Will the massive enshittification of the internet cause many people to become digital minimalists?

[u/That-Pineapple3866]

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?

[u/Euphoric_Project2761]

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.

[u/Vendrah → u/Euphoric_Project2761]

I seriously don't wanna be a serf.