I downloaded my first image from internet in 92, just took a prolonged coffee break (a couple of kilobytes small b&w image).

You must have been in an American uni?

IMHO, old internet started to slowly die with the introduction of MySpace, Digg, and even 4chan, I call the period of 2006 to 2010 the slow decline era, then 2010 to 2016 the rapid decline era. 2016 to 2022 is the “classic centralized internet era”, and now we have the era of the “new centralized internet”, characterized by the peddling of far-right ideologies of these centralized platforms, alongside with the potential rebirth of the old, decentralized internet.

the 1st of september 1993

You’re not an internet veteran if you didn’t get your start on ARPAnet

15-20 years or so ago. Whenever smartphones became the dominant communications tool, and pretty much everyone had access to the internet from their pocket square.

Been online since '93 myself at pretty much the dawn of the World Wide Web.

Sometimes wish we could go back to BBS’s and MUDs

I use new pipe if I heed. It’s like a window into a crazy house. You can see what’s going on, but you can’t have a say.

Tubular/NewPipe and siblings allow subscribing wiþout an account. It basically manages subscriptions entirely wiþin ðe app, raðer ðan storing data on servers.

Ðe way applications should work.

Tried newpipe when I migrated from reddit. It worked 50% of thw time. Any better now?

The crazy part, IMO, is that there is no way to filter that crap, at all. I’d love a good “front-page” but no.

At least Reddit’s front page features some news sometimes while YT front page caters to 3-6 yr olds who are YT’s main demographic. It’s all AI junk clickbait brainrot and shorts content.
I could never click on any YT’s front page links. It’s not appealing to me not even in my drunkiest state

The only view of reddit I have is top/hour.

The YT trending was disgusting boring farmed content. It was like going to r/all two days ago.

i’ve got a yt channel i woulda loved to get on nebula, but it’s some kinda invite only system and i didn’t get an invite.

i’m super over yt and the $130 a month i get from them…. $130(ish) for a 50 hour a week job.

There isn’t a ton of content, but Jetlag SLAPS

I think Jacob Geller and wendigoon are on nebula and they don’t make political content. I’m sure there are others

Fair question, I don’t really watch that stuff. I’ve been watching channels like king k and Liam triforce etc. I also dabble in channels like Not Just Bikes. So nothing super political. I also follow a channel that dives into Math topics, etc.

I block content I’m not interested in and it goes away.

I agree with this idea, but unfortunately YT and other engagement social media sites don’t want that to happen. For me, I’m almost never shown videos I hate, but when I say “not interested/don’t show me this channel” it USUALLY works. Not at the time though. I’ve definitely gotten channels recommended to me that I already said I don’t want to see.

This is especially true for my mom, who is frequently getting upset by the fact that YT keeps showing her Fox News and Asmongold clips in her recommendations. I think changing the VPN to Canada helped to reduce the Fox News recommendations, but the Asmongold clips can’t be escaped.

taking a guess but I already saw some other comments on another thread mention this: The chart boys in any corps will see Engagement == Profit. Thus they will tune their recommendations solely for that. And if you aren’t bothered about properly policing your video upload platform the end result is highly divisive content thats “not boring”.

Divisive content makes people angry so they engage in comments.

i used to be on reddit. And I used to get into “debates” that devolved into a slap fight and make me angry about the people who intentionally or unintentionally riled me up with outrageous (real or my own perception) opinions.

While lemmy also has slap fights, I feel like the lack of an “algorithm” tuned for engagement prevents continuous fueling of the fire, metaphorically speaking.

YT, really Google, is just not a company I want to support. YT as a platform is not something I want to support by using. Also, data reasons.

It became downright personal for me. Its about accessibility.

My brain works a certain non typical way which is challenging to live with at best.

Sudden advertisements hits me like a physical punch in my face.

The ui focus on everything new rather then a nice subscription view with filters meant i who does not watch daily would frequently miss new uploads from the channels i do like.

I felt like i was in a toxic relationship being pushed to watch on their terms while openly hating that i protect myself from ad-sault by using blockers.

I realize i did not need things to be this way and am smart enough to build and alternative.

Now i have a yt-dlp script downloaded the latest uploads from chosen channels straight to jellyfin and also a selfhosted invidious with custom tweaks for everything i dont want to spend storage space on.

Basicly i take 100% of what i liked and never have to visit the website directly again.

They are waging war on invidious, it breaks on occasion. Yt-dlp though, stable as a rock.

its a paid platform where engagement (i.e bickering in the comments section) is near absent. And the content is allowed to address themes that make main stream media blush.

Youtube alternative with focus on educational creators. It doesn’t have an engagement algorithm and it claims to compensate creators better.

I mostly watch folks like the Linux Experiment and Veronica Explains and Oh the Urbanity. I’ve had more luck on Nebula but I am trying to sort of “put up or shut up” by interacting with the platforms that I want to succeed. Ya know? So I just browse peer tube a lot and give random videos a shot.

Yeah, getting off facebook was probably the best thing for my mental health

Its nuts to me that we figured out their strategy like 10 years ago and people just chose to ignore that information and kept using all these platforms anyway.

Delete it. Do it.

I think the most interesting thing is that you don’t see any rage bait in that screenshot. It seems the grift is working as intended to me.

”lets just see what happens"

Not even “further”. They are driving to as many splits as possible, as opposed to ideological differences.

Difference is good, because two different systems can, eh, have kids. One can disassemble them, mix them, see how it works, make thought experiments, discuss again and again. A split doesn’t involve the kids making process.

A split is different from a discussion in the sense that you use a prepared set of shibbolets to tell friend from foe, not leaving any room for synthesis.

When you have that split mentality, you punish attempts at discussion by others by interpreting it always as the biggest split possible, - as if it were worse than actually being a foe applying the same split approach, just like you.

Totalitarian societies usually poison and punish and implicitly tax discussion, but they are always welcoming to splits. And that split mentality endures far longer than the original totalitarian regime, usually. Look at Germans, not the eastern ones, but all of them, - their political and group thinking still reminisces Nazi propaganda. Israel and Palestine are one good example, but this can be seen in many other things.

Which is also why I don’t entirely align with the idea of “new middle ages”. The mechanisms we are seeing are from 1930s, not 1330s and not even 1630s.

Nazis were a bunch of tough but dumb veterans and their conservative sponsors, doing things the way obvious for these groups.

Bolsheviks were a bunch of thieves and college dropouts and their small-noble and intelligentsia sympathizers, doing things the ways obvious for them (that crappy Soviet elitism existed because the sympathizer layer wanted some sort of Plato’s state with a “better” subset of society, ya knaw, the right kind of professors, the right kind of poets, the right kind of journalists, necessarily social sciences as you see, teaching everyone else to live (if you’ve read “Heart of a dog”, professor Preobrazhensky is very clearly that, he’s not a positive character in any way, he’s one of those people who liked social inequality, just felt markets are a wrong way to decide who is where in the hierarchy), and ex-Soviet societies still are divided into “the popular Bolshevik” view of taking everything from the “enemies of the people” and dividing it as the main solution to every problem, and “the elitist Bolshevik” view of “the wrong people that can’t be allowed to make democratic decisions”, the funniest part is that these mostly intersect in the same people, these are two sides of the same coin). They too did things the was obvious for these groups. By the way, thieves and murderers are usually the same kind of personality, and failures tend to use power they have to take revenge, and intelligentsia of the described kind.

These modern idiots are a bunch of piss-smelling mommy’s cheats like Zuckerberg or Bezos who managed to capture a new industry, and their (kinda elitist) professor-cultured predecessors who think that the treatment of the industry that allowed mommy’s cheats to do that should be maintained, and all of them willingly reinforcing the hierarchy of them, a relatively small group of “founders and visionaries”, deciding where it’ll go, but I beg your pardon, there’s no technical reason for any decisions to depend on what they want. I’m certain most of these people are actually not technically more competent or understanding of the domain areas than many other people who’ve never were anywhere close to that “Silicon Valley society”.

But still all of them used different, but similar in effects and covered areas, means of propaganda. Eh, I think I’ve recently seen a wonderful article about various ways in which human psyche adapts for totalitarianism and abuse, except I suspect it was in Russian.

So - IMHO one can draw an analogy between early USSR with Bolsheviks like Stalin (the thief kind) and Bolsheviks like Lenin (the elitist intelligentsia kind) and the tech industry, where Zuckerberg, Brin and Bezos would be like the former, while Linus Torvalds, big people of Microsoft, and so on - all very different people, it’s about culture of the resulting “elite”, - would be the latter. But combined together, as some community with a vision of the future, they are pigs. They look at the world as if it were their place to decide what it will be.

So all I have to say is - in the last ~30 years we have evolved paternalism of a very harmful kind, combined with the split mentality, combined with a structure where paternalists are in power in a hierarchical system. It doesn’t matter that those paternalists employ anti-paternalist slogans and say anti-paternalist words. What matters is what they do.

In any case - in 2012 the former group were in appearances very “liberal”, now they are the opposite thing, and some known FOSS personalities have more right-wing views than you’d expect from their public appearances (which are very liberal). But all this doesn’t matter.

What matters is that for a sane discussion about politics, for example, you should have participants equally ready to accept ancap, fascism, ancom, Confucian monarchy, Buddhist theocracy, direct democracy for every decision, Trotskyist Soviet system (no professional state bureaucrats, all state apparatus roles are filled with random citizens elected\sortitioned by councils, perpetually rotated, no professional military commanders\sergeants, the same thing, and the problem of expertise is solved by good enough common education), I can go on.

Point is that you don’t get into an argument in order to tell friend from foe, you get into an argument to synthesize something new and wonderful. An argument is like a blind date. Why the hell even spend your time on telling friends from foes, unless you are taking notes for a very big kill list, but that wouldn’t be good faith behavior.

So if you think something, you might think differently after the argument.

Except this good faith behavior I described is dangerous when there are a lot of cowards in the society and the legal protections don’t work (you sort of irritate people who’d like a hierarchical society with non-transparent concentrated power, because power is concentrated by groups, and those groups accept new people of their kind, and thus such people have a chance of getting a piece of that power and don’t like you dogfooding mechanisms for preventing such a system).