How do you view your participation on the Internet?
It’s no secret that the Internet has significantly changed even from just a decade ago. I’ve been thinking about online communities - particularly forums - and I’ve really begun to miss the sense of discovery when finding a new one while browsing online. It was like lifting a rock and finding an entirely new collective of people writing to one another about anything (complete with graphic signatures). It was an internet subculture in progress. Something something Wild West.
Small forums like that did a number of things that I feel we haven’t been able to replicate. You got to know people over time. It wasn’t a feed you vaguely subscribed to, but a forum (in literal definition of the word) that you chose to participate in.
I often think about what probably defines a typical experience online for people these days and I feel that the smaller and more cozy feeling of actual community has been replaced by the digital equivalent of big box stores. Twitter, Youtube, Facebook, Twitch, Netflix. Big corporate places with portals and algorithms.
These aren’t necessarily bad things in and of themselves (aside from the chasing of a world in which nothing is left unplanned), but I’m trying to hone in on the idea that the sheer randomness of this medium has more or less vaporized. The concept that anything and everything you do on the Internet wasn’t aggressively being tracked and developed into digital profiles to be traded, used, shared, and sold by ad companies and an array of other organizations was a fart in the wind compared to what it’s like online today. Websites simply didn’t have 5 megabytes+ of Javascript whereas now you need a half a dozen browser extensions to make the internet a halfway decent thing to be on.
My hunch is that once upon a time, people (at least those that even had access to it) had a kind of amateur desire of wanting to create an account at a website (particularly a forum). Coming up on 2019, I think long and hard before creating another account anywhere. There even was an expectation to introduce yourself in some introduction subforum at many of these boards.
A theme that has become completely domineering is the inflated ego linked to tribalism. I see people being so serious about everything; there can be no reciprocal discussion about anything.
I think it’s probably trivial to dismiss this as nostalgia but I feel there are some real truths to this. The Internet is something you had the choice of actually logging off and disconnecting but today, everyone is constantly connected. We are in the age of distraction and preoccupation. Think about it: how many times have you picked up your (smart)phone purely out of reflex, not even to check something with purpose? You see it everywhere in public, certainly. The constant stream of brightly colored iconography, beeps, alerts, buzzing, push/notifications, and beyond are endless. Everything demands your attention, and it is never enough.
I'm in the same boat. I fondly remember the quirky, welcoming niche communities of the mid '90s and I'd love to return to that. I think Tildes might be the best intentional approximation of some of that spirit I've seen in recent years.
I've been completely removed from social media (apart from Reddit, and now Tildes) for years. It's funny, I haven't touched Facebook in almost a decade and I still occasionally miss it. For me, the downsides of that platform heavily outweigh the advantages, and in the past year I'm feeling particularly vindicated for deciding to unplug from it so long ago— but at the same time I know that's the place where my friends and family are talking and planning events, and the absence of that in my life is palpable. In some ways my idealism has caused me to alienate myself.
One thing I've been grappling with but don't really have the grammar to articulate is about how the web has substantially deepened existing divides in the world's political landscapes. I see the polarization most prominently in the U.S. but I'm aware of similar effects in Canada, Britain, France, and Australia. I'm less familiar with the recent unrest in places like Catalonia, Tunisia, and Egypt, but I wonder if some of the same forces are at play there.
I can only speak personally but my own political experience seems like it may be reflective of the larger conversation. I'll sum it up here...
I started getting into politics in college and shortly after graduation, this would've been around 2005-2008. I'd say the web was the primary reason for this. Only because of the web was I exposed to the new ideas and arguments that caused me to walk away from the politics of my upbringing. For a time I was fanatical about the new convictions I'd found, and I spent a lot of time writing preachy Facebook posts and "debating" people online. If I'm honest with myself, I had been radicalized in a way that could've never happened before the internet.
A social media fast gave me some much-needed perspective. I realized that my online grandstanding accomplished nothing positive: No minds were changed. No policy was affected. My candidates did not win any elections. On the other hand, the emotional toll was significant: I felt the cycle of negativity seeping into my general outlook on life. My brain had been tuned to seek outrage and conflict. I was exhausted by, and eventually burned out from the Sisyphean "battle" I perceived myself to be in. My capacity for empathy with "opponents" withered.
Fast-forward to today. My political convictions haven't actually changed much since then, but my expression of them has. I've come to terms with the fact that I'm ideologically out of the mainstream and that I'm never going to see the rest of the world fall into line with my way of thinking. Now my focus is inward, on being the best person I can and finding fulfillment in other non-political pursuits.
I think a good portion of the web is still stuck in that cycle of outrage and hostility. I avoid discussing politics online (I've tried to be vague even in this post) because people are so reflexively antagonistic. Just because I believe in something doesn't mean I want to be prepared to defend it at a moment's notice. I'm not interested in evangelizing anymore. I feel like if I even mention a political issue people expect me to declare what side I'm on and immediately jump back into the fray with them. But I'm tired of doing that and I just don't care anymore. My politics are not who I am and I won't let my team affiliation define me.
I don't have a solution for the current state of things. I'd like to see people rediscover what it means to respect others and allow them space to be themselves. I think the general political climate would probably improve if all the radicalized people made their way back toward the center, but honestly I'm one of them and my beliefs are pretty well set in stone at this point. So maybe we need to just accept that other people are different and that's okay, and stop being so hypersensitive and looking for conflict, and practice the act of empathy. I'm coming to appreciate that there's beauty in a diversity of viewpoints, and it would suck in a lot of ways if we all agreed on everything.
I wish I had a better conceptual framework for understanding this journey of mine in relation to the bigger sociopolitical movements happening right now. I don't think a discussion about the evolution of web communities can be complete without acknowledging how intertwined our online experiences are with that broader context. At the core of it all is the question of how we regard identity online, and what it means to coexist with others in this shared virtual space.
I don't want this to come off like an attack because as someone with very radical political beliefs I fully understand the exhaustion this causes and the difficulty in trying to find a balance where you don't ruin your life with frustration and anger, but this reads to me like taking the high ground based on defeatism, burnout, and apathy that I see as far more common than it should be. I hesitate to reply to this at all because it's about your change to an inward focus and I firmly believe that in a lot of cases that is the healthiest thing to do, so take this as more of a general, non-personal response:
Are you not concerned that what you see as a mark of maturity and having escaped a cycle of hostility results in doing nothing and changing nothing? Are you not concerned that accepting all viewpoints and not injecting emotion leaves us with exactly the status quo at the time we got there? Are you not concerned that even if you're entirely successful at focusing on yourself and making yourself the best person you can be, not only have you not made the world a better place, but you haven't even tried?
I would like to take your approach because my experience with the internet is entirely unlike yours, and all I see are things pushing me to do exactly what you're suggesting here. I'm supposed to be apolitical or at least centrist, focus on myself, and value the expression of all viewpoints rather than the actual conditions of the people whose lives are dramatically changed by them being put into action. That's such an easy thing to slip into, but I just can't convince myself that it's correct. I have the privilege of being able to do so, for the most part. Though I'm not rich and I am trans, I'm still white, live in a relatively safe place, and have the family support to not be near starving. Does that mean I have no responsibility to the people who can't be apolitical and just focus on themselves? Since you're vague with your beliefs and we probably disagree I don't want to rest this on any specific points, but believing anything other than "what we have right now is fine" means you must recognize that the lives of other people are on the line. Is organizing the world in a way that gets people what they need to survive / a better life not the most important part of "respecting others"?
Other than the comments about the center being desirable, I really do understand what you're saying and I think I'm only a bit mean about it because I struggle with it myself. I can understand wanting to orient your life inward and I think being truly introspective is something people in general massively lack the opportunity to do, but do you really think that you are correct and have figured something out that others haven't by choosing not to participate in the struggle to make things better? I don't do anywhere near what I should, but I can't imagine a moral justification that makes doing nothing the better choice. After all, if the problem with arguing on the internet is that you think you're not doing enough, wouldn't participating in other kinds of activism be the superior way to go? Surely if not doing anything has the same effect as what you were doing before, you would look for something else to do instead, not continue to have the same non-impact as always.
Don't you think it's a little convenient that the best way to go is also the one that takes no effort? What does better empathy mean if it doesn't translate into action?
I appreciate your thoughts and the questions you raise!
I didn't mean to suggest I have any answers or have arrived at any conclusions, it's just where I'm at now. I've taken my foot off the accelerator because I'm out of gas. I agree that doing nothing isn't going to fix the world and I think I still have a lot of wrestling to do with that. All I know is, surrounding myself with outrage and negativity was having a detrimental impact on my relationships and my own mental health.
One major development I omitted that happened over the course of my story was that I got married and became a parent. Those changes necessitated a shift in priorities and available resources. I no longer have the disposable income or free time I once had, and I'm responsible for more lives than my own. When I describe shifting my focus inward, I really mean focusing on creating the best life I can for my family, rather than just myself. I'm finding more fulfillment in parenting than I ever did rallying or campaigning or arguing with people online. It's not a matter of expending "no effort," it's that my efforts have shifted to things that are more constructive and closer to home. It's not saving the world but honestly I wasn't achieving much world-saving in the first place anyway.
Obviously this isn't prescriptive for everyone. I'm not saying everyone should just give up and go home. There are still fights to be had.
Hey, I totally understand that and I hope it didn't feel like I was insulting your life choices. Sometimes we have to focus on life and our mental health, and that's fine. I mostly wanted to speak in general and a bit about myself, not target you.
This is similar to the journey I undertook earlier this year. On an almost daily basis, I would spend hours throughout the day carefully researching responses to policy arguments, editing paragraphs of text in spirited discussions between myself and civically engaged friends with different espoused views (those that could remain civil anyway throughout discussion) and NONE of it was fruitful.
Then one day I realized how pointless it was.
On the social media platform, I saw a relative of mine had recently shared a post. This relative is someone older, not especially bright, whom has spent most of their lives working for a hardware store chain. They vote a certain party reliably and as such - often share the sort of content you'd expect someone fitting this description would do... but on this day (and it wasn't even something political, really) they had shared this laughably simple VFX trick that supposedly showed "secret Chinese invisibility cloak technology" in action.
I spent HOURS carefully crafting a response that was intended to inform the relative (taking note to attempt an explanation to give that would educate them about this technology without insulting them). I even made an animated GIF via screen-capture showing how I could do the same trick in basic free video software I had access to. I made reference to the Harry Potter movies that used this same trick to make characters seem as though they could become invisible...
...And after all that - the relative responded with something along the lines of "well, I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree."
And, as I said - I realized how utterly depressing, fruitless, and frustrating staying on this platform (whose algorithm seemed to persist on continuing to surface these sorts of interactions) had become. So with that being a "last straw" of sorts, I decided it would be best if I distanced myself from such platforms...
However, I would like to make one alternate suggestion as to what you do next - based off the one thing different I did after deciding to pull away from platforms that elevate and draw attention to undeserving trite matters.
Don't argue with friends / family that are unreachable - instead find those who don't vote that you know are more sympathetic, even if just in casual conversation, toward your own views and in the idea of critical thinking in general... and help register them to vote.
I've done so with at least 4 other more sensible friends who I noticed complained of the state of things like I found myself doing sometimes, but whom were not registered to vote. Now they are registered, and I will be reminding them in future elections the way they can help change things... and hopefully they will do more to help us change things in a meaningful and positive way that endlessly arguing with wing-nuts most certainly did not.
This reminds me of a passage from Mikhail Bulgakov's novel "Heart of a Dog":
That's what I am thinking about too. It's a cycle of technology. Something emerges as pure and lightweight, is used by enthusiasts. Then it becomes popular, masses join, advertisers and governments take control. Finally, almost all enthusiasts move on to a new environment or technology. Besides the internet as a whole, Facebook and reddit are examples of communication environments heading to the late stage of development cycle.
I joined reddit 4 years ago and while back then I can't say the quality of discussion was ever high, it was at least in a much much better state. The reddit of today is actively hostile to use. Its crammed full of adverts, tracking scripts and bloat that make the website incredibly slow and the mobile website constantly bugs you to install the app so they can spam you with notifications about random posts. You can see whenever the reddit app spams everyone with a post the comments are 90% people asking why they got a notification for this. I know people complain about every website redesign ever but this one is actually horrid. I don't mind the visual changes, those look ok but the actual functionality is ruined. The UI is designed to stop you leaving the website now. There is a tiny section you can click to view the linked post but everywhere else takes you to the comments, even the title.
The website went from a place where you find cool links to websites or posts to its current state where it's a facebook for people you don't know. You can see in their announcement post where they explained that they are making the website closed source because they have to spend too much time removing the malicious bits before they can push the source out.
On Android phones there are many great unofficial reddit apps, they work fast and are customizable. In these apps the experience of using reddit doesn't get worse (not talking about content here). I use Boost, and before that used RedReader which is open source.
I don't want an app though. My usage of reddit is very minimal these days. Sometimes I click a link from somewhere else and I am bombarded with popups and 10 second waiting screen while their web app loads its 500MB of trackers
If you have android, you can install an addon for Firefox that redirects you to the lightweight i.reddit.com.
What about the rest of us? What do us non-geeks do?
(I'm assuming you mean computer geeks, rather than science-fiction geeks or comic-book geeks or game-playing geeks. Correct me if I'm wrong.)
You put into word what I was not capable of. I wholeheartedly agree. Especially the commercialization and privacy issues. But what really struck a cord with me was the randomness OP talks about. I remember sitting at my dads computer at work when he took me sometimes before we had internet at home. The feeling being left alone with this vast internet and just a search engine. What will it be this time? Music, football, forums, weird things? Anything was possible and it felt amazing. Now the internet feels small and closed off. It's especially apparent with some of the big site from my 20s. YouTube was amazing and huge and weird. Now the commercialized content is being pushed so much that I just give up finding something interesting and either watch fucking fail videos or endless Trump bashing on late night shows. I've been on reddit over 10 years and man how I have loved that place. So much that I actually made a homemade coffee cup for myself with the alien on it. I loved how every little thing in the univers had a community with enthusiastic people in it. A look at my subreddits would give a fascinating look into my life and interests. As we all know it has changed quite a bit the last couple of years and I'm not going to complain about it here. It's apparently what happens when sites become too big. I still go there regularly to mostly niche subreddit where it still has some of the old community feeling. It's still very possibly to get a great reddit experience but you have to put in some work now. Well very much like here. I don't know why I haven't seen a lot of outspoken praise of this place or its contributors here. Maybe I just missed it or maybe we don't want to jinx it. But I'm having the same feeling I had 10+ years ago when I joined reddit. Exited, humble and motivated but hesitant to participate because these people seems so knowledgeable.
I agree. I've been a denizen of the Internet since the mid-90s, and the change in content, culture, norms, etc are all very clear and frankly a source of despair for me.
I used to feel the the Internet represented both the best and the worst that humanity had to offer, but in mostly equal measure. Now I feel that the needle is heavily weighted towards the worst, and it pains me. Especially given the current political and ecological situation humanity is facing. I fear that near-term human extinction is a very viable possibility if we do not get our shit together ASAP, and that means cooperation and coordination on a global scale. The internet could facilitate that, but instead it is increasingly used to disperse what is essentially weaponized propaganda.
I often wonder how it feels to younger people, who didn't have the opportunity to experience the earlier version.
I think if you just remember that there can be a lot of value in small or medium sized communities and actively push yourself to find the cool spots, the internet can still be a fun place for discovery. What you're saying is true, of course, but that doesn't mean you can't break away and find the cool things yourself.
Go out there and find news sites and blogs that you wouldn't normally remember to check, and start following them on some RSS reader. Find forums for your more niche interests, don't settle for a subreddit or group on whatever social media platform you default to. I think once you get back into looking at things that way, it's a lot easier to find more and just enjoy the internet again. Even if you're engaging with the same kinds of topics that you normally would, it's so refreshing to go to simpler, slower places that show you exactly what you want and if you interact with anyone, they're probably a lot nicer.
Also, don't be afraid to choose alternatives to things you use that are smaller. I just decided to stop using Goodreads and move to a site that fits my needs much better and just has less of a userbase (still quite sizable though) and I feel great about it. At some point most of us adopted this idea that if we want a site for a certain need, the one with the most built-in users is the default pick and it just doesn't make any sense. A great example is the place we're in right now. I've been here for a while but I recently deleted my Reddit account so this is the only site I'm on which fills that need and my internet experience is better than it has been in a long time.
The internet is still a big place with a lot of shit to be found, you just need to retrain yourself because you aren't forced to exit your comfort zone anymore.
There's a social counterpart to this too. It's not just companies that can track you, but individuals or groups as well. On an old username I experienced a mild doxxing back before I'd ever even heard of that term. Through various accounts with the same username, I'd left enough personal info breadcrumbs that people were able to narrow down my real identity and use my information against me. In another unrelated instance, I experienced widespread, mass harassment after a reddit thread I'd commented in blew up. Neither of these were the result of corporate malfeasance and instead were simple user-to-user injury.
Both of those broke the illusion that I could spend time on the internet in a casual, carefree way. Up to the doxxing, I loved that I could be honest and open. I'd never once thought to limit what I said online because, after all, my username wasn't me. And, because it wasn't me, I ended up being a more accurate and expressive version of myself on the internet than I ever have been in real life.
Unfortunately, the fallout from those two events has made me significantly more careful about what I share online. I have a rule that pretty much boils down to "don't share anything you're not willing to have used against you." It's a crappy baseline to start from, but I'm not willing to open myself up to either of those situations again. Add in to that what you've talked about where we now have to worry about hundreds of companies tracking our every mouse movement, and it definitely feels like the internet has lost that homey, cozy quality of yesteryear.
I participate a heck of a lot less in pointless endeavors and nope out of discussions where there is clearly not no effort by both parties to engage.
I think you're correct in pointing out that divisiveness is peaking due to the anonymity of the internet and how easy it is to be toxic to others (not to mention reaffirming, if you're ignoring their response or dismissing it).
I never cared much for Facebook, and even back when I used to browse it, I never really did much posting or replying. I ended up reading shared articles and looking through pictures - not much different than what I do on reddit or tildes, just with less discussions because I had a good idea of how people were going to respond or realized I was already in an echo chamber.
I suppose I'm unique from your average consumer in that I don't find myself stuck doing it just because everyone else is doing it. I choose what I actively participate in, and as soon as I'm not gaining anything from it I stop.
I wonder about the next generation though. Already we're seeing the results of children growing up with instagram, snapchat, etc. and an always connected world. Children who were using an ipad often before they could properly communicate. We've seen a lot of negatives (because they are easy to spot), but I haven't seen a lot of positives. I'm sure they are there, in the way these people think (quite unique compared to their elders), I just haven't seen it highlighted or harnessed yet. I think we need to spend more time researching this, because we're progressing at a rate too fast to adjust to, and probably causing negative unintended changes in our biology and behavior that might be tempered by smart design.
I feel like if you look in the right places, the "old" internet is still there. For context, I was born in 1995. I didn't really get onto the general internet until 2005. However, I did get to experience the internet before Facebook, Twitter, reddit, etc. took over and replaced the general meandering and digging we used to do to find entertainment.
The old internet (or at least, what I imagine the old internet to be) lives on largely in IRC. I go through periods of activity on freenode, snoonet, and a number of other networks. The sense of community, getting to know the couple-dozen active members of a channel, is frozen in time. On the web, there are sites like Tildes, small communities that aren't trying to make gobs of money. At most they want to stay afloat, needing a couple hundred dollars of donations per month for hosting costs. The sites are still there, but you need to dig to find them (just like in the "old" days).
Of course, ignoring the more popular corners of the internet only gets you so far. For many, the internet will still aid in polarization and the spread of misinformation. These are people that you know and need to interact with in and out of meat-space.
For me IM groups have mostly replaced forums there can be a real good sense of community in an IM group, especially if the platform supports profile pics I think that really helps to get to know people. I run a lot of IM groups now and when I started I like the rest of the internet was obsessed with maximizing user counts and activity and I quickly managed to do that with hundreds of users on my group and a chat almost too fast to read but then I realized even though I had achieved all the metrics, I didn't actually like talking in my group. The messages were low effort and mostly trollish. Thats when I worked out that quality is so much more important that quantity. And I think thats where a lot of the internet is going wrong. Everyone wants more quantity because quantity creates profit but we are left with all these social media platforms that are just people spamming each other with memes and insults but nothing of value is ever gained by participating. For this reason I don't use Facebook or Twitter at all. I share updates on the software I am developing on mastodon but I treat the platform as write only because I don't find any of the content on it useful.
I also think there is a split between fun community and learning. My IM is full of random chats and stuff people are doing right now but I rarely learn anything from it which is why I go to websites like https://lobste.rs/ and here to find something worth spending more time reading and replying to. For these kinds of communities I like how there is less of a focus on who writes the content and more what they write. As long is there is a stream of well thought out comments I don't care who wrote them.
I know that people here don't like Discord, but that experience that you are describing missing from the old days is the experience that Discord offers today.
Every server is a community with it's own rules, guides, subforums (channels) and even bots that add extra functionality. Granted, is more like an IRC because is a chat in real time, but if a community is well manage each channel will show a lot of it's history, giving you the opportunity to just read or get up to speed so you can participate and continue the conversation without losing much.
You don't have portals or algorithms creating a bubble, you don't have curated content at all. Just a plain community around a topic (or several) that you can choose to be a part of… or not. Like an old forum (but more dynamic).
I don't want to defend Discord that much, but...
In the context of this conversation I don't think that this holds true. They wouldn't have a gazillion user base if their services weren't what most people wanted. And the amount and different type of communities that they are enabling with their service (text chat, voice, chat, open api, moderation tools, etc) just keep growing because in part of what OP said misses, It's one of the last places that (sort of) gives you that experience today, a place free of automated meddling, ads or another type of distractions; you just enter a server like is another mini world, lurk a little, chat a little and that's it. Its not the same, no; but its the closest that I've found.
Technical people (like myself, and I'm guessing yourself) may want to have more customization options or features, but the amount of control that they offer is not only good enough for most people, I can guess that it's more than half of them know how to use properly.
Btw, I don't know if there is a problem with your installation or what but right know on my PC is consuming less than 400 MB, which is still a lot but not even near several gigabytes like in your case.
I won't argue about the technical rant here because this topic is about the user experience (How do you view your participation on the Internet?) and because I kinda agree either way.
But I disagree with…
as a chat service
… which is one of the most saturated markets in the tech world right now. They wouldn't have gotten an inch of traction if their service wasn't any good, or what people wanted or needed.
They integrated functionality of different other competitors in one single place that mostly works without problems (mostly) and in a cohesive way. WhatsApp/Telegram/Facebook Messenger, TeamSpeak, Slack, Overwolf, and counting…
Taking into account their services, the user experience of Discord is way more consistent, distraction free, and bug free than in any of the competitors. They wouldn't be recommended if this were not the case. And this is what I'm arguing here. But your experience (and most people in here) seems to differ a lot from mine. It may seem that we are very different types of users.
And in my view, they are offering a place that works like OP described are disappearing right now. Finding a new server could be described as
Again, is not 100% the same, but it's the closest I found.