It allowed access to information, alternative views (real ones not insane made up ones), no ads, and an escape from having to hear a dominant narrative.
Now the internet has become the new TV. A lot of younger people I see are shunning it.
That makes my old hacker heart smile.
There were plenty of insane views :). Let us never forget the timecube [1]
(Admittedly I was also pretty drunk).
So really we are all fools for not taking it seriously enough to self-help promote this into a side hustle.
You even mentioned pedophiles as scum without recognizing that pedophilia is a condition that people have beyond their control and is separate from child abuse which is an activity people do and is within their control. Back in the day, that was also how people justified homophobia. There was a famous case in my country of a kindergarten teacher who was wrongly convicted and went to prison for something like 20 years because of essentially the popular belief that gay + satanic = child molester. My father was that type of person. He thought gays were generally bad people - they obviously weren't following Christian teachings so they must have no morals and would be just the sort of people who might want to infect others with AIDS. Today, if you voted for Trump you must be just the sort of person who wants to lynch black people because you're obviously generally bad and have no moral compass.
But would be interesting to see how Plexs numbers have grown lately.
https://seedboxes.cc/ https://dediseedbox.com/wiki/knowledgebase/jellyfin/ https://www.rapidseedbox.com/blog/jellyfin-vs-plex .. etc.
Not really. I see the stark difference when i visit my parents (in their 60ies).
TV is always on and pretty much always repeating the same things. Little variability, really poor content. It's basically serving the same old thing to the same old people.
The internet instead has much more variability. There's so much plurality of opinions they often clash against each other.
> A lot of younger people I see are shunning it.
What I see is younger people starting to shun social media, which is something that makes my heart smile as well. It seems we're finally shaking off this performative collective craze.
Social media was definitely a mistake that made everything worse. I hope it dies soon.
Ye. Hopefully from cultural change and not government bans though.
Young people seem to prefer small private group chats nowadays?
When I was a young teenager in the early-mid 00s, I surfed to an article explaining how the moon landing was faked, with photographic evidence and plausible logic (like the "last of dust on the lander"), blah etc.
There was a brief moment when I thought what I was reading was real, because it was the first time I came across something fabricated communicated as fact.
Of course, there is a very fine line between that and actually realizing something that the world doesn't see, but that's part of what makes it fun.
You would run into people like that maybe once every few months. These days you are basically guaranteed to run across multiple people like that every time you log on.
YouTube figured it out with comments around 2013 or 2014, but it got a lot worse about recommending videos from low-viewership channels in the last few years, which exposes you to a lot of wackos.
Having everything be polished, scripted and ad friendly is tremendously boring. My complaint over the last few years with YouTube was that I missed the wackos. They were the thing that made the web interesting to begin with.
I do still occasionally get some good videos from smaller channels, but smallness is a lot more relative these days. A lot of channels that I have started following in the last few years begin to see growth within less than a year. YouTube has gotten really good at identifying quality content and amplifying it, with the end result being that the 300 view videos in your feed are just market testing.
One thing you can do if you’re into the weirder side of YouTube is to append “before:2012” to the end of your searches; I’ve found some cool stuff doing that.
That you knew of.