Ask Lemmy

My internet experience is heavily filtered. I don’t see ads, I mostly focus on local news and events, and have certain keywords filtered here. It’s been so nice. It’s much less stressful dealing with my local and state community than everything else.

You might be done with people, not the internet.

AI is the thing thats close to pushing me off. I've loved it less and less every day since it turned into a popularity contest, but it still had a lot of great stuff. Now its not even people pretending to be something they're not, its a computer program pretending to be somebody pretending to be somebody theyre not in the vain hopes that you'll LIKE AND SUBSCRIBE.

I'm not talented or special-skilled or super-interested enough in anything to warrant joining any niche forums. This right here is the last of my Internet I think. Once Lemmy is overrun by thots and bots I might be done.

I still doomscroll to stay a little informed but my recent salvation has been free ebooks on my phone. Same phone strolling action but instead of doom, I get fun little mysteries.

I almost feel the same, too much USA doomnews about Trump and Epstein. Here, people break rules too, just to spam USA news 24/7.
My solution to combat this, was to block keywords(Lemmy) and access website I only need(forums, websites etc).

Good luck! Come back and let the rest of us know what it's like out there.

*humanity

but yes, i'm vastly returning to an offline, analog life.

when i stay on, it's self-hosted and smolnet

No. I might use it less often, but it's also a more healthy relationship instead of what tech bros wanted.

Good luck with that

Internet is a great to access information and people but most of the internet is garbage we need to promote quality sources and ethical technology practices

Pretty much. Recently got a device for Meshtastic, need to get around to playing with it. If I recall, SearX is an open-source search engine yeah? We should mod it to explicitly block the corpoweb as a whole and strictly favor results from foss and federated sources.

not this part

I worry more what the internet is doing to children than to our rotten heads. Both are harmful but I have kids, and well once you give them a smartphone then who knows. Will some big corp ask them for face id and personal data? Fuck that but apparently it’s unavoidable

I am getting there.

I've been fighting the good fight online and off for decades now, and people have broadly gotten so dense and people's worst behavior and worst manners are now considered identities and rights, and it's so massively annoying that I have grown tired of telling people to shut the fuck up about shit that either harms other people or harms themselves.

Now everyone you interact with is not trying to interact with you specifically, but trying to make something they can clip, snip or appeal to an audience with for views, upvotes and attention. They don't care about exchange, they care about getting attention from their peers.

At least in real-life (whatever that means) people are on their best behavior when you're larger than them. I really get how some cranky old dudes are always just looking for a fight.

The anonymity of the internet combined with it's openness and freedom to shit on any conversation and muddy every water and poison any well, has broadly done more harm than good, and I am really weighing the value it has for marginalized people and the like over the overall harm it's doing TO marginalized people and the like. I am tired of running defense for people who shit on my help, I am tired of having to argue about the most basic bullshit like empathy and civility or choosing to not be civil when required, because there's always either some 13-year-old who just learned they can be treated like an adult online, or some tweet-farmer in India pretending to be from my country, doing their best to take over the conversation and make it about themselves and their absolutely psychotic world-views or rage-bait.

Broadly, the worst people in the world bring out the worst in others, and that's far more infectious than good people being good because our species is all about survival, and we fight to survive.

We probably need to take away the freedom honesty. Just like China was forward thinking and employed a social credit score and took away privacy and outside influence from their internet, it sounds horrific but I totally get it. We probably will do that all over the world when this reaches a head. I don't trust our current government institutions in the west to do it right, but the internet is killing our society, people aren't having relationships anymore, people aren't making friends, people just imagine the worst about each other and retreat to private echo chambers and AI chatbots that suck them off.

that sounds more like problems with IRL than problems with the internet

Still good to find "free" content 😏