Thoughts on the current state of the internet?

Orlando Smooth

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They prefer the clean, sanitized stores with the girl who is paid to smile at them when they come in where the weed is dolled out in perfect little containers that resemble pill bottles.
Even beyond that, I'd say they prefer stability. I think it's largely an age thing - the older you get the more likely you are to prefer not rocking the boat because you've seen more people fall in life and each year the stakes get higher for you. To extend the weed allegory, in the before times of legalization it was one thing to get hit with a possession charge when you're in college, entirely different when you're 40. And while your point is well made, I'll be the first to admit that in many ways I much prefer the new situation. It was always something of an adventure to score in back then, but I don't miss seeing the occasional gun at a deal, I don't miss the "dealer math" of converting Oz to g and g to $, I don't miss the unreliability, and most of all I do not miss the fear. Fear that something was going to go wrong, fear you'd be pulled over on the way home, fear that the dealer would be arrested and your phone number was in their contacts, etc. The point is, in order for something new to come along, something else must die. We often lament those days only because they're never coming back, not because they were actually better.

You see the same thing now that psychedelics are becoming normalized as therapeutic - people on some of the drug forums I look at complain about "capitalism" (even though they lack the basic economic understanding of what it even means) for ruining the good old days of it being an underground. On the one hand, I get it, because feeling like you belong to a counter culture and having community that supports you is a wonderful thing and it has been fundamentally changed. But on the other hand it's like, really? You miss the "good old days" of people being duped into taking NBOMe and getting hospitalized or worse? You think people randomly dying because trace amounts of fent has made it into their k is the way it should be? That's the shit that scares me now, because I've seen enough of it with my own eyes to think twice about the risk/reward profile of a day in the woods or a night of fun exploration with friends. I guess I'm a normie because I'd personally be content with sacrificing a good portion of the underground in exchange for the safety and reliability of commercialization.

Also, a subtle but noticeable anti-internet sentiment is rising among the gen-Z crowd. Once they overtake the millennials as the general adult population, the numbers for the tech companies might start stagnating due to this.
I hate to break it to you, but until Millennials start dying of old age in like 50 years Gen Z will always be smaller by several million. Also, not for nothing, but if there really is an anti-internet sentiment amongst Gen Z I'd argue that it's more than offset by the sheer number and severity of internet addicted individuals in that generation. I like the sentiment, but in my opinion the best we can hope for is the youngest of Gen Z to lead an anti-internet charge and that really it'll be the next generation (alpha or whatever) to be truly anti.
 
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AMC_Squared

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Everything we were taught as kids about not showing people your true identity on the internet or keeping yourself anonymous as well as separating the internet from reality kinda fell apart some time in the 2010s. Nowadays, it kinda feels like you have to put as many things possible about yourself on the internet as well as post a lot and match that profile in real life if you want to have a career that surrounds any social networking
 
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PizzaW0lf

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Everything we were taught as kids about not showing people your true identity on the internet or keeping yourself anonymous as well as separating the internet from reality kinda fell apart some time in the 2010s. Nowadays, it kinda feels like you have to put as many things possible about yourself on the internet as well as post a lot and match that profile in real life if you want to have a career that surrounds any social networking
This is definitely the strangest cultural shift I have ever seen in my life, people simply not caring anymore about internet privacy. Before I was and still am very scared to use my real name because of how easy it is to track someone down from just a few notes of information. That warning was implanted in my brain at the very beginning of the social media age.
 
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manpaint

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This is definitely the strangest cultural shift I have ever seen in my life, people simply not caring anymore about internet privacy. Before I was and still am very scared to use my real name because of how easy it is to track someone down from just a few notes of information. That warning was implanted in my brain at the very beginning of the social media age.
Same. What baffle me the most is people posting pictures of their houses on Facebook. It's almost people want to be doxxed...

Meanwhile, I was extremly careful just posting a picture of my cat.
 

EzzyCrafts

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This is definitely the strangest cultural shift I have ever seen in my life, people simply not caring anymore about internet privacy. Before I was and still am very scared to use my real name because of how easy it is to track someone down from just a few notes of information. That warning was implanted in my brain at the very beginning of the social media age.
You should blame social media and COVID for introducing absolute normies who never touched a computer in their entire life to the internet and intoxicating it to a heightened extent.

Which from then onward made the idea of internet safety fade away into ashes while companies reinforce this behavior by forcing phone numbers, IDs, connecting all your accounts, and other forms of bs.

I find it hilarious, since people are so insecure with their personal information, anybody including me can be a menace and drive people off the web forcefully.


This cannot be combatted, however if you find the right friends you might be able to start your own little community which would in activity resemble a more legacy internet, or alternatively you could make everything around you a bit more bearable by educating the normie.
 
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punishedgnome

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Everything we were taught as kids about not showing people your true identity on the internet or keeping yourself anonymous as well as separating the internet from reality kinda fell apart some time in the 2010s. Nowadays, it kinda feels like you have to put as many things possible about yourself on the internet as well as post a lot and match that profile in real life if you want to have a career that surrounds any social networking
The thing that gets me is it was always understood that anyone can say anything on the Internet with few consequences, so everything should be taken with a grain of salt. Now there are news articles that cite Twitter posts by randos as sources and every post is taken as gospel if it says the things people want it to say. I'm quite sure a good half of everything posted on forums/twitter/>redditcostanzayeahrightsmirk/facebook/whatever is entirely fabricated and another good 25% is exaggerated and posts that are 100% true and not exaggerated are in the minority. If you even look at someone's post history on >redditcostanzayeahrightsmirk now and point out that their story is not consistent with their post history you get accused of doxxing. lol
 
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I was thinking the other night about the reason why I play TF2 and no other FPS game. I remember before CSGO came out, I would spend tons of time in CSS, just chilling out on deathmatch or cs_crackhouse or something of that nature, playing with weird plugins, listening to people ramble in voice chat. TF2, I similarly only play the more relaxing servers - 24/7 Harvest, trade_plaza, mario_kart, etc. There's a very enjoyable chaos to these environments. There's no pressure and people feel free to let loose on whatever's on their mind. Last night I spent an hour listening to these two men ramble about childhood fights. You don't get that sort of thing in CSGO. CSGO's a nightmare by comparison. Ranked, anonymous matchmaking, with high stakes for victory or defeat, even in casual mode, which is seen as a sort of "practice mode" for the ranked. The gameplay isn't fun, it's predictable, stale, and full of pissed off manchildren focused on hyperoptimizing towards victory.

I think about this as a metaphor of sorts for the internet in this day. TF2 is a vestige of the old way of doing things. Small servers with their own rules, regulars, there's an intimacy and a chaos there. Everything feels like it takes place in a discreet little sandbox we have a real ownership over. Every other PvP game is an algorithmically driven sweatfest meant to funnel players into monetization &/or e-sports. It's really hard to make money off people online as a server owner. It keeps getting tried and no one can do it consistently. Even the largest social media platforms survive off constant infusions of liquidity, never even breaking even. If you want to own servers as a business, you need to try really hard, and you need to accelerate towards a certain kind of platform - the type of shift exemplified by the comparison between CSGO & TF2.

People will often wonder why CSGO is so "toxic" - newsflash idiot, it's because of its very architecture! CSGO is set up to maximize misery, it reminds me of that Georges Perec novel "W, or the Memory of Childhood".

At the same time, this is probably inevitable. Most of these changes are just because the internet merges more with real life. And with that, comes real life incentives - money, power, prestige. You can take pretty much everything and run it on the internet without much change in things. There's a reason why in the banking sector, crypto never took off as a replacement for fiat, even if it makes more sense in a vacuum. The internet isn't just for nerds anymore. It's as ubiquitous as the post office, just another communication technology that everyone uses. There'll always be something worth doing there - just like if you were a teenager in buttfuck idaho before the internet, you'd hitchhike to California, it's just a matter of finding the little corners of individuality people can carve out. The time when the internet was exclusively that kind of place is over. It's just normal now.
 
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PizzaW0lf

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I think about this as a metaphor of sorts for the internet in this day. TF2 is a vestige of the old way of doing things. Small servers with their own rules, regulars, there's an intimacy and a chaos there. Everything feels like it takes place in a discreet little sandbox we have a real ownership over. Every other PvP game is an algorithmically driven sweatfest meant to funnel players into monetization &/or e-sports. It's really hard to make money off people online as a server owner. It keeps getting tried and no one can do it consistently. Even the largest social media platforms survive off constant infusions of liquidity, never even breaking even. If you want to own servers as a business, you need to try really hard, and you need to accelerate towards a certain kind of platform - the type of shift exemplified by the comparison between CSGO & TF2.
The thing that really baffles me about private servers is, do companies lose anything by allowing them to exist? Seriously with a private server, it's all up to the server host and not on some server in bumcrust California. By that logic, companies don't need to spend money on maintaining servers since the private host is doing the work.

Minecraft is the best-selling game ever and I can easily host a server with any version. What excuse do these companies have? :lainDissatisfied:
 
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Jade

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The thing that really baffles me about private servers is, do companies lose anything by allowing them to exist? Seriously with a private server, it's all up to the server host and not on some server in bumcrust California. By that logic, companies don't need to spend money on maintaining servers since the private host is doing the work.

Minecraft is the best-selling game ever and I can easily host a server with any version. What excuse do these companies have? :lainDissatisfied:
lots of suits like the idea of having complete control over the playerbase, because it's a lot harder to force microtransactions and lootboxes in peoples faces if the majority of the playerbase is on private servers
 
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PizzaW0lf

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lots of suits like the idea of having complete control over the playerbase, because it's a lot harder to force microtransactions and lootboxes in peoples faces if the majority of the playerbase is on private servers
The funny part is how even that's not working out for them...
haloin.JPG


(Unless it's valve....)
 
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consonant

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At the same time, this is probably inevitable. Most of these changes are just because the internet merges more with real life. And with that, comes real life incentives - money, power, prestige. You can take pretty much everything and run it on the internet without much change in things. There's a reason why in the banking sector, crypto never took off as a replacement for fiat, even if it makes more sense in a vacuum. The internet isn't just for nerds anymore. It's as ubiquitous as the post office, just another communication technology that everyone uses. There'll always be something worth doing there - just like if you were a teenager in buttfuck idaho before the internet, you'd hitchhike to California, it's just a matter of finding the little corners of individuality people can carve out. The time when the internet was exclusively that kind of place is over. It's just normal now.
I like the part about how the internet is just normal now and how you need to carve out your own corners of individuality. Before the internet was the place to go itself but now you need to find those special places, like if your mall got super popular you can't just hang with your friends anywhere in the mall you've gotta go near that 1 weird store. Which always happens when something becomes popular.
 
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Jade

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youd be surprised to know majority of people just scroll endlessly and watch shit that theyll forget in 2 minutes. meanwhile frying their brains.
so yeah. not cool
I remember my sister used to tell me she literally could not live without endlessly scrolling through tiktok every day. Eventually she curbed the addiction, but she still gets antsy and annoyed very quickly when she has to watch a video that's more than 1-2 minutes long
 
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Big Bill Hell's

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I remember my sister used to tell me she literally could not live without endlessly scrolling through tiktok every day. Eventually she curbed the addiction, but she still gets antsy and annoyed very quickly when she has to watch a video that's more than 1-2 minutes long
The scariest part of that is there are millions of people now just like that. They don't consume any long form content of substance. Just mindless Tik Tok dances and doom scrolling. I think the early internet encouraged free thinking and skepticism. Now it just encourages being mindless.
 
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Jade

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The scariest part of that is there are millions of people now just like that. They don't consume any long form content of substance. Just mindless Tik Tok dances and doom scrolling. I think the early internet encouraged free thinking and skepticism. Now it just encourages being mindless.
Worth nothing there is a very notable audience for long-form content, look at all those video essays that go on for hours and hours. I guess they target a slightly different audience but I'm not sure it's much better than short-form tiktoks.
 
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Big Bill Hell's

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Worth nothing there is a very notable audience for long-form content, look at all those video essays that go on for hours and hours. I guess they target a slightly different audience but I'm not sure it's much better than short-form tiktoks.
That's true. Some of those video essays are just talking in circles.
 
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You should blame social media and COVID for introducing absolute normies who never touched a computer in their entire life to the internet and intoxicating it to a heightened extent.

Which from then onward made the idea of internet safety fade away into ashes while companies reinforce this behavior by forcing phone numbers, IDs, connecting all your accounts, and other forms of bs.

I find it hilarious, since people are so insecure with their personal information, anybody including me can be a menace and drive people off the web forcefully.


This cannot be combatted, however if you find the right friends you might be able to start your own little community which would in activity resemble a more legacy internet, or alternatively you could make everything around you a bit more bearable by educating the normie.
idk the source is wrong, but how you can know... rather to worry than sorry
1673640600535.png
 
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