Many aspects of the internet have improved. For all its issues YouTube is better now than it was ten years ago... at least, given the way I use it and with the curation I apply. There are plenty of other things that have improved too.

However, what used to be a diversity of communities has been horrifically, horrifically crushed into a vastly less diverse set and it's not just nostalgia saying so. Everyone has been herded into centralized systems all of which are so large that they have significantly converged into the same thing, whether you're on Reddit or Facebook or X, despite the superficial differences and the various reactions people may have to various elements of that list.

My local BBS, run by high school students for the local high school students, had picnics. It's been a long time since I was a member of a community that could do something like that routinely. And to the extent you want to say well jerf that's obviously because..., the things that come after "because" are the point I'm making here. I'm not mystified by the effect. Nor is it the only thing that has changed for the worse, it's just a nice little snapshot that is easy to ponder.

Everything on the internet is structured to constantly make things bigger and bigger. But there's a time and place for not bigger.

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baron3dl 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

i agree with you entirely, so i wasn't going to "that's obviously because" you, anyway. my own reflection is that when I first got on the internet the intersection of people I knew on the Internet and IRL was an empty set, then for about 10-15 years it was nearly a perfect union, and now it's pretty close to disjoint again.

i don't think LLMs are going to end human-to-human interaction on the Internet, it'll look different, but as long as >1 human values community with only humans, it will find a way.

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cowlevel 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

YouTube used to be things people made for fun, now it's all content made for clicks and monetisation. It's just cable TV but non-linear (which in the TV business means you can choose what to watch next, not have a fixed selection of live channels).

	▲	jerf 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		My YouTube isn't that. But it has taken a heavy hand with the "Don't Show Channel Again" and the hand is getting heavier over time. YouTube seems to have some idea that I am uninterested in the dozens of AI slop TTS + AI slop animation channels that are popping up every day but it keeps probing me, just in case maybe I've changed my mind. It also takes a certain amount of discipline. While it's not like my feed is nothing but high-brow university channels, you do want to make sure you don't leave any cute animal videos or reaction videos accidentally clicked on or anything else you don't want to see hundreds more videos of in your watch history. If you do decide to watch some junk you have to remove the junk from your watch history. I have no illusions that removing things from my watch history has anything to do with "privacy" but it definitely does impact The Algorithm, and I've seen little evidence that The Algorithm is using those videos anyhow... it really does seem to 100% remove them from consideration.