The centralization of the internet is what ruined it
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nagolbud
Chudarisee
Old people didn't create hot tub streams on twitch. They created Linux an other cool shit. You young kids did more to f the internet than anyone.
S
Spas
Guest
People flock to the infrastructure, they flock to where everyone else is. As we say in Serbia "little mujo goes where all the turks go". People flock to big platforms because that's where everyone else is, the bigger they get the more people they attract. The current stage of the internet isn't anyone's fault, it's just how it was bound to progress. That's not to say it's progress didn't lead to shit
nagolbud's Number 1 Fan
Nagolbud is a Censorship loving Faggot
@NekoRightsActivist and tranny thoughts on the subject?
dd/mm/yyyy
(: Never Lose Your Israel :)
To add on, its also a matter of optics. They (le redditors) don't push this shitty propaganda because everyone thinks this way is acceptable (the only reason they are still afloat is because some of these organizations, who do similar things but aren't necessarily a part of reddit, get funded by taxpayer dollars rather than voluntary transaction). They do this to make you think everyone else thinks this way.
tl;dr, its the most brimstonian demoralization coal to ever be shat out of negroid assholes.
1844 or something
White Identifying (Hv/Hvm)
I wish that old tv show about colonizing the past and fighting dinosaurs didn't turn out so gay. It could have been a cool survival/nature show and instead it's GI Joe with dinos (also pretty cool tbf)
1844 or something
White Identifying (Hv/Hvm)
And it's not just moderators deleting shit. It's thousands of bots that have been shilling a narrative and upvoting "approved ideology" posts en-masse. Whether it was jannies or users running the bots, it gave every NPC the impression that "upvoted take flawless, downvoted take retarded"
The bots haven't been necessary for years now, because the living users have been trained to do the exact same job
An Hero
Lord of the edge
I am going to make a spergpost tomorrow about how you are confusing 2 problems (which compound eachother but are caused by the opposite type of internet user) for 1 problem which you can blame everything on, but it's extremely late right now.
Chairman
Other only linux user on the blog
@' me in the post, I want to read it.
Hans Shekelstein
Infantry Iron
Without internet centralization almost none of us would be here
An Hero
Lord of the edge
I ended up exceeding the maximum character limit, this is part 1 and part 2 will be posted right after this
To understand why the centralization/normification of the internet is not the only reason why it seems so much worse right now, we need to first understand 2 very different archetypes of internet users, which I will refer to as "relatives" and "quirkies" in this post to not use previously existing terms that don't entirely accurately describe them. Also, many internet users have traits of both or neither category, since if they didn't there would be practically no reason for someone to talk about the 2 problems associated with these 2 archetypes
First, these are some characteristics of "relatives"
- Never use adblockers or reader mode
- Generally inept with technology, even including something as simple as web browsers
- When posting an article on another site, they might actually click the "share" widgets at the bottom of it rather than copying the link
- Spend most of their online time on branded, massive, and public sites such as twitter (using the app, not the website), Facebook, mobile reddit (almost only browsing the front page or clicking on links that already exist, rarely searching), spotify, yahoo news (even though yahoo news just steals articles from other sources and condenses them into a boomer-friendly format), and tiktok.
- In extreme cases, some of them might act as if Facebook is the entire internet
- Often use their real name and have no concern for privacy, and get very suspicious if you say you have "no social media"
- Almost unable to understand the concept of talking about different things online than you talk about in person
- This applies in reverse too, when interacting with "quirkies" or users who do not fall into either category relatives will act very suspicious if they ask "so, what do you do online?" and do not get an answer.
- Almost unable to understand the concept of talking about different things online than you talk about in person
- Usually boomers, gen x, or millennials
- Examples of communities mainly composed of relatives include LinkedIn, Facebook, r/aww, instagram, and the comment section of most news articles
- Most third-worlders are closer to the category of relatives than quirkies, despite what certain slopjaks imply.
- Care a lot about privacy, but still post information that can easily be used against them
- In some cases, they dislike others screenshotting or archiving their posts without permission, and consider this harassment by itself even if nobody comments on the original post, and have rules for how anyone should be allowed to interact with them ( DNI)
- Unlike relatives, they really like and often know a lot about "Weird/Obscure Thing"s
- This often brings them into direct conflict with users like us (schloggers are much closer to quirkies than relatives, aside from having opposite opinions on e-politics)
- Usually millennials, zoomers, or gen alpha
- More likely to be neurodivergent, or at least effectively have self-imposed ADHD as a result of the conditions that have surrounded them for their entire life.
- Much more interested in fandom communities, and often create fanworks of their own
- Despite being very involved in an artform that only exists by building onto previous works, quirkies often fanatically hate anything to do with AI, claiming that it steals their work/livelihood.
- Communities mainly populated by quirkies include r/196, Tumblr, and fandom.com
Now that I've explained these 2 archetypes, I will explain how they create 2 very different problems for people who are very deeply online (this means something different from terminally online since it refers to the obscurity of content viewed rather than the duration of viewing content; "doomscrollers" are terminally online but not deeply online, someone who only posts once a week on an obscure forum and then closes the internet would hypothetically be deeply online but not terminally online, although almost everyone who is deeply online is also terminally online).
Obviously, relatives have allowed the mainstream internet to be filled with celebrity gossip, buzzfeed-tier reposting of content that wasn't good the first time, and smalltalk that isn't even necessary in real life, much less on the internet. In addition, most discussion is on extremely large, general-purpose but low-quality sites, such as twitter or facebook, and important people will often make announcements this way (thoughbeit Elon Musk buying X greatly reduced the trend of people with both online and IRL importance making public statements via twitter, it's still seen as the default site to use for it by many people). However, schloggers are much likely to be part of, or at least browse, more obscure communities. These communities often start out on a search-indexable site, such as a forum, wiki, or a subreddit. Inevitably, quirkies in the community will try to make the site more "safe" (invite-only), "moderated" (installing jannies to make sure that left-wing politics is always considered on-topic), and "accepting" (inviting new quirkies who like the topic just because their friends recommended it, and then kicking out users who refuse to conform to the standards of the new users). A great pre-internet example of this is tabletop gaming as well as other mostly-male hobbies, as seen in the following image, but this image is relatively inaccurate now since troons now take the role that women previously took in the image, since unlike troons, women are not exclusively degrading to a community, but most of the women who do not degrade a community are not identifiable as women due to understanding how to act online rather than attempting to use IRL social skills.
Back to the topic of discord and why it presents a completely different problem from the centralization of the internet, I would like to include quotes from this archived /v/ thread as an example of the cliqueiness of discord and why it is different from the mass internet.
/v/ - Video Games » Thread #671681023
arch.b4k.co
(in response to someone asking why using discord as a pseudo-wiki is bad without buzzwords)
An Hero
Lord of the edge
In addition, this actual blogpost, if you ignore the relatively irrelevant first 2 paragraphs, is a good example of how discord users intentionally make information unavailable through their need for rapid, low-time preference discussion, and how discord's inability to be archived normally will lead to the permanent loss of information much like how ImageShack and TinyPic unexpectedly closing down destroyed the visual history of early forums.
Some have tried to make scrapers for public discord servers, yet discord users, due to being quirkies, consider this a violation of privacy even though the messages were all sent in public/easily accessible servers, and discord is already unencrypted for moderation purposes.
www.gamesindustry.biz
This is not exclusive to discord, the fediverse, another hub of quirkies, is possibly even more extreme when it comes to anti-centralized but also anti-search and pro-clique policies, given that practically each time you visit a fediverse thread, you'll see yet another Troon with a domain name you've never seen before (many of them create their own instances for vanity as well as be able to more accurately control what content they can automatically avoid). The first account linked in the following examples of extreme anti-search fanaticism actually has an instance like this.
mstdn.social
urusai.social
This reddit thread below has a reply which exemplifies the attitude of the quirkies towards others being able to view what they publicly posted
![[angry]](/data/assets/smilies/angryyyyy.png "Angry [angry]")
Back to the topic of discord, to use the example of game mods, a narcissistic mod developer wants to avoid the scenario of people visiting their site just to download the mod/read the documentation and then immediately leave and never return until they need to download an updated version or encounter a new bug. In comparison to a wiki where you can find what you want just from a search engine, a discord server has many steps before you find what you want, meaning that users will spend a lot more time in the community, and may need to send several messages before getting what they want. You might wonder why members of the community approve this, but quirkies crave attention as well as feeling like they are part of a community that they contribute to, and it's much easier to "contribute" to a discord server where positively reacting to the local celebrity's off-topic messages or praising people for being brave enough to talk about their IRL life is considered contribution, than to contribute to a wiki for an obscure game mod where the only thing you can contribute is relevant factual information which hasn't been added yet, which there is a finite and small amount of.
To summarize my blogpost, the invention of smartphones may have encouraged relatives to take over the more public and large-scale parts of the internet by filling your screen with content that is irrelevant and you aren't looking for. The widespread adoption of discord and similar invite-only or hard to search platforms for more obscure topics has allowed quirkies to take an iron grip around that Weird/Obscure Thing you may have once been, or still are, a sincere fan of, and make it exceedingly difficult for you to quickly find what you want. If a mod gets angry, it's much more easy for information exclusively stored on an unarchivable and hard to search source to be permanently lost, especially if the project is then abandoned (then it becomes lost media thoughbeit).
Discord, or the Death of Lore
I chose the life, it didn’t choose me. I could have walked away from it a long time ago, and I’ve certainly shifted my focus over the years. But I still hold the heft and halter, the on…
ascii.textfiles.com
Discord bans accounts that sold messages from up to 620m users
Discord has banned an unknown number of accounts that were using bots to scrape messages from up to 620 million users a…
www.gamesindustry.biz
Mastodon 🐘
mstdn.social
neatchee (@neatchee@urusai.social)
#MastoAdmin be advised that contentnation [dot] net includes a fediverse scraper; we recommend defederating immediately to protect your users' content and privacy EDIT: Changed "is a scraper" to "includes a scraper" since the site itself claims to do much, much more
urusai.social
Someone even made a counter to shame people who make search engines for the fediverse
Back to the topic of discord, to use the example of game mods, a narcissistic mod developer wants to avoid the scenario of people visiting their site just to download the mod/read the documentation and then immediately leave and never return until they need to download an updated version or encounter a new bug. In comparison to a wiki where you can find what you want just from a search engine, a discord server has many steps before you find what you want, meaning that users will spend a lot more time in the community, and may need to send several messages before getting what they want. You might wonder why members of the community approve this, but quirkies crave attention as well as feeling like they are part of a community that they contribute to, and it's much easier to "contribute" to a discord server where positively reacting to the local celebrity's off-topic messages or praising people for being brave enough to talk about their IRL life is considered contribution, than to contribute to a wiki for an obscure game mod where the only thing you can contribute is relevant factual information which hasn't been added yet, which there is a finite and small amount of.
To summarize my blogpost, the invention of smartphones may have encouraged relatives to take over the more public and large-scale parts of the internet by filling your screen with content that is irrelevant and you aren't looking for. The widespread adoption of discord and similar invite-only or hard to search platforms for more obscure topics has allowed quirkies to take an iron grip around that Weird/Obscure Thing you may have once been, or still are, a sincere fan of, and make it exceedingly difficult for you to quickly find what you want. If a mod gets angry, it's much more easy for information exclusively stored on an unarchivable and hard to search source to be permanently lost, especially if the project is then abandoned (then it becomes lost media thoughbeit).
