The internet is worse than ever – now what?

Summary:

Our minds have not (and will not, for the foreseeable future) caught up with the advancement of the internet which introduces millions more people than our brain is used to dealing with. We are used to small tribe-sized groups, where we all shared similar interests. The shared interests acted as social glue, which kept the tribe together. We were isolated from other tribes via rivers, mountains, etc, so this worked to keep a sense of unity among the tribes. The tribes would think the other tribes were crazy or evil, and would fight with them because of it.

Instead of rivers and mountains, the early internet had "digital" separators where most communities were small and surrounded a particular subject (think of certain games, pets, art, music, cars, etc). Nowadays, social media has removed the dividers, and we are more likely to see, hear, and interact with people who we (seemingly) don't agree with on any subject, which makes us categorize them as "other". This puts a negative lens on our minds where anything the "other" tribe does wrong, we are more likely to believe it. In contrast to how we begin to see ourselves and our own tribe, where we are more likely to dismiss any wrongdoing by our own members.

What to do about it? Kurzgesagt suggests we attempt to keep ourselves to smaller communities, so we can mimic the early, more tribal stage of the internet until evolution can catch up (just for clarification, they suggest we do this as individuals who change our own behaviors, and they aren't referring to a group of people).

I figured this might be interesting to the community of Tildes, since this is a pretty small community compared to sites like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Reddit, etc. I wonder how we could achieve this, now that the larger sites have shifted peoples' shorter attention, translated peoples' feelings of validation/worth to likes and shares, and fuels rage-bait algorithms for the sake of funding their website through more interaction. Is it even possible for us to revert the internet back to what was, or would we need to evolve enough to make a significant change in how users behave online, and which sites they choose to use? I'm wondering if a larger power needs to step in to put regulations on website companies where open communication is the main draw and purpose of the site. If that were the only solution, I don't know how we would avoid the potential abuse of the regulations, nor do I know of all the other downsides that kind of solution would bring.