The internet is kind of a predatory cesspit now

carabiner

Everything on the Internet is designed to enrage or sexually arouse you as quickly as possible, including this article.

analog8374

A billion hungry discorporate souls, roaming a vast non-space, looking to feed their hunger, looking to eat each other. Some call that hell.

chasd00

Heh “predatory cesspit”. Ironically, the internet is kind of returning to its roots in this respect.

operatingthetan

My feeling is that the current state of the internet is just exposing how humans behave normally, the guardrails have just fallen away. Everyone is immune to shame, the threat of consequences etc. You see this in real life on the streets too.

tamimio

What ruined the internet is monetized social media, regardless ad driven or direct monetization. Monetization will basically ruin anything meant to be fun, even a simple board game with friends and family, if it stopped being about spending quality time and having fun and now there’s a competition of how much will each make at the end, it won’t be fun, you will see tribalism, manipulation, cheating, and other shenanigans.

sicktriple

You could replace nearly every instance of "the Internet" in this article with "capitalism" and it would make perfect sense.

aktenlage

This so exaggerated. If you think some of the people you know are assholes, that's fine. If you think all of them are assholes, you are either choosing the wrong places to be, or (more likely) the problem is with you.

demritocracy

I saw a video of a doctor answering a call and the caller started saying some strange hate/concensus-pushing message about Jews hating people who hate Jews in a very angry tone. Neither the doctor nor the commenters suggested it was AI, but it certainly sounded like it. I got a flash of a future where every telemarketer call is either an angry voice ready to convince you of something, or the gender you like trying to woo you. How discouraging would it be (intentionally) if every time an AI had access to your attention, it was trying to make you angry. This would probably cause a lot of people to disengage, a lot to get angry, and a few able to live without being affected by the laser guided anger and manipulation

tristanj

Well duh, was this not expected? The Internet userbase has transitioned dramatically over the past several decades. It moved from an outpost for computer nerds in the early 1990s, to a middle-class product in the 2000s, then everybody got access in the 2010s with the spread of the smartphone. The demographics of the internet look nothing like they did when it was created.

grackasthebig

So ...it's the same social dumpster fire humanity has always been? Cast aside the syntax and semantics of religion for financially engineered beliefs; buy low, sell high or you'll be "left behind!" Small step forward from "believe in my take on Christianity or your soul will be eternally damned!" Mirror neurons fostering same flock building via corps people used to build via scripture. Just more lazy people who want zero responsibility to themselves and everyone else to have responsibility for them.

skybrian

I don't doubt that there are very large communities of grifters, but to say that they are "the Internet" seems a bit much. If you see grifting as the central core of the Internet, maybe that's a problem with your filter bubble. You need to filter that stuff out.

bryan_w

If you go to doomer places on the internet (this thread included), you will see the internet as doomed

OgsyedIE

Half the comments here, for instance.

Biologist123

> People increasingly behave like addicts because addiction is the business model. I sense my internet addiction got a lot worse in recent years. I don’t use social media, but I consume news, blogs and newsletters - and comment threads - voraciously. I think the addiction began as soon as I started to work at a desk behind a computer which had internet access - 20+ years ago. Like putting an alcoholic to work behind a bar and thinking he’d restrain himself. It seems to have worsened in recent years. I’d like out, but the dealers are on every corner.

shuwix

Internet didn't change, it's population did. It's 8 billion potential victims and all bit more sophisticated thieves under one roof. Can't blame Internet. People which were scammed "offline" are now scammed online.

ok123456

Hell is other people.

juleiie

I have only one agenda - my own. People hate that I think nowadays. You need to be in some kind of camp, even for something so minor as skincare brand or fanfiction. I think that it was fine until the internet started to influence the real life way too much. You used to be able to log out and gain distance to the bullshit on the web. Now the bullshit has permeated into the mainstream and you need very drastic measures and personality to reject it. You will lose some people for this but there are still some older folks that can talk about anything and will never get offended. Never conform but also don't become a contrarian for the sake of it. The modern life is an art how to stay weird in a world that wants to squash you into some kind of label. How to stay genuine It starts during simple social interactions in real life. You make a joke about alcohol, now you feel the pressure of the crowd to become 'the funny drunk'. Squash it as soon as possible now you are a teetotaler. Now tell them joke about drugs. Make it all too confusing at all so they lose any idea about what to make of you. Obfuscation. Now you are free in the purest sense. There is no template for you aside from the one you craft or discover for yourself. I even went further and made myself genderless so that these norms cannot easily qualify me into anything really. There is 50% chance if someone calls me a woman or a man. Sometimes I support the feminism. Sometimes I give myself to patriarchy and observe how that feels. Maybe I made it all up and nothing I wrote is genuine. We should strive to be stranger or at least do not treat it as something bad but as a virtue. Of course do not try hard but just explore the weird and see where it takes you.

stillpointlab

One thing people go through as they age is an elevation of cynicism and general misanthropy. After decades of being disappointed when naive idealism and speculative optimism fail, one can just get down on it all. It is really hard not to succumb to this. It requires active effort and sometimes even a willful ignorance. "turn a blind eye" is the idiom here. Monty Python's "Always look on the bright side of life" kind of thing. Mr Rogers said it: look for the helpers. They may be few, but they are there. Find them and focus on them.

analog8374

maybe the physical world is the moderator of the dream world (internet). In the absence of the physical world the dream world runs rampant. with no empirical reference, truth becomes a matter of popularity or the loudest argument. with no space, everybody lives next door to a thousand assholes.

daoboy

We're evolutionarily programmed to stop everything and focus on anything that elicits fear in our environment. Enormous amounts of money has been invested to design algorithms that capture our attention with fear because they need your attention to sell advertising. Everything's optimized to make you enraged and afraid because it works. They're really good at it too. I know they got my number. I've had to delete every social media site I used to be engaged in (I suppose except this one) for the sake of my mental health.