Nodding along here.
A comment there:
I bet phil thinks it’s great. 
Another comment there:
I guess it’s good to know that other people out there see it just as well.
It wasn’t that long ago that tons of discussion sites weren’t sanitized from search results and the few promoted ones weren’t all part of the same ad networks and playing by the same rules.
And no, the irony isn’t lost on me that I’m linking to youtube content.
Damn, I hope he’s got a load of cheese to go along with that whine. 
Oh boo hoo, things ain’t what they used to be.
The one thing I kept thinking about was how it it all sounded a lot like what happened in the newspaper industry.
Lot’s of different, small publishers, all out there doing their own thing. Things evolve, survival of the fittest sets in and, some win, most fail.
Then, the winners start consolidating everything, and because there’s so much money at stake, they play it safe and keep cranking out the same old crap that always worked in the past.
That’s when things get stale and boring, just like the internet.
Then, the next “big thing” comes along.
Lather, rinse, repeat.
There are still some gems around. Check out this car leasing company in the UK, as featured on Dragon’s Den:
(check the source code of the homepage too!)
DistroTube is on Odysee and others so I have no idea why everybody doesn’t promote alternatives at every given point. The network effect is real!!
The early internet was mostly nerds and hobbyists, interacting with other nerds and hobbyists.
As the general population got on the net, the businesses that cater to them followed. But the nerds and hobbyists didn’t just disappear.
If you don’t care about beating the competition, then it doesn’t matter.
It doesn’t make the damndest bit of difference to me who’s winning the social media wars when I’m hanging out at audio science review.
The smaller independent sites and forums are pushing way down the average search result compared to hits the spiders get from Reddit and a couple of dozen select sites. Something was posted here (I think) a while back that showed search engine results where it said there were 13m results or whatever, but if you tried to go beyond a few pages it said that results beyond that were too similar to previous ones and so weren’t shown.
It’s like having a tucked away pub that nobody can find any more because recent city developments mean that independent pubs aren’t allowed on maps, in the phone book or to even have street signage. As the bought-off city manager would say, “the ‘nerds and hobbyist’ pubs didn’t just disappear”.
It’s definitely a real issue.
I think you need to make a distinction between the internet and social media. They’re two different animals.
The internet itself is a great place to visit, but you don’t want to live there.
It’s not how it used to be, by far. And it wasn’t that long ago since the internet was much better. As Snookoda pointed out, tons of websites are being essentially hidden away in favor of a much smaller set of sites. The whole world of the internet is captive under a big tech bubble.
I hope I didn’t come off too dismissive in my initial response. I’m not disagreeing that things are different now, but I guess it comes down to expectations.
I thought people from all over the world being able to communicate with each other would make things better. I was wrong.
The internet itself is still great. There are a number of things about the internet that have made my life much easier. Banking is one of them. I can’t remember the last time I wrote a check.
Learning music is another one. The resources available today to learn how to do pretty much anything you wanted to do in music is available at your fingertips. Compare that to what it was like trying to learn an instrument, or even a song, before the internet.
Those sites you mention are still out there, but the fact you can’t use a free product that someone else developed to find them isn’t the internet’s fault.
In the end, for those looking to the internet to provide truth, justice, and the answers to all of life’s questions, it ain’t gonna happen. But if you use it as a tool, as it was intended, there’s still a lot of good stuff out there.
Put your devices down and go out and talk to people. They can still blow smoke up your ass face to face, but not as easily as they can through a screen.
I would actually argue that it’s worse in a lot of ways. I have known too many younger people trying to use some dumb tech thing to learn to play, or some free resource that is half-cooked at best. It’s usually a phone app and a youtube channel or 3. Thinking back to when I picked up guitar, kids learned instruments socially and via books, and sometimes lessons on top of that. It was a good experience for me and the other people I knew learning to play. In this day, there are way too marketers pumping out content for ad revenue and for selling fast-food courses, educational quality be damned. And sorting through the mess to find any gems (there are some of course) is not something that I would expect a beginner to be able to do. And I can completely underestand why would-be players likely will get lead astray and not have a good experience with it. Quantity definitely does not equal quality.
Don’t get me wrong. The potential of the internet is infinite. But in practice today, it’s being controlled and homogenized more and more by big tech, government, etc., where less solid info and creativity is allowed to be out front, and more junk and propaganda is promoted. The sites that play ball are pushed ahead, and the sites which don’t might as well not exist for lack of access.
I pretty much agree with all of that. But how is any of that any different from the way all things seem to progress?
Keep in mind also that you’re talking about information here, and of course government is going to jump all over that.
Life is change, nothing you can do about that. I understand people don’t like change and fight tooth and nail to avoid it, but that’s just not how things work. And it’s been that way for a long, long time.
The current trajectory isn’t anything to do with progress. The progress peak of the net happened more than a few years ago, since being heavily stifled by control of information and profit, essentially being molded to the will of the old school empire. There is nothing natural about the way the net has changed.
I guess you would have had to have grown up with just 3 tv channels and a local newspaper or two to see that, as far as information is concerned, the internet is just a digital version of all of that.
Same business model. Make money by selling advertising and in order to maximize that income, publish the most sensational stories you can find, and massage them around to maximize the shock value, so more people will tune in, or buy your rag, so you can increase your advertising rates.
Ultimately, the big publishing housing buy out or squash the little guys, things become “homogenized” or controlled by a handful of people, and you end up hearing or reading what they want you to hear or read.
I did grow up with that. You must think that I’m younger than I actually am. I wish I were.
Maybe it’s just me, but I see all of this stuff as just more of the same, just packaged a little differently.
I’ve always been a big fan of history. If you go back and look, it doesn’t take long to see the same patterns repeating themselves over and over again. Some of the details may vary, but the basics stay pretty much the same.
We yearn for peace and harmony and yet we turn war and fear into global industries.
What I see on the internet doesn’t match up with what I see when I’m out and about. I suspect the same applies to all of you.
That should tell you all you really know.
I’m not discounting all the messed up crap that’s out there. Just saying, when haven’t things been messed up??
Just go out each day and do the best you can. Treat others the way you want to be treated and don’t get all twisty nickered over things that one, you don’t fully understand, and two, that you don’t really have much control over to begin with.
Life really is too short.
I have to disagree with you there, I have young kids at school and a whole bunch of what you might see as internettiness is actually a reflection of/part of the driver of what is happening IRL.
I heard about Project Gemini last night on DistroTube and gave it a browse around. It’s kind of the opposite of the modern internet where everything is text, no cookies, css, javascript or anything else. Just clean text-based pages with numerated links for quick browsing, over mandatory TLS. Interesting here is that the gemini protocol is feature complete and not to be expanded, as the modern web is always doing. Making a page is about as simple as writing a plain text document, and setting up a server is far easier than a http server.
https://gemini.circumlunar.space/docs/faq.gmi
As mentioned in the DistroTube video, the command line browser ‘amfora’ can be used to start browsing gemini. It was available from my distro’s repository. ‘?’ brings up the help page to get the command keys. But basically:
Numbers 1-0 open page links 1-10.
Numbers higher than 10 can be entered by pressing ‘space’ and entering the number in the popup bar at the bottom.
The current url can be edited with ‘e’ in the bottom bar.
‘b’ is back in history and ‘f’ is forward.
The amfora site has links to some aggregates for browsing around.
Probably not terribly exciting to most people using the modern web, but I like what it is aiming for. No corporate interests driving it, no privacy issues, light and simple, just people sharing thoughts via text pages. It aspires to be nothing more than it is already with all the traps that go with it. It’s the anti-modern-web.
Sounds a bit like Gopher.
How I understand it, it tries to fix some of the issues with gopher.