Idk if this is the right community for this conversation, but it’s been on my mind and I want to share it with someone.

In the 00’s every new thing we heard about the internet was exciting. There were new protocols, new ways to communicate, new ways to share files, new ways to find each other. Every time we heard anything new about the internet, it was always progress.

That lasted into the early teens and then things started changing. Things started stagnating. Now we’re well into the phase where every new piece of news we hear is negative. New legislations, new privacy intrusions, new restrictions, new technologies to lock content away and keep us from sharing, or seeing the content we were looking for. New ways to force ads.

At one point the Internet was my most favorite thing in the world. Now I don’t know if I even like it anymore. I certainly don’t look forward to hearing news about it. It’s sad, man. We’ve lost a lot. The mega corps took the internet from us, changed it from a million small sites that people created because they had big ideas, or were passionate about small ones, and turned it into a few enormous sites with no new ideas, no passion, just an insatiable desire for money.

We’re at the end of an era, and unlike the last 20 years of progress, I don’t think most of us will like what the next era brings.

  • @some_guy
    10•10 months ago

    I remember getting really angry at Facebook for all their shit about eight years ago. It used to be that when I met someone and they learned my profession, they said it was “cool.” I was angry that FB would turn the public against us. Fuck them. They started this downward trend.

    • @some_guy
      20•10 months ago

      Replying to myself:

      Also, tech became a place to make money rather than a passion, like law and medicine. It’s full of people who don’t love it, but wanted to get rich. It took a friend’s observations for me to figure that out.

      • SokathHisEyesOpen
        OPEnglish
        14•10 months ago

        It’s full of people who don’t love it, but wanted to get rich

        This causes me unending frustration using the web now. There are so many terrible practices on so many websites, just because they think it’ll make them a little extra money. I used to run a bunch of blogs as my primary means of income, and I always refused to do things that I found annoying. These days the companies seem to seek out whatever is annoying and use that strategy without fail.