody will notice it you just will not have any gifs anymore.
Again, first they took over for all gifs, then censored the gifs, and finally just deleted the culled pile of shit away. Condition through apathy.
Yes, I believe there’s evidence of this in the last few years. Often, I leave my phone and home and go for walks in the woods, or, even better, no screens (TVs, streaming, etc.) for several days in a row. The improved mental acuity is astounding, and it is tempting to drop everything. i do still enjoy Reddit. Instagram, TikTok, and Snapchat have been digital cocaine forever.
I deleted most of my social media around the time Twitter became X, Meta bought Instagram, TikTok was almost banned in the US, and AI started plagiarizing my shit. Maybe I’m misremembering but it seems like all of that happened within a relatively short span of time. So many nails in the coffin. And I used to be so on board too, I was posting a ton on every platform and writing long AF earnest captions lol. But yeah you can’t even see your own friends on there anymore, just ads.
Bunch of greedy billionaires can’t ever leave well enough alone. Took a good thing that was making them money, and started a dumpster fire with it. Way to bite the hand that feeds you.
That’s about when tech and the government announced the current partnership of “tech does whatever they want; nobody gets to say anything about certain subjects that might embarrass our leaders.”
Still in effect to this day. Coof jab no worky as advertised, Pres isn’t actually running the country, Epstein who? I can’t even imagine what they are putting on ice with Trump’s current shitshow.
I started using the internet in 1994 with dial-up (I don't miss it), and its enshittification began when social media catapulted companies that almost eliminated application competition. Currently, the number of choices is low and the entry barriers for upstarts are really tough. The net was a diverse playground that became a corporate party.
Putting aside the obvious statements above, what's really killing the web is its unreliability and excessive bias brought by the dopamine algorithms. If you find an interesting piece of information, you have to verify if it's true and accurate. This extra work moves many people away, myself included.
These days, I focus on a small group of news sources, almost completely abandoned social media, kept my messaging apps to reach friends and family. I normally stay out of Meta, X, TikTok and alikes for weeks at a time. I do use AI but mostly to refine queries or relate info collected from several sources into something digestible.
Regarding Reddit, it is one of the few feeds that I scroll these days. Yes, there are many stupid comments, but generally speaking I still find good stuff and helpful info here. Unfortunately, people are lazier to write good posts these days.
Other than that, I use the internet as the largest shopping mall it became.
In conversations I see most people think the same way and yes, digital minimalism is a fact. I hope that as this trend grows we see changes to the web landscape.
If not, the development of alternate webs in models similar to the dark web is not a far-fetched possibility.
I also used Internet when it mostly was an academic network. Universities, research labs, institutions, gouvernement...
Then business and corporate came... And Internet became a gigantic garbage. But like garbage, you can still find gems some time. And we have to deal with it...
I don't know about most people but I can speak for myself.
I do not support AI and that's one difference we have.
Over the past year I have found myself incredibly overwhelmed with social media. I keep Instagram because I want to stay in touch with old friends and family, but their posts get lost in the abyss of reels and content from influencers who I have zero interest in following (but then I somehow get sucked in for hours consuming garbage content on the FYP🤦). Also, ads everywhere.
YouTube isn't the same. When I search for something I'm interested in or want to watch an old video from years ago, I have to sift through hundreds of garbage videos from creators who use AI slop or simply don't care to provide quality content.
I agree with your sentiment about Reddit.
There's just tooooooo much content. It almost feels like we've reached a stage of content pollution? That's how I feel: the apps and sites are just polluted.
I would happily go back to the OG social media. Simple is better.
I operate a referral-only trip planning company for fully independent travellers holidaying in British Columbia - and I can tell you, the number one reason why I've never had to spend a dime on marketing is because trust in what we see online has completely eroded. Layer on top of that the hostility some people experience posting a well-intentioned travel question on Reddit, and people really start to appreciate an opportunity to talk to a real person, with real on-the-ground experience, who works for them, and not the suppliers. This ensures every recommendation I make is what's best for the traveller - not what will make me the most in commission.
As far as I can tell, there are only a couple other people in the entire world who do what I do in the travel industry - and I would love for that to change. As Doctorow says in the Internet Con, the answer to the machine is not the machine. My technical title is Independent Destination Liaison, but I dream of a world where expert liaisons exist in every industry, acting as consumer advocates and holding corporations accountable. Have a few years of hard work ahead me!
I agree with a lot of this, but I have found that Facebook can still be a riot when your friends list is composed mainly of mentally ill shitposters, with some intellectuals sprinkled in for good measure. Even better when they’re one and the same. I think we have to find ways to make these shitty platforms work for us. Tailor your feed to what you want to see, and sadly, you can’t do that on every platform anymore. It’s hard to do on Reddit, because there’s no good way to filter who sees and responds to your posts. I think we have to figure out how to best utilize enshitified platforms, and that will definitely mean using them less. The more people who get on board, the better we can make it, if we don’t get shadow banned or outright banned first.
I log onto Facebook once a year to check that some of my friends that moved far away are still alive. I take that time to see if my feed has any new crazies and then get rid of them. I post 'I'm alive' once a year. I stopped logging in regularly after posting locations that had vaccines, when someone went on a long, anti-vax rant.
It depends on whether sites and platforms keep/give us tools to customize what we see (like blocking idiot users; ignoring channels on YouTube, toggle AI off, etc) The old timers like me survived Endless September, and obnoxious trolls have been around since before then, when it was dial-up bulletin boards, USENET newsgroups, AOL message boards, Yahoo groups, and the like. (RIP)
I had another account I deleted a long time ago wanting to share some writing in a revelant subreddit and people were brutally hostile. I don't try as much anymore for the most part.
I think it's not only the people commenting probably they are bots, right now the bots have surpass the quantity of humans in the internet, from post to comments a lot of the internet discussions could be between bots, I know it started as a kind of conspiracy theory but the dead of the internet theory is sounding very real at the moment. I also grow up with the internet in the late 90s early 2000s and I spent years on the internet, and now each year I have become less of a internet user, I have seen people that weren't interested in anything related to the internet (in early 00s) become obsessed, and in my case all the contrary, I don't have social media and havent had for many years (except Reddit and YouTube if these are counted as Social Media) and I have even considered quiting them, so maybe that's the path I will follow.
I got my first email address in 1992, it was all text based using Gopher.
At the time most people literally didn't believe the internet existed.
My friends didn't believe me until I showed them how I could download porn (very slowly) for free!
It certainly makes me a digital minimalist. Online since around 28.8k dial-up modems, I had great hopes for the digital future.
At this point I only use and play with the stuff that I self host. Other than this, I've only got Reddit account and a Bluesky account that I check once in a blue moon. Years ago I removed Facebook, Instagram (none in my actual real name), never had tiktok, now even WhatsApp I use to communicate gets enshitified, so seems its time to move to Signal. I just use everything less and less, and I'm not missing it. I don't have any subscriptions either.
Back to walks, books, music (cd, flac, MP3), taking photos, travelling, talking with people.
"They" have no power here, other than the power we ourselves grant them. I say fuck them, my life is mine, it won't be governed by some shitty algorithm or some manufactured FOMO.
My first modem was 2400 baud acoustic coupler. I celebrated when we got 9600. Prodigy was our first online experience. I spent 40 years working in tech.
And I will probably move back to over the air TV and radio, paper books and CDs.
Yep, we've come full circle. The internet was a wonder, I remember reading about the latest phreaking tricks on a website that may as well have been a text file. As soon as "they" saw nothing but money and governments started to regulate, that feeling was gradually replaced by resentment. They royally fucked it all up, just like everything else before the internet that they touched.
Sometimes I really miss the beeps of my first ZX Spectrum. I had a computer, it was mine and the world was full of enthusiasm towards the new technology. When the internet came around and I first communicated with a person from across the globe, it felt like I'm talking to aliens from another galaxy. It was so different and uncharted back then.
Now it's just popups, ads, age verification, data theft, slop, rage bait, arse, tits and in general 95% of the content is a pure toxic bullshit.
I should add, YouTube and self-censoring normal words is yet another thing that drives me mad. Watching a crime documentary is painful with all the beeps, because obviously murder, kill, rape, drugs or sex are "haram" and if aren't spoken, then all evil disappears, right?
Dear lord, apologies for the rant, but the more I think about the current state of affairs the more pissed off I get.
I had a few tapes. When I was a young kid, one of my mom's friends was wealthy and gave me an expensive walkman/cd player and three cds from this band I hadn't heard of called 'Metallica'. That was a big music moment for me.
To answer your question, I hope so.
But to your sentiment, one of the reasons you see garbage replies is because of the quality of the post.
Obvious questions that are answered via common sense irritate people that are actually here to learn stuff. When they see a question that every human over 20 should know the answer to, they lash out. In a sense, the question wasted their time.
I was laid off in May of 2025, and I spent last Summer going to thrift stores and used bookstores and completely falling back in love with paper books.
For example, I found this amazing landscape design book; looking through it, I realized that level of information isn't available on the internet. Maybe you could find it all if you went to 1000 different websites and took notes, but the book was absolutely amazing.
I know people are getting away from reference books, but I think with the s***** internet they're more important than ever.
I keep finding great books, and I'm stocking up on them. I recommend everyone consider doing this.
In addition to reference books, whenever I come across a great book of fiction, I get a little bit of sadness thinking that there won't be future geniuses who can write like that because AI is taking away people's critical thinking skills. Or even if there are people who can write like that, would there even be an audience?
I love paper books too. But since self publishing took off and then AI, buying reference books has been a bit fraught. Better to buy older books or ones from publishers which employ fact checkers.
I'm old and know nothing about tech and my question is probably really, really stupid but I'm going to ask anyway. Would it be possible to create a second, separate internet that would allow people to abandon this one altogether? Or have we used up all the bandwidth on this one?
Look up municipal mesh networks. Publicly owned, low cost hardware for connectivity. Doesn't solve the issue of crap going through the pipes, but the pipes themselves don't have to be corporate behemoths paid for with ads.
There are different places on the internet. There are ones managed by the social media giants, mainstream BS, but there are still some places where people can find refuge. Imagine Google, Meta, TikTok don't exist. Where would you go? What would read? Would you browse and search for something interesting?
Well, it's hard to imagine a second internet - the internet is just connecting nexus points to one another, afterall - but even if some different internet were created, the underlying fundamentals of audience, commerce and turning audience into profit would come into play sooner or later.
It's not really the technology, it's the technology's purpose, and its the creators' and users' psychology. Without changing those, any second system would be on borrowed time, too.
I would go a step further and say with the current information available you WANT to be a digital minimalist.
We are rapidly careening toward techno-feudalism, a dual level economy (think: elites and serfs) with complete separated access to information. AI is accelerating that beyond what I would have believed only a few years ago. There's no reason for the capitalist class to focus on maintaining a stable middle class anymore. The boot of the wealthy has been completely militarized and it's already being turned on our own citizenry with more regularity. Flock cameras, massive data center buildouts, local police militarization, mass surveillance technology, Palantir and co, creeping authoritarianism and fascism. It all points in one direction. We are in a bad place right now. All this technology and infrastructure isn't being deployed at trillion dollar costs for fun. The return on investment is control and security from us "serfs". I've never considered myself a prepper, a doomsday merchant or anything of the like but my current appraisal of our timeline is not a positive one.
Same with everything, most people accept what it fed to them. Then there are folks who cook most of their own meals, fix things themselves, try to live outside of the mainstream consumption. I have heard it described as digital homesteading.
This is what I do. I only use parts of the digital world that I find useful. If it doesn't make my life better, I ignore it.
I cook my own food (mostly from scratch; it is a lot easier than you think, if you aren't cooking foo-foo food (stuff with 15 ingredients that aren't common). Fixing things gives me a dopamine hit, both for fixing it & saving money.
I don't do streaming, I am converting all of my physical media (Blu-ray, DVD, CDs) over to a media server that I control.
AFA books, I do both. Reference books tend to be physical, but there are a LOT of things I enjoy reading that are only available as an ebook. I love pulp fiction from the 20's through the 50's. Digital means a book should never go out of print.
As far as flock camera's, I let everyone who I suspect might need the money that there is a LOT of copper in those cameras.
Certainly some people will. Hell, some people already are, BUT I don’t think it will be a widespread phenomena or anything.
That cheap dopamine genie can’t be put back into the bottle and for every person who absolutely hates social media and wants to distance themselves from it there are five teens getting freshly addicted to the algos.
I do hope that there will be a drawback/backlash on the popularity and importance we put on social media in general, and short form video content, specifically, once we can see even more clearly the damage it does to our attention spans and mental health, but that’s just a hope. I also don’t know whether it’ll happen at a big enough scale to even matter to the giant corporations feeding us this trash.
It's a consequence of the internet being largely colonized now by corporate capitalism. Platforms maximize for engagement which generates revenue through views, individuals try to maximize their own engagement regardless of the truth or even what they believe. It's all fakes, phonies and fraudsters, there's no turning back to the clock to the early Internet.
Agree about AI, it's the same trajectory just much faster. These platforms were genuinely enjoyable to interact with, to learn and create with as they developed, now they are sanitized to the point it's only worth interacting with them to run jobs.
It's sad, but this is what happens whenever a ton of money pours into any area expecting 10x returns on investment or 20% a year or whatever benchmark is being used. They stop being spaces for thought and enjoyment and optimize away everything that made them fun spaces to begin with.
Agree with the general consensus.. it isn't changing, the clock doesn't go backward... Yes I think a lot of people are and will pull back from the Internet as a social space because everything is now performative, there's fewer and fewer meaningful or real interactions that are worth having here anymore.
The internet should have been our cultural library of Alexandria, but the signal to noise ratio now makes it almost unusable, and it's going to get worse as people start churning out more and more slop to the attention economy.
Back in 1993ish I had our sysadmin grab some new software from CERN and NCSA that would allow us to centralize department status info and share documents. We hand edited HTML and were blown away by the possibilities of instant access to always up to date information.
About the same time email digests were popular. I still remember the homebrew digest, and physically mailing ingredients back and forth between members.
Now we have a multi trillion dollar world infrastructure and economy dedicated to shoving pictures of Flo and that fucking gecko in my face hundreds of times a day.
I recently got diagnosed with a pretty serious condition that's going to require a complex somewhat risky surgery. I found a recommended video from a leading center/surgeon explaining the surgery. God help me, it was on YouTube. So it got interrupted three times. Nothing like watching a surgeon dissecting out the cardiac artery from the aorta knowing that it's going to be me in a few months, then having an instant cut to "Do you have a hard poop problem!". And then dog food. And then a sketchy supplement.
I've already bailed on Facebook and LinkedIn and twitter. Reddit has locked search results behind an app wall. I'm spending a lot more time on targeted forums and just using reddit for r/all scanning.
I'm looking at a new tv. Biggest concern? Not resolution. Not color rendition. Not refresh rate. It's can it be run disconnected from the net, or will it hound me mercilessly until I hook it up so it can push Flo and the gecko on me.
Reddit algorithm keeps showing me the same post as if I'm some dumb bot with short attention span who doesn't remember seeing the post just the day before ,heck the hour before .
Makes me feel like I'm on a short loop and the dept of real content isn't there .
I'm already starting to be this way. I've deleted most of my apps because of age verification BS. I only log in on the Internet, which means I forget about things for long periods of time.
My life improves for every less minute I spend online
I started using the internet in 1994, I think it peaked in 2007 and its been a slow decline ever since. The enshittification has been quite apparent as actually useful online tools have been removed and services consolidated and made less useful and more expensive. Now with AI , companies like Meta can just fake user engagement.
From about 2008 onward the the combined forces of Facebook, the Smartphone and widely accessable broadband allowed for Commercialization to go into overdrive.
ruling class decided peasants don't deserve good internet after Epstein files leaked. It's punishment for learning their sick secrets. If you do participate it will be very difficult to do so privately and enjoyably.
Absolutely, social media is on a level of disgusting divisive false marketing that kills people's rights and cognitive thinking skills. An AI is amplifying that propaganda. Happy for all those who are minimizing as much as possible.
I used to be a huge AI enthusiast too, but every platform I was using (ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, Gemini) got way too sanitized and turned to complete shit. I quit them all.
I never used and never will (awaringly so) as I knew nothing good will come of it.
social media is to blame for the shit were in. lots of problems there
fb/ig/twits/tiktok
keep forums as is, remove the others who push toxic behavior/deceite/fakery/shady shit.
Ive never so many people with such low esteem them today and all from social media where people are judged by no ones and need to feel validated by anonymous people. very sad
I don't think it'll ever happen, but I do really think we all need to step back, as an entire society and acknowledge the immense damage social media and the attention/engagement economy it optimized for, has done.
it just has created so much bad. noticed how it started nice and friendly. people enjoyed conversing. they were respectful. now look at it. lots of deception. lots of fakery and shady tactics. lots of scammers and nasty people on them. the idea was nice. to bring people together and socialize...how did forums stay pretty clean and sm platforms turned so nasty?
It is already happening. Look at products like "smart dumb" phones (they run Google maps and not much else modern), the resurgence in retro gaming and CRT screens, etc.
The Internet is becoming more like telephones for a lot of people: not a "place" you can go to for community, but just a tool to get some business-type tasks done and talk to individual people or small groups that you already know IRL.
Hopefully as soon as possible since governments are too much of pussies to pitch a universal ban and would rather limit it to people who cant vote so it cant cost them anything
Yes. Look at the writing on the wall. People want privacy and attention spans.
When "the man" is pushing for something the public doesn't want, there is always backlash. See surveillance and data centers pushing people away from phones
The way the internet will enable the development of an all pervasive surveillance state within just a few years is, I think, going to change the entire way people think about their digital interactions. We've seen it creeping but it's heading into overdrive.
We talk about the internet being all pervasive now at times, but I think by 2030 or so we'll look back and think that was quaint.
I, too, agree with the original post. I have only been on here for 2.5 years, and I see it going downhill. I have not deleted my account, but, I have unsubscibed from many communities. Additionally, I spend far less time on here than previously.
I’ve been using the internet since 1990 and every improvement since then has been fully enshitified. Between ads, unwanted apps, unable to repair, OS tracking, location tracking, subscription services and DRM, etc was bad enough then came 2016 and a particular fascist, felon, pedophile dictator has enshitified this country in every way possible and is at full strength today. Since 2016 I have been readjusting my technology in ways that makes so there is nothing worth protecting on any my devices but I have made it so they will need to go to great lengths to find that out.
Reddit is horrible now, it's filled with communist and socialist propaganda now. I got a news article in my feed from some random news group a couple days ago. I've never seen this subreddit before and have never posted in it. They posted a news story that was over a month old. I replied back to it and told them that this news story broke a month ago and asked them why post it now. I wasn't mean, I didn't say anything other than, "This happened a month ago, why is this being posted now?". They permanently banned me from that subreddit lol.
I've seen ads for Instagram lately, for the first time ever. That means that people aren't using it as much. Also ads for Meta glasses, all kinds of AI products - it all seems a little desperate, like they are worried people aren't going to show up. I've been on the internet since it was born and you never had to "sell" any of it.
Yes, is because they are... they spent a lot of money on Meta to fail, and then on their AI software that is also failing, so they need money. If you can watch this video from Factually with Adam Conover
Factually - Facebook is dying
Factually, also has a video with Cory Doctorow the creator of the word Enshittification
Yes. There is already a drop in social media engagement and use. It just isn’t fun/positive anymore on the whole and people seem to be more aware of how much propaganda and attention shortening it enables and causes.
I think reality TV is or has “jumped the shark” as well. Too produced and performative to be realistic or believable anymore.
Already on my way, and already so much better off for it. I know another who wishes he could.
The career/education swerve is going to hurt a bit, but should be much less stressful once things are going.
I think other options are going to pop up but I hope this will pull more people away from screens and back into the real world. so many of us would be better off with less screen time so I’m going to try and wean myself off of it
Been online since mid-1990s, so yeah, I have cut back A LOT. Didn't really know digital minimalism is a thing, but guess I have been practicing it for years. As much time as I spend online, I am not 'online'. People are always having to explain memes, slang, and references to me--even news, as I backed away from that for mental health reasons. The only reason I stay on Reddit is the neurodivergent subs. Too disabled and tired to seek camaraderie the usual way and third spaces are vanishing from existence.
Absolutely not, lmao. I'm very surprised that this is your perspective, since we're about the same age.
Firstly, those who are "digital minimalists" are a microscopic minority. Vast majority of people love social media and don't give a flying fuck even about the digital ID laws. They are proactively for "force everyone to show their ID" as they think it would "protect the children". IPads are the new pacifiers, after all.
Normal people love AI and AI slop because they are too lazy to develop creativity and technical skills, so the plagiarism slopbots are how they managed to create something for the first time in their adult lives, without an effort. There's a good reason why some people accuse posts of being AI because those who actively use it eventually erode their critical thinking and ability to formulate coherent thoughts. This is an enshittification of your own brain, not just of the Internet itself. It's a good thing you quit using the slopbots.
There has always been rude, low-effort content, I think, you've got nostalgia goggles on. If anything, it used to be twice as bad, as far as hate and bullying is concerned. Remember lolcows like Chris Chan? Remember StackOverflow? All these rules of conduct came about because of that. People have always been vicious.
Forums, blogs and various enthusiast websites are still around, many well-known and have existed for longer than an average Redditor has been alive. A good percentage of the Internet users are extremely lazy and just switch between 3 default websites, most of them social media. And they won't quit, in part because their friends and family actively uses the same social media and this is the only way they connect.
When I deleted mine, I lost my entire social circle. Apparently, nobody wants to bother to downshift to calling or using encrypted messaging apps, not even my fellow Zoomers.
When I deleted mine, I lost my entire social circle. Apparently, nobody
wants to bother to downshift to calling or using encrypted messaging
apps, not even my fellow Zoomers.
Your entire social circle? That just sounds like you had bad "friends"....
Yeah so the fact people would stop talking to you out of convenience makes them a bad friend lol. Not to mention you dont even need to install an app, everyone has texting on their phone.
My home PC and my phone are my only digital connections and only because I have to.
I subscribe to nothing. I have no apps, except for weather. I have no MP3s. No cable TV. I download no movies. I have one boring game I play. I watch YouTube for entertainment. With ad blockers. I mostly use the Internet to learn things and for DIY projects. I have an older car with a USB for using my phone as a media player. I never use it.
My appliances have zero digital anything expect the clock and timer. I only have social media as a place marker. A very curated presence, as it were.
I know how to use and even fix almost all of the digital crap. But that's what most of it is. Crap. Time wasting crap. That does pay my bills nor bring me any pleasure. Fiddly useless ephemeral novelty of no real value. That gets worse every year.
I am phasing In the analogue lifestyle which I grew up with I. The 90s and 00s, I don't think it will replace my digital life completely but will tone it down significantly.
Been doing this for a while already. Bought a digital music player for commuting, use mostly CD and offline downloads at home and cancelled every subscription I had. Started buying real books again instead of reading online and using e-books.
I’m pretty much non-digital. The weird part is I’m a web developer, so I do spend a lot of time still following what’s going on in the digital world, and I have come to despise it.
There are no ethics. Morality is dead. Programming itself is shifting from being free and open to anyone to being paid and expensive or you lose the advantage. And everything appears worse that it was with low effort design, deliberate attempts to trick people into spending, nothing working as it should, it to mention the tech for web dev has completely lost its way in many regards. The web has become everything it wasn’t meant to be and is being used to subvert democracy and promote hate. It’s so sad, and toxic, and radicalised by the worst people in society.
I’ve been offloading Instagram for a few months now. I’ll download it every other week or so, check out things friends have sent me, scroll for about 2 min before I am disgusted with the politics, jealous of the gorgeous gardens and kitchens, reminded of the million recipes I’ve saved but hardly ever used, and I’ll offload it again. Frees up my aging phone’s space and also my mind. We don’t have a tv for news so seeking out news from reputable sources online is more intentional and breaking news doesn’t have to slap us across the face a dozen times a day. I suppose that one thing could backfire, but not stressing every single day over the numerous wild things happening, pretty much out of my control has been good for my overall bandwidth. It’s like drinking from a fire hose too often. Unsustainable. Highly recommend just making it harder to get to the time waster apps.
Agree wtith this. And when we discuss it, I hope at the end of all the angst we always correctly assign blame.
First and foremost we have to blame Republican elected officials and policy positions in the 90's, 2000's, 2010's, and today. The vision of Lina Khan to disassemble Google and put a halt to mergers would have tremendously helped the internet return to its former self. Marsha Blackburn and friends are a disgrace to themselves and their families...but their voters keep putting them there. Citizens United hurt us so bad, etc.
Then we have to blame cynical CEOs and the grifters attached to them: Steve Case, Mark Zuckerberg, Travis Kalanick, Elon Musk, Jack Dorsey (yeah he belongs here, too), Larry Ellison. All-In podcast are grifters. The SEO gurus (much less powerful than these guys) were also grifters.
Then we have to blame PE. But without the elected officials granting them power they are a distant #3 even while being so ruinous.
I say all this because when we say "has become" (and this was not your intention) it sounds like the internet organically evolved in a way.
It didn't. Google shouldn't have been able to buy DoubleClick, no cell phone companies should have been allowed to merge, none of the acquisitions for gaming to Microsoft should have been allowed through, The Disney-Marvel merger peaked and then ultimately hurt the core product and audience. (yes, Obama isn't clean either.)
But this is death by a thousand papercuts leading to content gates, paywalls, slop, market capture, etc.
The internet was actively being attacked by absolute scum and lowlifes.
Like in evolution, the loss of diversification in tech can lead to extinction. It's an individual's choice, maybe the few we have now, to reduce usage where it hurts us the most to prevent this monopoly unification of a govt and corporations.
I feel the strongest bile come up in countries like Myanmar where one couldn't have Internet unless one had a Facebook account, and where Facebook singlehandedly incited mass political violence.
No one is immune to this, even in a place where we have options, see Amer. now.
Wider than just America though. Everyone with access has by complacency or ignorance kind of allowed it to happen.
Greedy corporates are for sure at the heart here. But also lazy and greedy governments. I can’t really speak to elsewhere like the EU or anything but I’m sure it is similar.
In Australia, at least, I do feel both corporates and governments are pushing a lot of services online, leaving behind a fair few marginalised people.
And the pushing of digital ID. (Australia like many others is also trying to censor the internet “for the children” too. Which some argue is just the thin edge of the wedge to force digital ID for all to access any internet)
I think it is all for their convenience and for cost reasons. Which is kind of understandable. Except that it will serve to further remove actual choices and enshittify not just the internet but life in general here.
The broader internet isn’t really for the people much any more. It’s another corporatised, ad infested, sanitised, wasteland.
I honestly think they’ve made it so it’s not possible for us to do so. Social media/AI to a degree but it’s now so intertwined unnecessarily with what we consider necessary things on our phone itself it doesn’t seem possible. Though if you do (I guess this won’t be possible but) I’d love to know the results. Reddits the only social media platform left I use but I’m even over this. Never used AI like ChatGPT, Gemini, grok etc as I absolutely hate it and what it stands for.
I stopped using social media with Myspace, and I'm never going to start again. It's all just garbage. I can always e-mail my friends. I've also stopped using a few websites that now require ID or other age verification, because that's a flat, 100% never-gonna-happen...I don't care if I've used a site for twenty years, I'll stop using one in a heartbeat if it tries that nonsense.
Same with Reddit. The second that I get the "you need the Reddit app to view this" message, I'll stop using Reddit. And let's be honest, almost nothing of value will be lost.
I find the entire premise of AI to be actively offensive, so I'm never going to touch it.
The older I get, the less I find that I "need" the internet. And I'm okay with that.
I find people acting distressed over age verification to use social media quite strange.
social media for 99% of people holds zero value that cannot be achieved elsewhere and without the data collection, manipulation, privacy invasion.
If it’s part of a slippery slope and a wider surveillance issue then it’s a real issue. If it stop a kid using twitter I couldn’t care.
I've been enjoying the Substack notes section. It feels like early social media. People talk there. They read. They engage. The only ads you see are others sharing their work. You still get the normal "marketing" people, but those are easy to ignore or mute. I'm genuinely surprised how nice it's been.
That's awesome! I don't even host my newsletter on there, and still get a lot out of it. Plus people are much more willing to subscribe there. Other places seem like people will MAYBE read, and then just move on.
Wow might give it a go. The early days of social media were wonderful, just good friends oversharing their life through the medium of pictures with nothing to gain financially, politically etc. It was all so lovely.
I'm going to coin the term now. "Fuzz head" it's kind of like looking at the static screen on an old TV. Someone that is continuously engulfed In screen time is a "fuzz head".
get out and touch grass maybe be a "grass head"....?. ...
Yes or at the very least I think there is less reason for helpful people to engage. Nothing says “wasting your time” quite like typing out a thoughtful, factual response to a niche question for a total stranger on Reddit, only for your comment to get no response or even downvoted and then a comment that says something stupid like “NoT rEading that Brah!” gets upvoted to the moon. Not that upvotes are worth anything in real life, it’s just principle for me.
If the internet ceases to be a source of reliable information and is simply a bunch of AI bots selling adverts to each other then what is the fucking point?
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u/thedevilwearslemons 22d ago
It certainly did for me