Recently, I have found myself almost unable to find things online to engage with, Tildes being the rare exception. I feel like I used to be able to find my way down Youtube rabbit holes, scroll on Reddit endlessly, and for a period even get lost on Instagram reels. I still have the urges, but now when I indulge it doesn't feel like an effortless dopamine hit, I feel like I'm fighting the platforms for something, anything engaging.

The channels I enjoyed, even the small ones, seem to all be chasing monetization and the lowest common denominator. Even Beau Miles, one of my favorite people on earth, joined the absolute deluge of people focusing on renovating a crumbling "historic" building or just rehashing his old fun ideas. Gone are the days of the inspired videos like the Human Bean. The miniature painters all seem to be hocking their own inventions or models. It feels like capitalism has crept into every video. Reddit is even worse, where it always feels like there is an agenda or a link to a patreon or scrappy youtube channel and I just feel manipulated by the posts being made.

For lack of a better phrase, I'm just constantly feeling the "ick" being online. I'm actively trying to search out things to engage with, anything even remotely genuine or authentic, and running up against a wall. It just feels bizarre. Maybe I'm alone on this. Or maybe I'm reaching a different stage of life and no longer the target demographic. In any case I just feel myself reaching for my laptop less and less and less. For most folks I think that would be a good thing, but when it's dark out, and I'm too burnt out from work to make progress on whatever home or art project I'm doing it was a really nice way to turn off my brain.

Is anyone else having a similar experience? Are folks happy with this version of online content? Are we entering the dead internet? I'm trying to figure out if this is a real trend or just a personal experience.

For most of the history of Tildes, if someone came across the site and decided they wanted to join, but didn't know anyone already on, they could email Deimos with an invite request. However, with the rise of LLMs, the noise-to-signal ratio has become so high this is no longer a way to join Tildes - explanation by Deimos: https://tildes.net/~tildes/1vl3/is_there_any_interest_in_building_a_tildes_successor#comment-if6r

I've read the recent discussions on Tildes being maintained as is and not actively grown, but I think most of us believe the community is up for many more years of enjoying each other's company, and would like to pick up a few more members along the way if they seek us out. That just requesting to join isn't possible anymore makes me a little sad.

I had the thought that larger sites are able to invest more resources into spam account filtering, many of us have active accounts on other social media sites (or other types of sites with community interactions), and I speculate that almost everyone who finds tildes and is interested in joining has already been active in some other online community. Some of us Tilderinos could post here our handles in other communities, and offer to consider sharing one of our invite requests to Tildes if DM'd in our other community. We'd have to reject requests from new accounts, and use some judgement on established ones, but I am thinking having people go through the filtering process those other communities use would reduce the spam requests enough to make it workable.

What do you guys think?

I'm using the phrase 'internet discussion site' pretty informally, so I hope my meaning will become clearer as you continue reading.

I got rid of Snapchat around 4 years ago now. At some point in 2023 I noticed a sharp downtick in discussion quality on Twitter, and got rid of it as well. About two years ago, frustrated with the lack of human interaction and the vying for attention, I deleted Instagram. Near the end of 2025, I stopped using Discord. The final nail in the coffin has now arrived, since I'm unfortunately coming to the conclusion that Reddit is no longer worth visiting, leaving me almost entirely cordoned off from internet communication at a time when more humans are using it than ever before.
I won't bother repeating my personal reasons for this exodus since I feel confident that most people on this website have feelings on the matter that at least approximate my own.
Realistically this is a sign that it's time to prioritize interaction in the real world, and that's certainly a worthwhile thing to pursue. But bluntly society has restructured around the internet in a pretty substantial way, and I don't think it's an unreasonable ask to find various forms of forums on which more meaningful discussions can take place.
Here is my personal survey of the current landscape:

• tildes.net: Basically good. I really enjoy this website and I think in a lot of ways the 'bar/pub/cafe' model for a forum, where you can peer through the window but require permission to gain admission, is the only viable model for future online discussion places as the internet becomes ever more saturated with bots and bad actors.
• lobste.rs: Also basically good, for the same reasons as tildes. In some aspects, limited by the fact that it has a particular focus. In other ways, that's a really good thing. Maybe in a perfect world there would be a lobste.rs equivalent for every hobby, and we would return to an early internet forum world.
• Hacker News: Also basically good but perhaps a bit less so than the above two. I think most of the things posted on there are interesting, but a lot of the discussion has lately felt less insightful than it used to. I think a different tildes post noted this as well, but it's very caught up in the AI news cycle, often to an unfortunate degree.
• Rateyourmusic: The core site is enjoyable, and the forums are usually fun to check in on every now and then. Certainly a worthwhile place to visit if you enjoy music.
• Stackexchange networks: This is cheating since this is obviously many sites. I'm a mathematics student and I've found MSE and MathOverflow to be really wonderful places to learn and converse, albeit with some very arcane and strict rules for posting. The philosophy SE seems also generally of a high quality, and there are many other SE sites that I occasionally stumble into and am pleasantly surprised by. Unfortunately I expect its time is finite, since the UX has slowly but surely been degrading and the site traffic dropping.
• Fediverse networks: These sites clearly have potential, but for whatever reason it's still just not there. I drop into lemmy and Mastodon occasionally, but the posts are rarely of high quality. In many ways they just feel like "Reddit/Twitter but with a different name".

Surely these can't be all, right? It's a little soul-crushing to think how many people are online at any given time and how hard it is to find a place not drowning in noise. Maybe this is just my lament.

And what do you write about?

Currently, my personal website is under my real name. I'm asking this question because I'm about to rebuild it (as is tradition), which gave me some energy to write about a recent personal event, and I'm realizing that I'm not comfortable with writing this under my real name. So I'm here, wondering what to do with my personal thoughts that I want to share, but not too loudly.

If you own a personal website or blog, what do you do? Do you use a pseudonym for everything? Are you ok with publishing personal stuff under your real name? Do you have two blogs to separate things?

This post is mostly going to be incoherent rambling, but I hope this does make some sense and gains engagement from my other fellow Tildes users on here.

I, like many others, participated in the Reddit exodus to a degree after the API changes some years ago. I've been using tildes semi-regularly ever since, but I still frequent Reddit just as much as I used to (however, being much less active in terms of commenting/posting) simply due to the sheer size of the user base.

Of course, since January 20th 2025 (the beginning of Trumps second term), the world has definitely seemed to be in an increasingly state of turmoil ever since. De Minimis exception rules, non-stop changes on tariffs to different countries, the war in Iran, capturing the Venezuelan president (for better or for worse), trying to unite the Western hemisphere under the American flag, unveiling of the Epstein files, Isreal still attempting to ethnically cleanse Gaza, and countless other disputes that have been ongoing such as Russia v. Ukraine, China v. Taiwan, etc.

None of this is relatively good news, nor am I really a fan of any of these actions above, save for perhaps capturing Maduro.

Whenever I scroll through r/worldnews or r/news, it just seems that present day society is literally going on the brink of collapse. I'm just wondering, am I in the wrong to think that most people are living their lives the way they always have, and just hope for the best and they stay relatively unaffected?

I am someone who travels to the US semi-regularly, and if I were to take the word of the average redditor on there, I would safely assume that I am about to be shot on sight by ICE or be captured and waterboarded (slight exaggeration, I hope). And yet when I arrive, people are living their life the way they always have. Perhaps there is a tad more mistrust between citizens, and perhaps a bit more individuals feel more free to be openly racist (these are all assumptions, not stating them as fact), but everything is mostly just functioning the way it always has.

My question is, should I be more on the side that there is going to be significant political and economic reform in the world, or will things play out the way they always have for the 21st century, where everything gets, very slowly, shittier by the day, but things remain decent enough to quell the suggestion of a civil war?

Thanks for reading anyone, and appreciate any thoughts on the subject.

P.S I have no idea how to tag this, so thanks in advance to whoever does end up tagging this post.

Most social media sites have options for muting and blocking people. As we know, muting is one-way (they see me, I don't see them) and blocking is two-way (neither see each other).

Recently, while having too much caffeine in my system way too late, I had the thought that "blocking" is a far more negative term than what it should be. Sometimes it's done in spite, absolutely. You wanna slap somebody for being how they are.

But sometimes you just recognize that there's someone who you have nothing against, whom you might even like if you met them in real life, but in this context of limited human connect, you understand that the only possible communication between you and them would be toxic. That your opinions, your way of speaking, perhaps your whole existence offends them. Or vice versa.

So you protect them from yourself by blocking them, in lieu of a better word. I think there should be a better word but I haven't figured out what it should be yet. "Spare"?

(P.S. I think tildes should perhaps have such a functionality)

I would like to learn more about environmental technology to protect Earth. Right now I am using Google Search, which is mostly bad results and not very educational, or nature documentaries, or too complicated for me. Can you please provide me with list of good YouTube channels to watch videos and websites to read about?

I am interested in greenhouse gas emission, electric car, solar panel and battery. I like animal but I do not want to read about their habitat. To learn about animal, I will watch documentary.