doktorb
Internet Refugee
- Joined
- Oct 11, 2019
- Messages
- 14
- Reaction score
- 30
- Awards
- 5
The point you make about people making content for the explicit goal of earning money is something that I've been agonising about a lot recently. I too, being elderly, came up during a time when the internet was defined by people making and sharing things for the joy of doing so as a way of connecting with others without strings attached. I feel like the big problem is that this old culture was still connected to a reality where nothing was monetised at a platform level and, if you wanted to host things to share, you had to pay for the privilege. Nowadays, we're all so accustomed to getting everything hosted for free so that our content can feed into a platform's monetisation strategy by generating engagement that we have been conned into believing we should be paid for with the crumbs that fall off the table. It's like some sort of collective amnesia where we've lost perspective of what has value. There's this weird paradoxical trap where internet culture exists at the scale that it does because we can all afford to pump out unprecedented volumes of content but in becoming reliant on doing so we've sold the future of internet culture out to whatever suits a platforms profitability. I guess what I would like to say (and see) is an internet that is not just smaller and more personally intimate but also slower where we all re-learn how appreciate the value of being able to make and share things without immediately moving onto the next thing.I think the most important and hardest to accomplish step would be to decentralize the internet. If we could split up sites like Twitter, Facebook, >reddit, etc. into smaller communities I think we would see a lot more meaningful interactions. I like posting on this site because there's a relatively small amount of people and I like getting to know you all.
Another issue, in my opinion, is that people seem to make content with the goal of making money rather than just doing it for fun. I really miss the internet from when I was younger and everyone seemed to be creating and sharing things just because they wanted to.
I guess I don't really have any ideas to accomplish this stuff, it's hard to compete with these giant corporations that have algorithms designed to keep you glued to their sites.
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