> What actually happened was that the first generation of text-loving online people were eventually outnumbered by subsequent waves of "migration" by people who don't like text and prefer images and (especially) video. It was just replaced by a better product as the online audience expanded to become more representative of real people.

I think you're right about the waves of migration, but I disagree that the product is "better".

What we've really traded are in-person friendships for anonymous online interactions, and that's definitely worse for everyone, in my opinion.

What's distinctive of the old blogging era is that the amount of online content at the time was extremely limited. You couldn't endlessly scroll through blogs. You went online, read some stuff, and then went offline. Now people never go offline. Now the amount of online content is practically unlimited, and not only that, it's the type of content that people typically consume alone. We get sucked into spending so much time alone, our only company being online strangers who we've never met and never will meet. You talk about YouTube channels with millions of subscribers, but that million-to-one ratio of viewer to YouTuber precludes most direct human interaction.

The fact that both we and the masses in general have been sucked into this situation, this depersonalization, separation from in-person interactions, is a great societal harm. And I don't think it's ironic that I'm saying this online to anonymous strangers; I just think it's sad, another symptom of the problem.

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hollerith 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

>What's distinctive of the old blogging era is that the amount of online content at the time was extremely limited. You couldn't endlessly scroll through blogs.

That is not true: when the first blog started in 1996 or so, text was being added to the web so fast that nobody could read even 1% of it. (Ditto text on the newsgroups before the rise of the web.)

	▲	lurk2 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		The issue the grandparent post is alluding to is more a change in consumer habits and technology. Even in 2005, recommendation algorithms were barely impacting the content you saw online. Facebook was chronological until around 2009 from what I remember; you could literally go online and find a friend had filled your feed by posting status updates over and over again. YouTube similarly prioritized your subscriptions over other content, and the other content was usually just whatever other people happened to be watching. You would go online once every couple of days, see what was new, and then log off. If there wasn’t anything new, finding it required a significantly greater time investment than opening up your short form video content app of choice. There was also probably less duplication; these days you can find dozens of Reddit threads relevant to almost any given query, but most of them will have the same kind of comments. With short form video content you’ll often see 3 variations of the same meme within 15 minutes. Back in the early 2000s a lot of queries would only return a couple of relevant results.

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Karrot_Kream 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Most of the people that hang out in normie social networks "touch grass" a lot more frequently than the types that hang out on text forums. Text forums tend to attract a high number of folks with social anxiety or other circumstances that keep them from socializing which puts them in bubbles more.

	▲	lapcat 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		> Most of the people that hang out in normie social networks "touch grass" a lot more frequently than the types that hang out on text forums It's missing the point to compare two types of people. You need to compare the so-called "normies" before and after. The statistics show that everyone is spending less time in-person socializing and more time online. YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, etc., have millions or billions of users, and it's not the blog-loving old-school techies who are spending endless hours on them.