TINY DRAGON GIRL ALERT!!!

This and also I feel like we’re at the point where, with AI slop being cheaper and cheaper to produce you will have to curate your experience even if the website you’re on already has The Slop Page because otherwise you would just see Worse Slop.

I honestly can't think of anything more pathetic than stating outright that you don't know how to find & follow things you enjoy on the internet

Seeking out things I'm interested in and like is the entire reason I'm on the internet???

I really wish I knew how to convince others that it's worth putting a tiny amount of effort into using the internet. I wish I knew how to convince others that stuff like adblockers were worth using. I wish it was more than just the Computer Touchers who were willing to learn

Finding weird shit on the internet is my favorite thing to do. I still trawl and read blogs and follow blog reading lists and shit.

it's been kinda surprising for me to see how quickly people have forgotten how to discover things on the internet on tbh, like you kind of just click on profiles/tags/posts you think look cool or interesting, which will bring up a whole new page of profiles/tags/posts to click on, and so on, and i feel like it really was not that long ago that everywhere on the internet was like that. even here on cohost i've seen some ppl mention how it feels harder to find anything and idk it's just like. you just click links.. if you see a post that looks even mildly interesting to you, you can check out the poster's profile, or explore the tags on the post.. you do the thing that made the internet such a powerful means of communication in the first place, yknow

The fundamental problem is that literacy of the Internet (computers in general, really) is in sharp decline due to modern computing methods (tablets and smartphones) because they present primarily tightly controlled and and curated experiences. People raised with this paradigm feel alienated, so they don't want to overcome the hurdle and do what we had to do before.

The issue is so much broader than this or any other site, this is more a microcosm of larger issues.

At least, that's what I believe.

realizing that this kind of person probably doesn't actually post anything and won't be followed by anyone so like... what the fuck are they contributing here

the algorithm delivers slop because a large amount of people LIKE that stuff

there are lots of problems with algorithmic stuff, but you can't really take them on without acknowledging the elephant in the room: pretty much every algorithmic recommendation algorithm just shows you stuff a lot of other people like

a lot of people aren't signing up to social media to find things they care about. they're signing up for social media to fill their free time and stave off boredom by scrolling an endless supply of mildly interesting posts/videos/whatever. they're not on these sites to find things that are Important To Them, they're on these sites to kill some time. waste fifteen minutes during their break at work. occupy themselves while their food is cooking. whatever. shit like that

they are not going to put effort into it, because it is not important enough to them for them to put effort into. they're looking for quick entertainment, not a new chore

casting a spell over the phone line is precisely it

I've lately been feeling that maybe it'd be a good idea if I only went on the internet by going on the computer. Goodness knows I've spent the bulk of the last, oh fuck, 23 years or so chatting to people by text and reading their blogs even if the exact protocol and websites have changed. Maybe Twitter was just a bad dream. Facebook certainly was.

I'm coming up on 34 this year and something I think a lot about as I get older is how, at most, maybe people a few years younger than me now are the last ones to remember much about how culture and technology used to be and used to intertwine in the past. I was 17, a senior in high school when the iPhone came out and my initial Japanese learning was largely done before the modern Internet and app ecosystem had coalesced towards what we have now. I remember what it was like to go forage for information and like-minded groups and in some ways, I have trouble sometimes relating to how people even just like a decade younger than me consume the Internet.

I've struggled to articulate to myself what that difference in values is between me and a lot of younger people online and I think what it ultimately comes down to is, I grew up with, more or less like you and OP are saying, the Internet being what you make of it. You chose where to navigate to and for what purpose; it was a lot easier to have a much more personalized relationship with the Internet when the infrastructure was decentralized. That definitely came with drawbacks, but I'm glad to have that perspective and history because it always serves to remind me that what we have now elsewhere isn't a natural progression, that the Internet didn't have to turn out this way.

And I'm not trying to paint with broad strokes, obviously we have plenty of people younger than us who are similarly skeptical and whatnot. But I do have to wonder how "natural" all of this feels to that younger generation who knows nothing but algorithms in the same way they only know a post-9/11 political climate and whatnot. Our generation can't turn back that time, but I do feel it's not imperative of us with sites like these to show there are other ways to be online because otherwise who's left to push back on the direction things have taken? Anybody older than Gen X is generally too old to have been technologically literate enough to use the Internet the way we did; that Internet existed for only a limited period of time and the number of people who can say they were there for it is finite. Where things head from here, I have no clue, but I feel like we need to do what we can within our power to reclaim that culture, if only to keep shining a light on how artificial the rest of the Internet really is.

Kids should only be allowed to use dail-up until they're 17

I remember there used to be a lot of curators and like with blogs they usually linked to other similar blogs. Nobody really curates anymore and the lists i see today are not really my specific niche of interest either.