i have depression
The web has been monopolized into a handful of big tech sites that trap everyone inside. The enshittification runs deep.
The chilling thing is that it doesn't have to be this way. There are still plenty of niche communities online. You can find web comics and blogs and hobby forums. But these all require some means of funneling people into them.
Where are the AlbinoBlackSheeps and ICanHazCheeseburgers and YDMNDs of yesteryear? They're on TikTok and YouTube, rather than their own boutique platforms, because there's no really good way to get people from Main Public Forum into your niche community.
One of the silver linings of Lemmy has been a nascent renaissance of this kind of community. Even then its predicated on creative folks contributing and participating and feeding on one another, like the goons over at Something Awful did. I kinda see that sort of thing with podcasts like E1 and Hello From The Magic Tavern. It feels harder to find but not impossible.
To be fair the method that existed before tiktok youtube and the like was either word of mouth via discussion boards or google itself.
I think the bigger problem here is actually that everyone is chasing money in some form, which means people aren't creating content for fun. They're chasing mass market. The problem with chasing mass market is that it reduces the quality of niche content that is designed solely and specifically to only appeal to fans of that niche. This content is only created by people doing it for fun, and it achieves the highest level of quality within its respective niche (but not for mass audience).
If you like a bunch of niche things while finding mass stuff terminally boring, this becomes a problem when all the niche things no longer have creators.
The other side of this is that people do still want to do it for fun, but don't want to do it for fun on a platform for someone else to profit from. The platforms being for-profit deters people from using or contributing work to them, because why contribute your labour to someone else's profit? Fuck them. (Fandom being an obvious example of this).
Everyone was happier on the internet when everyone was just kinda doing stuff.
Nothing to do anymore but work, shitpost, and cook crack cocaine in the microwave.
Back to Basics
I attribute Hexbear with keeping me up to date on the hip slang lingo of the modern teen-ager
I was using tiktok for that but stopped on the day i realized i had spent sixteen consecutive hours swiping tiktoks without noticing. Adhd is a horrible burden. There is no punchline.
i haven't finished reading every last HTML page on marxists.org yet
Hard agree. Shit's just boring now. Even hexbear, while the best place on the internet, still gets boring when the posts aren't there
a front page of threads all with 0-1 comments 
Hexbear is the last fun place on the internet
I dunno what we are in now but the old web was better. 1.0 sucked. 2.0 was good though. You had all these nich communities bubbling with energy and ideas. Now it is just reddit and psyops and comodification.
Hexbears should help expand our creativity on the web, by taking inspiration from NeoCities (successor to GeoCities). Not everything has to be sterile and bland and boring. I'd even like to be able to customize our profile pages more than just things like the banner and profile picture. I mean, just look at how much life can be breathed into a site with so much flexibility. Look at all the colors and non-standard layouts. What the web as lost is personality, which we should be taking back. We're on FOSS sites here in the Fediverse. We can do better, and we shouldn't be too afraid to take risks by deviating from what's accepted as "normal" these days.
We had way better tools for self-expression on older formats like early YouTube, MySpace, etc etc. We don't have to stay the course of sterile, standardized, corporatized web formats.
The original point of using the web was making things beautiful and tinkering around with different designs. It was to tell a story with the layout. That was part of the content itself, not just what we say and do online.
Edit: https://yesterweb.org/ (on NeoCities) has plenty of good and interesting information on this general topic of a worse present web (a manifesto, if you will)
Check Hexbear
Pay bills
Order stuff
Watch a few youtube videos from select channels
Check email
Stream some show I don't even watch off a russian piracy site, I just want the noise.
Check twitter for silly shit
That's the entire internet.
I thought I just had depression but no, the internet really does suck now
ripping off the twitter and reddit bandaids, in addition to not using ig or tiktok, means i can spend about 15 minutes online before i've seen all the current content. we probably aren't supposed to spend hour after hour surfing the web.
What else am I supposed to be doing while I avoid work then? Because I'm sure as shit not gonna be doing work
The only cool thing about the internet are niche hobby sites. Everything else is an SEO skinner box hellscape. I'm sort of glad honestly, it's helped to cure me from reddit scrolling and actually go do stuff like work on projects or go ride my bike.
did that "losing net neutrality" thing everybody was concerned about circa 2010 eventually happen, and that's why everything's worse?
No, California passed a Net Neutrality law, and it's easier for ISPs to be in compliance with it for the whole country than have different practices in every state.
I’m not sure this is universally true. Technically, phone companies violate net neutrality all the time by providing faster “lanes” for or access to certain streaming services (e.g. getting Paramount Plus or Peacock for “free” with your phone plan).
the internet does feel a lot more corporate than it did 10 years ago and especially 20 years ago. That sucks a lot of the fun out of it. Making money off of the internet was barely even a thing 15 years ago.
It's been this way since like 2008 IMO. Internet is just an addiction that we're not allowed to break or else we get cut off from social and employment opportunities.
It is a conspiracy theory, but the way everything feels like copypasted crap really makes the Dead Internet Theory feel plausible.
Dead Internet Theory
Feels more like a reality tbh. The last human users of the internet are all washed ashore on social media.
I think some niche youtube channels are fun, but it certainly is becoming a bore. If I had to guess, it probably is from everything being localized to a handful of websites and those are in turn optimized by an algorithm for profit instead of something enjoyable. The internet has been turned into what is addictive instead of fun.
My personal theory is that we are so detached from joy that many find "reaction videos" a source of amusement because we can't feel excitement ourselves anymore, so people vicariously enjoy something "new" by watching someone else be very excited and happy about it.
I only really partake in interacting with people I don't know on Hexbear, and anything else I leave exclusive to people I know in real life.
Its a fantastic reservoir of knowledge at your fingertips, but a terrible and inhuman way to interact with other humans. Much nuance and body language is not seen, and people essentially develop the same kind of anonymous rage they feel when driving a car except it is in front of a computer screen.
It’s turned to shit over the last 10 yrs, exponentially worse in the last 5. You cannot Google businesses any more such that finding home repair is an endurance trial.
You cannot google most things without hitting a top 24, 11, or 32 list. Product, business, topic, doesn’t matter.
And when you do get a result it’s the same handful of places. Product? Amazon, Walmart, Wayfair. Topic? Spruce, Reddit, Wiki. Business? Yellow Pages, Angi, Yelp and the business will not actually be anywhere near you but a national chain with an 800#.
All the interesting bits and random have been culled by paid ads and Google algorithms.
no flash games 
They were shitty because they were so easy to make so everyone was doing it. But when they were good they were really good. It’s hard to overstate the number of novel game mechanics spawned during that time that are still fueling the mobile game market.
I used to spend an embarrassing amount of time each day following up on deranged Evangelical twitter users. Posted some of the worst takes to the dunk tank and would generally get worked up about things.
But I would never create an account because I’m not giving Twitter my phone number (that thing that easily identifies you to everyone and most people never change, which is why every website wants it).
So when Musk decided to not let people view twitter without an account, that part of my day just dried up. I wouldn’t say I’m happier but I really don’t miss it. Between that and the new algorithm here I’d like to think I’m spending less time online. I probably am, but I also find I do this exact thing a lot more (just open my browser and not knowing where I want to go, but I know I want to go somewhere)
Coming to hexbear feels like being able to breathe after holding my breath across the rest of the internet, which is truly a fascist cesspit, with the exception of a dwindling number of twitter accounts.
i literally only have fun here or reading manga/fanfic online. gamification/algo-focused content really sucks the soul out of posting, but tell me something that hasn't been said a million times at this point, i guess 
It really feels like 2024 election season is truly gonna make me log off. I'll be around the age 
was when he got grillpilled. Internet got so bad I took up golf this year.
Internet got so bad I took up golf this year.
I've found myself looking at porn more than I used to just because there's sometimes still some whimsy to be found
There's still lots of cool stuff online, it's just not always new and hot. Doom scrolling is a trap. Return to random keyword searches to find the strange stuff. Even that is harder now with all these shifty walled platforms though. Pinterest is so annoying.
It's also harder because search engines have been rendered almost useless by optimization. It's so hard to find anything now. Youtube only shows you like five results you searched for before they switch to the useless "for you" category, which are just unrelated videos you've seen before.
I just like the feeling of nostalgia of sitting at a search box like I'm in high school again using the internet for the first time.
What weird word combinations can I put in this box, and what freaky stuff am I going to find? I guess the new version of this is AI generated content, but that's not usually nearly as interesting to me.
Pinterest is so annoying.
Those motherfuckers have massively and successively bombed search engines years ago with random snippets of sentences and niche stuff and copy-pasted crawled content and said search engines never entirely recovered
I hate them too
That just means more time to read theory!
Eh sometimes creative stuff happens on the internet, but it's all so monetized or becomes full of inscrutable drama before it can get cool.
I'm not gonna say the internet used to be more democratic or open, because when I first started using it every website was run by some white male computer dork from Bellevue, Washington who wanted to share his love of pictograms or declarative programming languages.
But there was a wacky amount of variety you could stumble into. No one was trying to make money because there was money to be made. No one was trying to build a huge audience because there wasn't one. Everything was niche and that was cool.
I mean I've basically hoarded a shit ton of older media from 2000 and before. I'll sometimes expose myself to modern media and realize I made the right choice to stay under my rock.
trump no longer tweeting was the spiritual death of the internet
True dat. Even the handful of niche subreddits i go to are pretty miserable, and beyond that is a vast and desolate silence.
Banned? DM Wmill to appeal.
No anti-nautilism posts. See: Eco-fascism Primer
Slop posts go in c/slop. Don't post low-hanging fruit here.
