I think most of us here were there for the late 90s early 2010, for the internets. In fact, the forum stuff we used was just one of the best ways to interact in-depth with strangers in the 2000s. I learned about underground Hip-Hip, electronic music production, gear off forums. I was there and hooked on Reddit in the early 2010s when it was pretty mature, but not totally messed up. I remember facebook when the default mode was a chronologic listing of my *actual* friends' posts without any automated spam, ads, AI generated shit, political disinformation, etc. All gone now.
I took a big reddit sabbatical a few months ago and out of boredom I started logging back in and goodness. So 20-30% of videos on the frontpage are from Tik-Tok (instant skip, it's junk). Useless, often tasteless memes. 1000x reposted videos. But now I see that a lot (perhaps 20%) of interesting pictures are now AI-generated. And the text only posts?! Text-only posts do not seem to make it to the Front page anymore, and if they do, they are almost exclusively The Am I The Asshole variety. AITAH has been the most appalling sub on reddit for a while, where made up stories get judged by 15-year-olds who recommend divorce/breakup. But something really changed now. The stories used to have some realism to them, but not anymore:
"My mom was an amazing mother. She also had no support and was young [19 per the OP]. I have no idea how she pulled it off. She did however needlessly complicate parenting because her standards were so high. She believed if her kid showed any interest in anything, she had to support it full throttle. That meant the sister who rode horses owned three and competed every weekend. It meant going to everyone of my games and getting me private lessons. It meant my sister who liked art had to be taken to the Louvre and the Met."
I don't think I need to explain the incredibility here. It's just sad, that the internetz I knew turned into low effort self-generating, meaningless garbage, dumped on us using soulless algorithms.
I took a big reddit sabbatical a few months ago and out of boredom I started logging back in and goodness. So 20-30% of videos on the frontpage are from Tik-Tok (instant skip, it's junk). Useless, often tasteless memes. 1000x reposted videos. But now I see that a lot (perhaps 20%) of interesting pictures are now AI-generated. And the text only posts?! Text-only posts do not seem to make it to the Front page anymore, and if they do, they are almost exclusively The Am I The Asshole variety. AITAH has been the most appalling sub on reddit for a while, where made up stories get judged by 15-year-olds who recommend divorce/breakup. But something really changed now. The stories used to have some realism to them, but not anymore:
"My mom was an amazing mother. She also had no support and was young [19 per the OP]. I have no idea how she pulled it off. She did however needlessly complicate parenting because her standards were so high. She believed if her kid showed any interest in anything, she had to support it full throttle. That meant the sister who rode horses owned three and competed every weekend. It meant going to everyone of my games and getting me private lessons. It meant my sister who liked art had to be taken to the Louvre and the Met."
I don't think I need to explain the incredibility here. It's just sad, that the internetz I knew turned into low effort self-generating, meaningless garbage, dumped on us using soulless algorithms.