I mean I agree with that in principle, but: before the Internet, of course big corporations influenced kids and adults! Before the internet only big corporations had the resources and practical ability to distribute any information to a lot of people.
The promise of the internet was that we would have a society where we could all have a say and the flow of information would be democratized. You are right that, because of "algorithms", that promise hasn't really been fulfilled.
I live in a country where the voting age is 16. It used to be 18 and I don't think this change has caused many concrete policy changes: young people aren't big or unified enough a voting bloc to meaningfully affect the results.
I tend to be in favor of letting young people have more rights at a younger age in general (in part because I remember being young and not seeing any good reason why I shouldn't), so I'm definitely not in favor of raising it to 18 again or further.
Google Maps seems to have been launched in 2005, so it did exist, though maybe not as a smartphone app.
Now that we do so many things through a browser and WebKit/Blink (which run everywhere) have become the de facto standard browser engines, the OS no longer matters as much as it used to.
the thing is that not all of them use systemd or bash or zsh or even X11 (servers don't usually have X11 installed)
All of them use a Linux kernel and many components that were originally developed for GNU, especially the C library.
Or it's great because something interesting is about to happen. If I had a time machine I would travel to 1989 to see the fall of the Berlin Wall.
I just checked the Wikipedia articles and it seems that two of them have already had their birthday this year, five not.
It was on its way out when smartphones and HTML5 became widely adopted. Smartphones didn't support Flash and HTML5 made sure that the things you used to need Flash for were just implemented in web browsers. Maybe you remember something along those lines.
I have released thousands of photos I took under free licenses.
You know, serious question from someone relatively new to the fediverse: how do you make sure that people won't just create many accounts across instances if they want to evade bans or create one-time throwaways for posting abusive comments? One instance has no idea about users on other instances after all.
The things that happen on each kind of online platform are to a large extent a result of how the platform is structured. Lemmy and Reddit are structured in pretty much exactly the same way.
As the userbase of Lemmy grows, it will become more like Reddit, whether people like it or not. I wish we had a social media platform structured like a traditional phpBB-style web forum, with thread bumping and all.
I certainly agree that the Internet should be by and for individuals; whether we can in the long term do completely without corporations, I am not sure, but the current "algorithmic curation" is definitely a problem.