It feels like the web is becoming more closed every year — fewer open forums, more platforms locking away data and communities behind logins. What do you think are the biggest forces driving the decline of the open internet? Are walled gardens like Discord the main problem, or is it something else like artificial intelligence, corporate consolidation, surveillance, or changing user habits?
Whether you like it or not, its censorship. Ppl with opposite political views silencing eachother creating echo chambers of only ppl who align with them politically.
Things are too strict now, every one has a mega phone and wants to shout at eachother and their opinion. The internet has become one big political pile of shit, most actually chill ppl, avoid it as a source of escapism.
Barrier to entry. Not enough laid back open minded ppl. So now, everyone’s separated and closed off. Ppl just want control
It’s not about connection and getting information, it’s all about pushing some fucking agenda.
Personally I don’t buy this one as a problem. Pre social media, anarchists weren’t sitting around a table sipping tea with nazis, alt people didn’t have to put up with fkn jocks making the same comments about dyed hair and piercings that grandpa has been making since 1976 daily, if you want to the club and spent your time insulting all the regulars and staff and owner, you’d get your ass kicked out to the curb by the bouncers.
I think the problem is a certain crowd acting like they should have the right to just barge into whatever spaces they want and say whatever they want without any consequences. Life was never like that. And just because you’re free to speak, doesn’t mean that everyone should be forced to listen whether they want to or not.
Sometimes people who believe in jewish space lazers just need to be treated like the deranged fucking clowns that they are and not be given a seat at the table. The world would probably be so much better if these people would go back to whatever fucking holes they crawled out of.
Edit: I’m also going to start assuming that people who think the internet used to be this place where bigots could run wild saying the N word are all 12 years old. Because forum sites pre social media were iron fisted.
While you are looking at them censoring people using slurs on big social media thinking it’s a win, they are also censoring people using ugly words like rape, genocide, suicide, and silencing a lot of important channels about important themes because it’s “sensitive” content.
We went from “I don’t like that shit, so I’m not gonna go to that place/interact with those people” to “I don’t like that shit, so people are not allowed to do it/talk about it”. And this is affecting everyone.
Ok? This is actually now a different conversation because someone deciding that they don’t want to spend time with you or be in your company is not censorship, you fucking baby. No one owes you their attention or time. Or a ‘debate’ whenever you feel like it. And expecting, for example, trans people in a trans space to sit at the fucking table and sing kumbaya with people who think they are subhuman is just insane.
Also, who is the “they” that is censoring you? I’ve been on Facebook quite a lot over this last year and my feed is full of people talking about genocide. And feminist pages that don’t shy away from subjects like rape. In fact, here we are using these words right now, waiting for the man in black to come and make it disappear.
Unless you’re making a habit of going into spaces that specifically don’t want these topics and doing it anyway? In which case, you’re the asshole. Which would make you just like a maga that gets banned from a queer page for using slurs, then acts like their rights are being infringed because of it.
“who is the they” - big social media
The biggest social media of all is YouTube, and even mentioning those words screw your reach, get you demonetized and later deplataformed. They killed most critical channels about history and war reporting, and these pages you see on Facebook, ask about their reach any of these days, you will see that they barely reach their own followers.
ps: Sorry, the original commenter was talking about people “censoring” each other - if it means just blocking, I fully support it (but usually it means reporting everything they don’t like and getting it banned). I was talking about social media itself censoring everyone.