Where are these magical “right” places? Today alone, I visited a site that had a broken YouTube embed from 3 years ago, another with a story that had embedded tweets that were gone, a restaurant’s domain that redirects to a Facebook page that I can’t view without a login, and a news site with a paywall with ads all over that were, mostly, blocked by my ad blocker.
Every one of these sites came from a DuckDuckGo or Google search. If these are the wrong places, where are we meant to go and how are we to find the “right” places for information?
It’s a subjective matter. I’m not you, I can’t say what brings you joy and motivates you positively.
Say, Mastodon, Reddit, Youtube any other social site. Pursuing the topic of politics alone is going to push your mental balance towards negativity, pesimism, cynicism and possibly depression. Skip it, limit it, and if you can’t resign from it, then balance it out with pics of funny things, jokes, possibly a community dedicated to some interesting project or hobby.
Today alone (…)
The fact that such an experience managed to frustrate you is a strong indicator that you could use a bit more organized approach to the online content.
I think xda is magical that it is still around and a resource to find out stuff about a specific phone. Then other forums like avsforum that’s kept popping up to help me when I had TV model specific questions throughout the years. Overclockers.net for specific motherboard discussions that have continued to be a resource over the years.
Deal sites like isthereanydeal, camelcamelcamel, and pcpartpicker continues be so useful as it has been in the past. Then there’s pcgamingwiki I use all the time. Oh Wikipedia of course. Even steam forums has been useful with guides there for games, and even sometimes people asking about troubleshooting for console versions because the devs are there.
I think there’s a lot of wonderful places. If you look at the most popular billion dollar run social media services with massive amount of users then yeah it start to seem bleak. But, there’s still places that were cool and are still cool because they exist with a more sustainable model as opposed to infinite growth.
Also forgot to add that something like archive sites exists is incredible too, so sites that will be lost will have more of a chance to not have content lost forever and be a glimpse into the past.
The web as a whole is more alive than ever, but many of those old school places aren’t. They still exist, but most of the userbase doesn’t.
I have some hobbies, which used to have a thriving online communities on forums and blogs. For the average internet user, that wanted to read up about such hobbies, they would gravitate towards those forums or blogs. This has fundamentally changed with the popularity of sites such as reddit, facebook, youtube & discord. The conversations that were had on the forums moved to the above platforms and as such a lot of the deeper nuances of conversation were lost.
A specific hobby of mine had a dozen active forums to read. Now all but one are mostly dead. The only one in my native language is also gone. My country’s native communities moved to facebook, which is now only used for announcements and some simple questions being asked again and again.
There has been a complete reversal of internet discourse on many topics. Instead it’s (again) back to having discussions with your friend group and building up connections locally.
It’s not a simple thing, but the solution to is to do yourself what you wish existed. I’m shifting away from social media to my own site that I can personalize as I want. It feels nice.
I think you are confusing soulless with dead. It’s more alive than ever yes but it has become monotonous. The original feeling of individuality of websites has been reduced to the monotonity you see when you visit different websites. For example, Twitter, Reddit, Instagram or even their federated alternatives like Mastodon and Lemmy (I haven’t used Pixelfed) are designed in a similar way to that users feel familiar and don’t get turned off from using the website. This is just one example I can think of now.
I’m not. By “alive” I mean that from where I sit, the Internet is a vast, colorful tapestry. There’s plenty of individuality, diversity and originality in it. It’s just that it’s not given to you on a silver platter.
Imagine being a person living in a skyscraper, rarely leaving it because all the things you require are situated on one of lower floors. What isn’t there, you order to be brought to you, conveniently. So you complain that the world became souless, monotone, repetitive, not like in the old days, when you were living in suburbs and had to travel on your own to find the service needed.
1st of all, if you’re into politics and can’t resign from it, replace the sites you know, with those that deliver news in as neutral tone as possible, with as little toxic inclusions as possible.
AXIOS is one.
2ndly, use Feed Reader like INOREADER and consider sbscribing to one of its non-free plans to get the tools that filter out news by keywords, phrases or similar variables.
3rdly, prioritize what you actually need, instead of stuff that might be “somewhat” relevant to your interests. For example, if you have some good, reliable source of news/content on video games, then skip the rest - they tend to cover same games in similar time span, so you won’t miss much when you reduce your feed from 10 to a single site.
I think this is true to an extent. The internet is still filled with magical things, but no one can deny that a huge portion is just ad-filled garbage at this point. Most everything “mainstream” is designed to manipulate us and suck us dry. I still say the internet is both the greatest and worst invention of all time.
Adblocker do great job at filtering out the majority of ads. Resign from social sites (or their parts) that drown in toxicity (anything dealing with “news” is usually the 1st place to avoid) and it’s going to improve your online experience.
I still say the internet is both the greatest and worst invention of all time.
I’d argue that there are better contenders, but this is a discussion for entirely different community. 😜
It didn’t. It’s more alive than ever.
It’s just you visiting wrong places, not paying attention to the correct ratio of negative and positive content.
Where are these magical “right” places? Today alone, I visited a site that had a broken YouTube embed from 3 years ago, another with a story that had embedded tweets that were gone, a restaurant’s domain that redirects to a Facebook page that I can’t view without a login, and a news site with a paywall with ads all over that were, mostly, blocked by my ad blocker.
Every one of these sites came from a DuckDuckGo or Google search. If these are the wrong places, where are we meant to go and how are we to find the “right” places for information?
It’s a subjective matter. I’m not you, I can’t say what brings you joy and motivates you positively.
Say, Mastodon, Reddit, Youtube any other social site. Pursuing the topic of politics alone is going to push your mental balance towards negativity, pesimism, cynicism and possibly depression. Skip it, limit it, and if you can’t resign from it, then balance it out with pics of funny things, jokes, possibly a community dedicated to some interesting project or hobby.
The fact that such an experience managed to frustrate you is a strong indicator that you could use a bit more organized approach to the online content.
“Disengage from the world, and chase escapism, and things will be better” says someone too privileged or too blind to know any better.
“The Internet is the real world for me, one I can’t choose to escape from, or at least limit to some extent.”
You don’t realize just how privileged YOU are, to hold such an conviction…
I think xda is magical that it is still around and a resource to find out stuff about a specific phone. Then other forums like avsforum that’s kept popping up to help me when I had TV model specific questions throughout the years. Overclockers.net for specific motherboard discussions that have continued to be a resource over the years.
Deal sites like isthereanydeal, camelcamelcamel, and pcpartpicker continues be so useful as it has been in the past. Then there’s pcgamingwiki I use all the time. Oh Wikipedia of course. Even steam forums has been useful with guides there for games, and even sometimes people asking about troubleshooting for console versions because the devs are there.
I think there’s a lot of wonderful places. If you look at the most popular billion dollar run social media services with massive amount of users then yeah it start to seem bleak. But, there’s still places that were cool and are still cool because they exist with a more sustainable model as opposed to infinite growth.
Also forgot to add that something like archive sites exists is incredible too, so sites that will be lost will have more of a chance to not have content lost forever and be a glimpse into the past.
The web as a whole is more alive than ever, but many of those old school places aren’t. They still exist, but most of the userbase doesn’t.
I have some hobbies, which used to have a thriving online communities on forums and blogs. For the average internet user, that wanted to read up about such hobbies, they would gravitate towards those forums or blogs. This has fundamentally changed with the popularity of sites such as reddit, facebook, youtube & discord. The conversations that were had on the forums moved to the above platforms and as such a lot of the deeper nuances of conversation were lost.
A specific hobby of mine had a dozen active forums to read. Now all but one are mostly dead. The only one in my native language is also gone. My country’s native communities moved to facebook, which is now only used for announcements and some simple questions being asked again and again.
There has been a complete reversal of internet discourse on many topics. Instead it’s (again) back to having discussions with your friend group and building up connections locally.
It’s not a simple thing, but the solution to is to do yourself what you wish existed. I’m shifting away from social media to my own site that I can personalize as I want. It feels nice.
I think you are confusing soulless with dead. It’s more alive than ever yes but it has become monotonous. The original feeling of individuality of websites has been reduced to the monotonity you see when you visit different websites. For example, Twitter, Reddit, Instagram or even their federated alternatives like Mastodon and Lemmy (I haven’t used Pixelfed) are designed in a similar way to that users feel familiar and don’t get turned off from using the website. This is just one example I can think of now.
I’m not. By “alive” I mean that from where I sit, the Internet is a vast, colorful tapestry. There’s plenty of individuality, diversity and originality in it. It’s just that it’s not given to you on a silver platter.
Imagine being a person living in a skyscraper, rarely leaving it because all the things you require are situated on one of lower floors. What isn’t there, you order to be brought to you, conveniently. So you complain that the world became souless, monotone, repetitive, not like in the old days, when you were living in suburbs and had to travel on your own to find the service needed.
I’m not living in such a skyscraper.
Maybe I need to expand the pool of sites I frequent. Any recommendations?
1st of all, if you’re into politics and can’t resign from it, replace the sites you know, with those that deliver news in as neutral tone as possible, with as little toxic inclusions as possible. AXIOS is one.
2ndly, use Feed Reader like INOREADER and consider sbscribing to one of its non-free plans to get the tools that filter out news by keywords, phrases or similar variables.
3rdly, prioritize what you actually need, instead of stuff that might be “somewhat” relevant to your interests. For example, if you have some good, reliable source of news/content on video games, then skip the rest - they tend to cover same games in similar time span, so you won’t miss much when you reduce your feed from 10 to a single site.
I think this is true to an extent. The internet is still filled with magical things, but no one can deny that a huge portion is just ad-filled garbage at this point. Most everything “mainstream” is designed to manipulate us and suck us dry. I still say the internet is both the greatest and worst invention of all time.
Adblocker do great job at filtering out the majority of ads. Resign from social sites (or their parts) that drown in toxicity (anything dealing with “news” is usually the 1st place to avoid) and it’s going to improve your online experience.
I’d argue that there are better contenders, but this is a discussion for entirely different community. 😜