Does anyone else feel hopeless and depressed about the future of the internet? It used to be my happy place but lately it's cold. It's like it's paused. How can it become cool again?

My plan was to make a forbidden and immoral ritual to ask the mighty Nyarlathothep to destroy social media, but then I realized that Nyarlathothep, being the Crawling Chaos, is probably very much pro social media and probably has many sockpuppets on Tik Tok.

Get the conglomerates out of it. Stifle everything with their monopolies.

AND TOO MANY TROLLS!

Maybe the glut of AI content being poured out lately will fix it?


No…no, probably it won't…

Secretly, I'm kind of hoping for Earth's magnetic poles to flip and a huge solar storm at the same time, frizzling every single web server in the world, scrambling and wiping the whole damn mess with those stuck-up companies and anti-social media and their A.I.s and bots and spying software and shit. Start the whole thing over again.
See, whenever a computer starts going crazy, push reset. Remove the battery, put it in again, reboot. It'd be the same thing, only on a larger scale.

It'd be a pity about the Duck, at first, but we all remember 2011, don't we? If any community is going to survive a worldwide EMP, it's us.
I just hope everyone who draws digitally thinks of printing out their comics in time, and I'll see if I can't get a jelly pad duplicator from some forgotten school basement for the zine until building a website and uploading works again.

Ok. More realistically, vigilantly keeping some cool sites as “strictly human beings only” spaces could be a start, maybe linking them in a ring to become a “human web” as opposed to the usual “AI-troll-moron-dataminer-and-spambot-web” and let's just hope this human web won't become the digital equivalent of Native reservations too quickly. I have spoken.

Honestly at this point it is beyond real fixing, I am looking into making books and games when I can to sell at cons because I don't really see a future online, with small exceptions for basic gorilla tactic advertising on social media here and there.

A huge fault I see is the fact everyone just got thrown into one massive spot and it became one huge battle royal mixed with an orgy creating this monster baby that wrecked everything, everyone becoming instant experts in every field and getting upset if told to mind their own business.

Back to my first point, I am had been looking for places, shops and meets up in physical life due to how it seems like soon the net is just going to be so restricted and controlled into a nanny state we are going back to postal money orders, art catalogues and word of mouth sales.

As Bravo says it's the big companies that are at fault. Google, Meta, Twitter, Microsoft, Apple, Spotify and so on have all taken way too much control.

Then there's social media.
Then AI and all the dumb bots.
Then there's the spammers and scammers.


A site like DD is outside of all that.
How can we expand of that though? Add user galleries so people can express their work outside of social media maybe? Add youtube embedding back to the site again so people can better share ideas and fun stuff without leaving the site…


Funny enough I saw a video on Youtube the other day that was just a Japanese woman doing something funny, like signing a song or something. It was a bit blurry, not recorded at a high res or econded at a high bitrate, she didn't have on a cool outfit and it wasn't recorded at a fancy location, there was zero editing, it was just a person sharing something they made that they thought was cool. And it was AWESOME because of that LOL!
Everyone in the comments under it were commenting how it was amazing that Youtube had actually recommended something real for once and it was like being back in the early 2000s again.

It made me realise how boring youtube is now that everything is slick, well edited with intros, thumbnails, effects, the same SUCKY edit techniques on EVERY VID… Youtube is like a bunch of boring ads because they've made all users make their stuff advertiser friendly and those who aren't have to do their own ads. It's turned the place into a boring commercial pit of shit.

I mean I could into my usual long-winded spiel about how YouTube has been taken away from the little guys like us who used it as a platform to share our original work with the world and gain some exposure like a virtual film festival of sorts, and how it's become an endless sea of talking heads and vapid vloggers who do nothing and yet have a shit ton of money for it, and how us little guys get swept under the rug, and the so-called “experts” telling us our content “isn't up to YouTube's standards”. . . .

But I won't, because even I'm tired of venting this same rant over and over again and it falling on deaf ears because I'm “desperately crying for attention.”

Sites like Youtube would need serious human-run competition - which I don't see happening any time soon. I know there are attempts like… dang, forgot what it's called, but it exists. However, users have to pay a monthly fee to keep it running, which is for a large part they don't want to base their business model on advertising. Unfortunately, that practically guarantees it will never take off. You can get it all for “free” elsewhere, and if it turns out to suck it at least didn't cost you anything (except loads of personal data, having your online movements tracked and valuable lifetime wasted with more aggressive advertising than even cable TV managed to make itself obsolete with), so keep the AI-generated standardized sewage flowing, right into everyone's brain! Getting kids addicted to it as an early age, when habit-forming works best, certainly helps. I!… need!… loads of repetitive shit nobody, including me, actually wants to watch!!

Kick the large transnational juggernauts out. Yes, sure, but as long as people take stuff that is offered for “free”, as if they didn't know very well that normally nobody will give you anything for nothing (TANSTAAFL), this is not going to happen.
Then there's the problem of server infrastructure to store all that bloat stuff. Everybody relies on Amazon's servers, even their competition. Even us, if you look closely at the bottom when you see a slow page loading. They made becoming indispensable their top priority, and it seems to pay off. Running an internet is expensive, and only a massive company can offer this kind of service at what we've come to think of as a reasonable price for users, simply because they've got so many customers to spread the cost on (and so much of their personal data into the bargain).
Suggest to introduce internet taxes in every decent country (like € 18.36 / month / household - I don't know what it'd cost, but this is the mandatory TV and radio licensing fee here in Germany, no matter whether you own a TV and radio or not; I hear it's a similar amount in the UK, and they're just as “happy” about it as we are, so it'll do as a baseline for comparison) to give them a free, public competition run by the UNESCO or something and see what happens: burning barricades and riots in the streets for all I know. Apart from that I can literally hear everyone balk against the United Nations, or worse, your own nation (no matter where you're from), running all of the internet's servers, and I tend to share that sentiment. But ask yourself this: in what way would it actually be worse than leaving the reins with Amazon and Google?

PaulEberhardt wrote:
Suggest to introduce internet taxes in every decent country (like € 18.36 / month / household

Interesting! Who would get the taxes though?

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Years ago the big kerfuffle was “free internet”.
The thing was that ISPs (internet Service Providers), wanted to charge for the usage of their servers and telecommunication infrastructure. They already charge end users but hey wanted to charge people on the other end of the line too: the providers.
So companies would pay a fee to served to customers.

The worry was that smaller companies and individuals who couldn't pay the fees would be relegated to slower internet and low priority stuff.

That was the line that big internet companies like Google and Facebook were selling though so it probably wasn't the case. THEY were going to be down for paying billions and so they sold the idea that they were saving the internet for us all…

And now they own it. T_T

We're just playing ion THEIR internet because they tolerate us.

Exactly my point, Oz.

Yeah, who would get the taxes? Wouldn't it boil down to summoning another multinational demon in the long run? What about differences in income between countries? What if any one of them chooses to “repurpose” some of it instead on sending it on?
Questions and questions.

It's a pity that decentralisation apparently never seems to work out. The internet should have been decentralised, but that seems to have been too complicated for people, who will just gravitate towards where everyone else seems to do.

EDIT (21 Oct.):
It may be different if everybody had the guts to remain firm like Tantz showed us the other day and take the appropriate steps if some social media corporation crosses a line. It takes effort and courage, though, even if it seems so simple, because nobody likes changing their habits. That's what they rely on.
I've never been on twit-X, btw., as many years ago some people wanted me to in order to save themselves from the 25 metre walk between their door and mine if they felt like asking me something.
Saves me some trouble now, apparently.