this post was submitted on 06 Mar 2026
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I used to be strictly materialist and atheist. Now I’m pretty spiritual. Don’t necessarily follow a religion and don’t support bigotry but yeah, I’m fairly spiritual now. This is a recent development and I never thought I’d be here like 5 years ago.

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[–] Assassassin@lemmy.dbzer0.com 26 points 3 weeks ago (3 children)

I agree. Though, I think it was less a case of a misguided or overly optimistic view, and more a case of unfettered capitalism driving the Internet into an ideological cesspool. Everything on the internet tends to get a lot shittier once people start making money off of it.

[–] Zonetrooper@lemmy.world 9 points 3 weeks ago

Yes and no. I think I was overly optimistic that people would make use of the possibilities of social media. I have thoughts on why I was mistaken, but ultimately I failed to recognize that a lot of people like their views affirmed and will seek out circles which do so.

At the same time, you're 100% right: Companies saw an opportunity to drive engagement and reap huge profits with the teeeeensy little side effects of further siloizing viewpoints, distorting reality, and elevating the most extreme positions. It turbocharged everything awful and repeatedly turned sites into cancerous shitholes.

[–] rumschlumpel@feddit.org 4 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

I think all the inter-instance drama on Lemmy shows pretty well that people don't need money to enter filter bubbles. I don't think you can even see this comment lol

[–] ICastFist@programming.dev 1 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

For some reason, you made me think of 4chan and how it's always been a cesspool, no capitalism needed. Little did we know how most corporate social media would devolve into "4chan, but with ad-friendly moderation"