Back in the day, the internet was an escape from the TV.
It allowed access to information, alternative views (real ones not insane made up ones), no ads, and an escape from having to hear a dominant narrative.
Now the internet has become the new TV. A lot of younger people I see are shunning it.
There was never any doubt that not enough people would take TimeCube guy seriously enough to tip major U.S. elections. That is EMPHATICALLY NOT THE CASE for the racists, fascists, pedophiles, and other scum that formed the core of the 4chan edgelord set.
TimeCube guy’s shtick was continuously improved upon and is now a TT meme about manipulating time by a “Global Entrepreneur & Bestselling Author
Ranked #1 Speaker in the World.”
So really we are all fools for not taking it seriously enough to self-help promote this into a side hustle.
That idea is kind of the problem with social media now. People found a way to justify its importance to pretend it's worth investing their emotions in. But just imagine how, say, satanic rituals looked to religious people back when that was a thing to worry about, or really anything where lots of other people disagree with your cultural beliefs. You can always imagine how it might be a disaster if you don't start a culture war to kill those "bad" beliefs. It happened again with covid where people turned on each other for their beliefs because other people disagreeing with you might have some bad consequence. Never mind that almost nobody critically evaluates their own beliefs and just assumes they're on the moral high ground because that's where they happened to land in life. People even found a way to justify fighting flat-earthers because anybody who believes such nonsense must be the same type of people who believe other non-mainstream things and those other things could be dangerous to society. At the end of the day though, it's just basic human bigotry which always has some sort of justification.
You even mentioned pedophiles as scum without recognizing that pedophilia is a condition that people have beyond their control and is separate from child abuse which is an activity people do and is within their control. Back in the day, that was also how people justified homophobia. There was a famous case in my country of a kindergarten teacher who was wrongly convicted and went to prison for something like 20 years because of essentially the popular belief that gay + satanic = child molester. My father was that type of person. He thought gays were generally bad people - they obviously weren't following Christian teachings so they must have no morals and would be just the sort of people who might want to infect others with AIDS. Today, if you voted for Trump you must be just the sort of person who wants to lynch black people because you're obviously generally bad and have no moral compass.
There is a notable vibe shift from when I showed a date my plex setup 5 years ago to now. Awhile back it was ick-inducing, now it's cool again to own your data / not pay for crap.
Ideally it will look from the outside like people are abandoning the internet when really what they're abandoning is the web (that's the sick part anyhow) and moving the rest of their digital lives into a vpn-mediated sub-internet made of the participation of people that each user knows via face-to-face interactions.
You're right. Plex is rolling out some plex-pass crap and jumping their pricing from 120 to 250usd for a lifetime pass. Hard pass for me, installed Jellyfin last night.
> Now the internet has become the new TV. A lot of younger people I see are shunning it.
Not really. I see the stark difference when i visit my parents (in their 60ies).
TV is always on and pretty much always repeating the same things. Little variability, really poor content. It's basically serving the same old thing to the same old people.
The internet instead has much more variability. There's so much plurality of opinions they often clash against each other.
> A lot of younger people I see are shunning it.
What I see is younger people starting to shun social media, which is something that makes my heart smile as well. It seems we're finally shaking off this performative collective craze.
Social media was definitely a mistake that made everything worse. I hope it dies soon.
When I was a young teenager in the early-mid 00s, I surfed to an article explaining how the moon landing was faked, with photographic evidence and plausible logic (like the "last of dust on the lander"), blah etc.
There was a brief moment when I thought what I was reading was real, because it was the first time I came across something fabricated communicated as fact.
You should respect those people for actually looking into it. I do believe the moon landing is real but it’s based almost on blind faith. Same thing for almost everything I believe about the world. Stay open minded and don’t criticize people who put effort into things you’ve never bothered to research. You’ll be surprised how often you don’t know much about anything.
That's true, but conspiracy theorists are not typically out on some philanthropic mission. It's a hobby -- they are doing it because conspiracy theories are fun. That's why they aren't actually interested in things where there is real, tangible evidence. They want to find hidden clues and feel like they are in the know.
Of course, there is a very fine line between that and actually realizing something that the world doesn't see, but that's part of what makes it fun.
It was definitely there, but the scale of it was different back then and it was decidedly less mean-spirited by the early 2010s. I can remember when I first started using YouTube, I had someone from my city threaten to kill my entire family. A few years later when the 2012 Mayan Calendar Apocalypse was trending, another guy tried to justify his beliefs that it was real by claiming to have “top contacts” in a federal intelligence agency.
You would run into people like that maybe once every few months. These days you are basically guaranteed to run across multiple people like that every time you log on.
YouTube figured it out with comments around 2013 or 2014, but it got a lot worse about recommending videos from low-viewership channels in the last few years, which exposes you to a lot of wackos.
Being recommended low viewership channels is a positive.
Having everything be polished, scripted and ad friendly is tremendously boring. My complaint over the last few years with YouTube was that I missed the wackos. They were the thing that made the web interesting to begin with.
I used to feel the same way, but something changed in the last few years to make these videos less appealing to me; they are usually low-viewership simply because they aren’t very good. For certain subjects like religion and philosophy, the novelty-seeking factor is completely gone for me - the best channels are the biggest ones, and everything else is guaranteed to be a grift, an inaudibly-recorded lecture, or an embryonic cult.
I do still occasionally get some good videos from smaller channels, but smallness is a lot more relative these days. A lot of channels that I have started following in the last few years begin to see growth within less than a year. YouTube has gotten really good at identifying quality content and amplifying it, with the end result being that the 300
view videos in your feed are just market testing.
One thing you can do if you’re into the weirder side of YouTube is to append “before:2012” to the end of your searches; I’ve found some cool stuff doing that.
It allowed access to information, alternative views (real ones not insane made up ones), no ads, and an escape from having to hear a dominant narrative.
Now the internet has become the new TV. A lot of younger people I see are shunning it.
That makes my old hacker heart smile.