/dep/ - Depression★

yeah, i miss old forums too. they had their own issues but it was less transient. i hang out in a bunch of generals related to my hobbies, they can be quite comfy since it's usually a rotation of the same people and a sense of community starts forming, recognizable posters, inside jokes, etc. you can also join smaller discord servers, but i can't stomach real-time chat tbh

It is the depression, for sure. It starts slow with you losing interest in things that you once enjoyed and once it persists long enough it takes over your personality and you eventually make it a habit of sabotaging the fun out of everything.

I am just starting to dig myself out of that hole and now it is clear that there are still plenty of things to do online, it was just that I didn't care enough to notice.

Not really, you just need to have interests in specific stuff. Reddit is still good for discussions. I got really into the local llama sub and have been spending a lot of time fucking around with AI recently. There are a million guides out there to teach you how to do anything you want. Anything you might want to do with software, some nerd has probably already coded and fully documented and slapped an MIT license on.

>>299097 (OP)
Yes and no. I've certainly been dealing with anhedonia and depression for years and like you I'm closer to 30 than 25 now. Time has passed me by while I was stuck in my monotonous daze and I lost interest in pretty much anything that I used to enjoy, digital and analog. I also tend to engage in nostalgia seeking online, watching videos about games I used to play over a decade ago whose servers have long since been shut down, trying to rewatch anime that resonated with me back then etc. But I don't think it's necessarily that there's nothing to do online, though certainly the monopolization and sterilization of online platforms and discourse on them makes the net feel far more hostile now than it used to be, I always feel like there's a world of interesting stuff waiting somewhere, I just can't quite seem to find it because of my lack of interests generally. I rarely search for anything specific, I'm resigned to just surfing whatever algorithmically recommended slop comes my way. If I was truly interested in some topic though, I know that I could find fun rabbitholes and lose myself in them again.

3 factors.

1. Stabilisation: the internet of 5 years ago is largely the internet of today. The internet of 2010 was not the internet of 2015.

2. Commoditisation: Internet services are now the norm, and associated communities have by now normalised and subject to market forces. There's a certain expectation of functionality and delivery of such is required to survive - the maintenance of which hinders interesting and breakout activities without investment which in turn requires a marketable face and guts.

3. Process optimisation: in my lifetime (closer to 40 than 30) passive entertainment (media) and some active forms (vidya) shifted away from rigidly scheduled, requiring skill and investment to move outside of the timetable. Buying a VCR for my family was an investment 1/10th the cost of a new car. A house with both a sega genesis and a SNES was considered on rich kid street. Renting vidya from blockbuster was a thing that happened and scarcity gave games meta-value and social clout.

Our cousins in the FOSS community who have burned their lives up making cool shit we can use for free mean that now, 95~% of everything in mankind's history that can be converted to digital format is available . Access is simply a price issue at worst, and a knowledge issue in most cases.

With the event of platforms like Nvidia+, vidya of nearly every sort and graphical complexity is simply a monthly subscription that can be paid in 2 hours of minimum wage work - you don't even need to sink thousands into a heavy computer. So why don't you ?

Yes, we're getting older and more wretched as the years pass but the sense of *accomplishment* and *treasure* of enjoying things like vidya has been optimised out of the assembly line. I have a big box copy of the original Icewind Dale which I consider one of my life treasures, but you can get an improved experience of consuming that "essential" product for cheaper than I paid for it 24 years ago, as part of either a subscription service or something added onto the backlog pile and forgotten for another 5 years.

Our elders in the Usenet era (early 90s) lamented about the eternal September - when the incidental barriers of complexity and community kept the noise and the parasites away, so that the value they were collectively building and sharing didn't require much in the way of manual gatekeeping. Don't ignore that as a factor, but I think now the glory of massively available entertainment, e-books and vidya introduced a new situation, that of universal parity.

As a possibly instructive lie, consider gold. It's not particularly useful outside of some areas of chemistry and engineering but quite serious and sensible people want to move national economies back to using it for legitimate reasons. It's utility and 'value' is in the scarcity of it in the environment and the difficulty in harvesting it.

Now draw the parallel to Vidya - in my lifetime the development, manufacture and sale of such things went from *having to phone a premium line to get a chance of getting a copy, because nobody you knew had a credit card * of something like C&C Tiberian sun, to having free games by the literal million being aggressively shoved in your face because the value to the developer - and the developer's owner - of you playing the game is higher than that of you paying for it.

Therefore

The secondary and accessory enjoyment and experience of having and being part of something valuable has genuinely been removed; because providing such value was optimised out of the assembly line and supply chain as unnecessary.

Thus

If any given activity is of equal cost - e.g. subscribing to one service over another - and of largely equivalent payoff, on what criteria should you make that decision?

We have to make and experience the value ourselves through our own efforts - as a conscious choice. This I think is a big part of why D&D and table topping has had the explosion of popularity - yes you can sink a few thousand into it and get a streamlined experience, but you have to *make* something of *your own* to participate, and that has value by simple virtue of the time cost. If the *effort* is beyond you for health reasons, then that's the problem - but you do have to realise that something you enjoyed when consuming a product, wasn't the product - it was an accident of the process.

So rephrase the OP question:

Is nothing online worth doing? no - if you think so then the question should really be:

What would I consider valuable to do online - given anything I want to do is probably pretty easy?

Which is when we come to the problem of decadence that has killed empires consistently throughout history. People have no sense of accomplishment or fulfilment in testing and proving themselves against scarcity and adversity, so they develop better and fancier sauces - because that's all their skills and appetites make it possible for them to do.

As a kindness I leave working out what the online equivalent of making a new and better sauce as a mental exercise for you to feel accomplishment over.

>>299101
That is part of it but it is not just in our heads. It is commonly accepted now that society is decaying with enshittification. Games, films, tv series, forums, food, wild animals, old growth forest, finance, non-smart electrical appliances, language itself - society is decaying in more ways than we can count and becoming horror.

>>299122
Manufacturers have shifted from targeting a niche, to targeting the largest demographic possible. They stopped producing what they were best at, what no one else could produce, and instead started making what most people could and wanted to buy. As a result, they lost much of their identity and character, and became bland and generic. A 90s BMW was a totally different car from a 90s Peugeot. Now both make crossover SUVs, and the biggest difference is the badge.

>>299097 (OP)
Piracy! And let me kindly remind, that the best way of having something done is to actively intervene about it. Do you want back the feel or do you have pretty clear what you wish to find here?
>Maybe I'm just jaded
Maybe both things are happening.
>People aren't invested in anything anymore, things are more permanent on this slow imageboard than they are on mainstream spaces.
Normie world is vapid and soldout. No wonder.
>Games back then used to be launch and play.
So, piracy is important, isn't it? There are people around here who uses Blender, I wonder if they know UPBGE.
>I wish I could will myself to create things
Check first if you suffer from something called "undefined sacral". To save you the agony of even trying.

But tell us, what's your ideal webpage like?

What the hell is wrong about this place are you all INTPs in Ti-Si loop?

>>299125
>undefined sacral
>>299126
>INTPs
>Ti-Si

you both got it wrong, it's the age of aquarius affecting the astral projection of the fourth chakra

>>299134
"undefined sacral" OP here. I rest my case.

>>299097 (OP)
>It's all commercial, brands instead of people, everyone is hostile by default unless they try to sell >you on something, nobody is there to have fun anymore. Nothing is authentic anymore.
>Now it all feels empty and hostile. It's almost the same experience as moving from a rural village to a big city just in the digital world.
Social media were a mistake, or at least the way it was implemented. they promoted narcissism, conformism and clout chasing. which doesn't foster creative minds or good people in general.
say and do things that please/amuses the crowd even if you hate it or don't really believe in it. any contrarianism from the mainstream opinions will be meet with hostility.
There are more bad actors now on the internet. who tries to mold the internet more to their liking.
Governments didn't like the free flow of information(increasing the likelihood of dissident) as such tries to find way to restrict internet in order to mold people back to government approved narratives and ideas. activists also see the internet as a cheap and effective way of spreading their propaganda.
Corporations now design their products to be addictive/money milking first and good second. they are also in bed with the 2 former groups in return for favors. they also try to appeal to the widest audience because every alienated person is a lost sale. Content creators don't tend to be better either. they just copy and paste the latest slop formulas. because their goal isn't to make something good, but to make fame and money with the least effort. just like corporation they try to be as tame as possible in order to not alienated people. Most of the internet traffic now is concentrated on just a few sites, which isn't good since it gives these sites owners massive influence to mold people. google can now decided what people will see when they search something, reddit can decided what topic/narrative/content is allowed.
back then people also tend to stay in their lane, if you liked gaming you joined a gaming forum, each place having it's own culture and rules, sure this meant that anything good stayed there but also anything bad.
now when discussion are mostly relegated to a few sites, censorship is rampart in an attempt to cater to everyone's sensibilities.
if you want the old internet back, you need the chaotic wild west environment internet had back in the early 2000s. people posting content as a hobby and not for any gains. Don't think any of the early flash animators on newgrounds went through the effort because they expected clout and cash. Probably did all of that for fun. yes they didn't always gave it their all, but the effort put in was usually above minimal. they also didn't crunch out content every other day, because they cared about keeping their audience. unfortunately there isn't much left of this because of how commercialized the internet have become.