Eh, I'm left wing, that's all, and let me say that I come here to get points of view that are not my own as a way of not existing purely in echo chambers. So I'm not saying this place is bad in any way, in fact it's one of the few places I still come to find links to read and so forth. I barely touch Reddit even, anymore, cause it seems like every subreddit has become captive of one viewpoint or another. Matters purely technical soothe my mind at this point, because there's really no way to cram politics into a manual on network programming, for instance. I was probably feeling gloomy when I posted that last comment.
That said, in the comments here I see a lot of people doing great systemic analysis of the problems of the current internet, which nonetheless (as a Marxist in the real sense of the word) fails to probe deep enough to identify the fact that the internet with these problems is the internet dominated by sites with a profit motive first and foremost.
I got here in the early 90s and hung out on irc and usenet, and I watched the internet become how it is. Way I see it, we had a set of community rules that worked fine as long as we were all people enjoying our spare time here. Once people came wanting to make money, things started going bad and they've only gotten worse and worse. We always had shitty trolls, but now you can actually get rich by being a shitty troll, and that is a much worse situation.
But I think change is coming nonetheless at this point - back in the 90s there was still a lot of middle class affluence here in North America, and GenX was either doing well, or else believing the hard work mythology, the "hustle culture" thing, such that along with the collapse of communism (which was never my jam, though I have tankies in my family) the 90s and aughts were basically Capitalism's victory laps.
But these days American streets are not safe, my own quiet Canadian prairie hometown has shantytowns that spring up all over the place and get cleared out by the cops only to reappear down the street. We call stabbings "The Winnipeg Handshake" now. I grew up there, it was not like this even twenty years ago, let alone when I was a kid and rode my bike all over town, even through the bad neighbourhoods, and rarely got hassled by anyone.
Basically they've got this unsustainable economic system that requires constant steroid shots to keep going on the one hand, which they are simultaneously claiming to be the strongest and best system we can have, and you know how it goes with steroids - at first you get big and strong, but pretty soon you're randomly breaking things in public fits of rage, and eventually your heart explodes and you die.
Capitalism is in its "public fits of rage" stage of its abuse, and the surveillance capitalism internet is reflecting the weakness in that their endlessly gameable algorithms have snuffed out the old internet and simultaneously been seized by bad actors, which is also a good description of politics around these parts (we have fascists up here too, it's not as bad as it is for Americans but we've got our Trump wannabe taking over the Conservative party as I type this).
My remedies would be socialist in nature, and seem like complete nonstarters to me in the current sociopolitical environment: The Internet was conceived by governments, military and universities as a public good. My first Internet access was through my local university, not as a student, just as a public yahoo using their (not actually) paid service - in theory I owe them $1/hr for thousands and thousands of hours, but they never attempted to collect a single one of them, from me or anyone else. The old internet was not about money, and money coming to the internet is what has caused the near-complete societal collapse we are currently facing in just a few years, because the internet is indeed an amazing way to connect lots of people together and democratize things.
So, kick the capitalists off the Internet, I say. Nationalize the fibre system and bring it to everyone free of charge, it's just a bunch of wires and switches in the final analysis. Hire public service workers who do things like build and moderate a site that does the same (good) purposes of facebook (Mastadon, for instance - we already have the solutions available, we just need server capacity and code maintenance)... but with no algorithmic manipulation of users' feeds. Show them what they subscribe to in chronological order. Privacy vis-a-vis government is not an issue when you're talking about public posts, as I see it. Social media is what you do for everyone, government included, to see.
At this point, I've probably lost most of the forum. Pay for free internet with my taxes? I mean, we're paying to drone attack weddings right now, is cheap, free internet really so obscene in comparison to the US military budget?
I'm also not saying that removing the algorithmic leeches from our social media lives is going to solve everything, but it will certainly prevent another Cambridge Analytica. I have no idea how big a problem bots are currently, but I'm positive they're gonna be a much bigger problem in years to come, with Machine Learning well in play. As long as people with profits to worry about are deciding what happens on the internet, we're screwed, man.
The internet, like medicine, needs the profit motive completely outlawed. That's the bit that I'm pretty sure is a non-seller to a lot of the folks around here. But that's ok, like I said, I'm here as one part of my attempt to not live in an echo chamber. Mostly I just try to read and soak up what gets said, because I am aware of my bias. But I do love the internet, and even before the internet I was a BBS kid, I have used modems to socialize basically my entire life, and this place is just no fun at all, anymore.
I just get grumpy sometimes, I guess, when I watch people get 99% of the way there, but won't take the name of Capital in vain. Profit must not be interfered with. This is the Ferengi timeline.
Cheers if you made it this far. :>