Old internet is dead. I don't even bother anymore but when I do I just end up wasting time on the same old sites which aren't even fun to begin with. I tried to quit and go out instead and for a while I think I became a normalfag and even sorta enjoyed it for a while. But then I got disillusioned with it all and realized that it's not for me, so now I am back here again but everything is dead.
I think you are just changing. Like for me they were fun in the sense that they time wasters like video games. Can be fun in short burst but becomes pretty depressing real quick after a significant amount of time is spent on them. Over the years the neglected responsibilities and missed opportunities pile up and I realized how much time I wasted on this stupid pointless bullshit, causing me to not see it as fun anymore. But you it is hard to leave because it got so bad that you do not know how to do much else
What ruined them for me were spammers and right-wing faggots who constantly post rage bait, politics, and culture-war bullshit on every board. Those places tend to have really interesting threads that now appear every once in a while because 75 percent of threads are just off-topic trash made to piss you off. Like for example, I frequent 4/g/. Thought I’d be viewing discussions of like-minded people about a certain things related to technology but NO. It’s always a thread about how (Minority group) is “ruining” something or a screen-cap of (Retarded Politician) who posted something on twatter, or (brand A) sucks and (brand B) is better, or somebody complaining about how they can’t get a simple tool like an adblocker to run. Technology MY ASS. It’s like that on half the site while the other half is gen alpha normalfags posting unfunny reddit humor or something painfully stupid. Especially on boards like worksafe-GIF, Advice, or R9K. The whole internet is making me want to kill myself. Where did all the normal people go?
>Where did all the normal people go? It is normal to enjoy political discourse and the enragement of those considered the enemy. It is normal to draw stark comparisons in dichotomies such as in the political, cultural, or video game console wars. It is normal to have a laugh over stupid things and people. Being so against this either means you're not normal, or you're one the frequent "enemies" that gets stepped on the most. Probably an Xbox fanboy!
>>215078 I mostly dislike how sexual everything has become. Can't talk about video games or anime on 4chan without some horny retard coming in spamming pictures and trying to make people cum. And if you tell him to fuck off you just get dogpiled and told "It's always been this way newfag!". No it fucking has not.
>>215119 There was a pretty niche imageboard that had a board especially for hikkikomoris, it's was genuinely good and had actual NEET and few real western hikkis, but is mostly empty now because many immigrated to Discord, that was straight from the horse mouth.
>>215072 >I tried to quit and go out instead and for a while I think I became a normalfag and even sorta enjoyed it for a while. But then I got disillusioned with it all and realized that it's not for me, so now I am back here again but everything is dead. I can relate with all this. Except for the fact that imageboards are never been my thing. You might try to ignore them more and focus on hobbies and shit, it's way better than these places
>>215124 How do you deal with the fear of missing out? Hold on! I don't mean the normie way. I mean the quest to build understanding of the reality we live in. It's conflicting that on the one hand there's the idea that it's better to be free from any idea about reality yet on the other hand a life of blissful unawareness of all societal drama seems not right somehow.
>>215124 The internet isn't a stronger drug, but everyone has 24/7 access to it and you effectively can't get exhausted from consuming it, which makes it worse than conventional drugs. It's also more insidious because it creates addiction through "natural" processes in your own body, not from an external substance, so it's much harder to categorize the same way as other drugs or harmful addictions.
That being said, I don't think the internet is as addicting as people think it is. The real problem is that the world outside of the computer is so shit that people would rather sit in front of a display and hit the refresh button for 10 hours straight than participate in real life.
You could say that if the internet didn't exist, people would be more motivated to fix the world since they can't use the internet as a passive coping mechanism. But you still can't fully blame the internet, because before internet the TV served a similar purpose.
The real problem is any content that can be digitally delivered to you with no costs or limitations because it allows your to just sit and consume with too little mental and physical effort.
>>215149 Please elaborate because it seems more like gambling: once in a while there's a pay-off that as far as I know can't be found anywhere else but it requires a huge investment.
>>215148 >How do you deal with the fear of missing out? I've had some normalfag experiences. But even before those, my worldview was the same. How you see the world is determined by your IQ and genetics. To quote Cioran: "What I know at sixty, I knew as well at twenty. Forty years of a long, a superfluous, labor of verification." >you effectively can't get exhausted from consuming it (media) uh, you definitely can? See >>>/dep/284879 >It's also more insidious because it creates addiction through "natural" processes in your own body, not from an external substance The "external substance" is the screen flashing with colors and sound and crap in front of your eyes. >The real problem is that the world outside of the computer is so shit that people would rather sit in front of a display and hit the refresh button for 10 hours straight than participate in real life. And rightly so. Reality is boring and full of suffering and cringe. >But you still can't fully blame the internet, because before internet the TV served a similar purpose. I'm not blaming anything, I was just telling the other anon to take a break from it and find some more interesting hobbies than imageboards.
>>215168 Imageboards outside of 4chan rarely last more than a few years at best. There's no 8chan-sized alternative at the moment, but there's plenty of imageboards and other forms of website that have cropped up in recent years and receive enough activity to pass the time.
You'll have to deal with most users being 15-25 years old however, which will make you feel fucking ancient if you're in your late 20s/early 30s like the average /britfeel/ user (AKA me).>>215168
I feel like there is no escape from trying to become a normie. The internet being an escape for loners was a lie that I idiot bought for half of my life. Now the internet abandoned me and I'm left stranded with no place to go. I feel like an idiot thinking that I could run away from social interaction in a world run by humans. I am no genius who can do everything alone.
>>215230 >I feel like an idiot thinking that I could run away from social interaction What are you talking about? You just need to use the internet to download movies and books and music, for example, and avoid communities. You don't find social interaction in a philosophical book in PDF format, lol. If you visit online communities, you cannot complain that the internet is giving you social interaction (which is a normie thing by definition, even when it's between outcasts). Just use the internet for noble things, like the aforementioned.
>>215230 I know how you feel man, but for me it's not even an option, I'm so autistic and isolation has made me even weirder, I'm like an alien stranded on Earth with nowhere to go
Nearly everything you hate about modern times can be attributed to smart devices and social media becoming mainstream and available to normies and evil corporations.
If the internet was decentralized and power was given to the people the flowers would grow and everything would be more colorful and diverse. Imagine 12 different youtubes competeing each having their own quirks and rules. Or 4chan not having a monopoly on image boards and just how many sub cultures there would be on other chans instead of them being wastelands with 4 posts a year.
the thing is, the internet and smartphones aren't essential for society. They don't need to actually be there. Smarphones and social media is one major step closer to a true hivemind where there is no individuality, freedom of speech and privacy. It's actual evil.
>>215751 One day the internet will be so pozzed you can't even log on without an internet ID and people will build tons of local meshnets and shit will be just like you hope the internet to be, so many local variations of imageboards and jewtubes, not to mention all the LAN parties.
>>215078 I think it's both. Obviously we (anyone around 30 years old or higher) changed as people and I think factually most of us became more jaded and depressed.
But image boards and image board culture also changed. Times changed. The userbase changed. If we use 4chan as an example, a LOT of outsiders flooded the website and demographically changed the make-up of the boards. A lot of them are also very young. I know the term gets overused but a lot of "zoomers" did take over the site and they come from a completely different culture and internet background to genuine older 4chan users. Remember when "lurk moar" used to be a thing? It was a means to defend the unique culture and posting habits of boards. Newfags got called out and ridiculed. It was a defensive mechanism. One which maybe worked in 2006 but not in 201X when the daily user count began to reach eye-watering amounts. The 16 year old retard in 2020 isn't going to give a shit about restraining himself or respecting such outdated ideals. After all nobody else is and on the internet he grew up upon, that's a foreign concept. Small communities like tiny forums have never existed to him. Everything is centralised. Reddit, 4chan, twitter, tiktok, twitch, youtube. He's a voice pissing into the wind with hundreds of thousands of pissers without a care in the world. The youth mentality now is that taking things seriously or being genuine is seen as "cringe". So piss away.
The internet changed and we changed. And we simply don't fit in anymore.
>>215754 I remember the British government genuinely trying to implement online porn ID's. The world is so clownish now that I can see this becoming a possibility in a few more decades. After all, younger generations are so utterly computer inept that they won't understand the risks of this or have the means to bypass it. Especially since everything is becoming smart phone and app based..
I miss old MMO grindfest games, where people played one character for years, I could log in, talk to some people knowing they would be there, grind some location together for few hours like its some important thing. Now its all dead or became gay beyond recognition. No one is interested in just playing game like its kind of second life, people just want quick adrenaline rush or they're bored and go to another thing. I rember 4chan before scientology "special operation" and suprisingly dont really miss it that much, especially when I find some old saved threads and try to read them now.. but pretending im some fucking elf wizard for years with other equally retarded people, that really hits me hard now
I never invested much of myself in internet forums so from my perspective I've seen no change. Same petty powerstruggle drama, same behind-the-scenes clique-forming, same no true scotsman endless petty squabbling because no one has any healthy venting habits. There wasn't much of a living breathing pulse in any of it. What are you actually looking for, if not just your own past?
>>215072 social media killed the image board. I miss old web days, but now everything's just run by corporations. it's no fun anymore. >tl;dr fuck jannies
My biggest take away from wizchan was that even in a den of losers a social hierarchy forms. Being with others is just an endless sea of conflict, its something I don't really mind, but deep down of course I think we all wish it wasn't like that. This isn't an appeal to better ourselves, but rather just an acceptance that things are always imperfect, there is always a piece missing, and something is consistently wrong. The source of the frustration; an imagined reality where things are in order.
I'm so sick of this that I can't get enough of it! Give me more of that thing I don't want!
I legit think imageboards are to blame for ruining my life. Even if I always had a tendency towards instant gratification nothing is as addicting as imageboards.
I realized that when I spent another day on 4chan after I was convinced I was bored of that place as all I see is the same repeating threads and any interesting thread just dies and gets inane 1-liner replies. It's truly soulcrushing to find a thread about a rarely discussed topic you are passionate about and you try to engage with people and just get ignored.
I feel like if we did a psycho-neurological study we would find imageboards to be as addicting as drugs. I've wasted my 20s on this and felt like a fool but then I heard stories of people wasting their youth with drug addiction and now that's who I relate with. Only I got no crazy stories to tell.
>>215792 true. they are on socials, so technically they are on the internet, but that's not "the internet", most don't even have an actual PC and don't know any website besides youtube or facebook or things like that.
>>215792 my life did not suck 10 years ago but imageboards took all my attention away and let me find likeminded doomers who pulled me in deeper into despair and defeatism
im not saying i would have become a gigachad without imageboards but just posting on internet forums, maybe finding some online "friends" and play video games and watch tv would have been healthier for my well being.
>>215791 I have crazy imageboard stories to tell but they're somehow less believable than my hallucinogen related stories >yeah you once started posting the word kek on some boards somewhere in 2013 and that led to an ancient deity being worshiped and Donald Trump being elected, yeah right and I'm Napoleon.
>>215798 There were past instances yeah, like a very niche wow thing. I checked archives once and noticed one in 2012 maybe it was and then like a year long pause on one board, then my posts and from there trend shot way up, I took advantage of the topkek get on /s4s/ to have other people jump on baord. I never said I invented it, just had a hand.
>>215072 >Imageboards are dead Seems that way. 4chan recently removed the ability to see how many unique IP's are posting in threads. This leaves a lot to implicate about the site as a whole and is pretty much an enabler for schizo and spam posting.
Holing up LDARing or Touching grass and finding something out there, where or whatever that might be seems like the only real avenues left.
Proclaiming it "dead" is part of the problem, it's part of this expression of passive consoomerist hopelessness that dominates imageboards today. Just as 'Dead Internet Theory' is masturbatory fantasy that hints at a problem but turns it into something 'amusing' to make Youtube iceberg videos about.
If you care about imageboards or the 'old' internet - then you should be spending just a little bit of time trying to BUILD a better internet, actively. I'm not saying you need to invest 5 hours a day or something, but just posting complaints on existing sites doesn't fix shit.
The problem is collective. It's social. To begin with, the core structure of society today is pretty simple. You have central banks that create money out of nothing, these banks represent the interests of elites who own and work at the highest levels of these banks and in corporations and government. They have an infinite money machine and they're the ones who get to direct where that infinite money goes first. If you're posting on an imageboard, you're likely the last person to benefit in any way from this system - I mean if you're a NEET you've probably wised up to things, but generally most posters are not that wealthy, are male and so on - and so we're the ones ultimately the system is trying to exploit most (other than animals, and those in 'developing' countries). This system is absolutely pure evil and doesn't do any good, even for those who think they benefit the most from it. Every one of us should be working to change this system so that people can benefit from their efforts and so that wealth can be more equitable distributed, thus created a more truly stable, prosperous, wealthy world. BTW every single "issue" you can complain about - ultimately comes back to this core issue. Anyone who attempts to fight for a social issue is ultimately like an ant fighing a dragon. Any amount of support or money you raise is nothing compared to people who create money out of thin air and can direct it wherever they want.
Anyway, the people with this power and money want to maintain their position and also maintain the stability of productive, relatively stable societies so they can live their lives. They may profit from wars limited to certain regions or outskirts, they may benefit from anarchy and disorder in various ways but the thing they really want is just to maintain their position and have society remain relatively stable an prosperous. They're selfish, they believe in their own value, and they don't tend to have a deep empathetic understanding of those who work underneath them. Millie Bobby Brown doesn't lose sleep over the life of the wagie who serves her her giant Frappuchino. Klaus Schwab probably genuinely believes most wagie normalfags wouldn't mind owning nothing (and I'm not sure he's even wrong). Just like you probably don't think about the animal whose flesh you consumed for dinner, or the 20 year old guy in China who put together your OLED gaming monitor. "It's just the way things are, I don't want to get stabbed".
So these people want us ASLEEP and PACIFIED in general, they want us generally hopeless of changing things for the better. They'd probably rather not have us even have the hope of building nice, meaningful relationships and so on - because even that could be a threat to them. At least that's how the "zero sum game" mentality people tend to see things - surely you've experienced that insecurity before yourself? Sort of wanting to see someone else fail because seeing them thrive would make you feel less by comparison? I know I've felt that before, though hopefully I've mostly moved on from that. Anyway I don't think this is just limited to elites or those who rule is - in some way it's almost like every fucking person doing somewhat well in society selfishly wants everyone else to suffer a bit and do just a bit worse. I think this sort of psychology gives rise to ideologies and beliefs - I think "dead internet theory" and masturbatory shit like that is exactly that, it's basically a way of pushing others to be hopeless, and maybe pushing vapidity, fakeness, 'irony' and so on so that nobody else really rises above anything.
So 'authenticity', real communication and so on are being strangled out of existence - because frankly there are a LOT of 'comfy niggers' as I call them who simply live at a level where all their needs are met and they're amused enough that they don't really WANT to be provoked into facing anything real, let alone seeing other people make real connections or live authentically.
The pure nostalgia, which I myself know intimately, the sense of loss and the sense that things were better in the past - I know this really well. It's like the main thing i've struggled with my whole life… but this pure nostalgia and acting like this is something "in the past" or in a past era is also another form of bullshit, but here we have to be careful because there are also those who try to deny that things were better. I mean I will legit get people insisting to me that 4chan was perfectly the same before and after 2016, that it never changed, but I know and have even looked into this in detail, even statistically to know that that's not true. It's not ALL terrible, but things have degenerated. But see the fatalism of "things were better back then" is an escape from facing the issue - the issue is WHAT FACTORS MADE IT GOOD and IN WHAT WAY WAS IT GOOD and WHY, etc. These are the things we'd discuss if we actually wanted to tackle the issue.
Watch this video for a bit and try to listen to what's being said - https://youtu.be/PmlnhO2_DUI . I think the point being made here is that THE SYSTEM (what I've been describing) knows that human "connection" on some level is necessary, as motivation, to get people into their positions as cogs and so on, nobody would do anything without some degree of hope… but the system ALSO wants to prevent the connection from becoming too real or strong.
It's not just 'THE SYSTEM' that wants this separation, like in some sense even as individuals we are prone to liking the status quo of amorphousness rather than the old tribalism. I mean I sure as shit don't want Haitian cannibal gangs moving up the street from me and maintaining their relationships, I wouldn't cry over their gang-love being disrupted a bit, and I'm sure you can think of many ways that you don't want others to be doing too well in that regard. So there's common sense, justified self-interest in this too - but I think the thing is, we're all being 'bought off' in a sense by a system that provides our necessaries (even if we're right on the margin of homelessness) and provides some sense of safety, but aspects of this system now are so out of control that it's sort of ruining even the most basic aspects of free online communication - which has always been a good thing and can't really be compared in any way to Haitian gangs. Talking online is good, it's liberal, it has the capacity to break down barriers and so on.
Now there were many of us, especially us Wizardly types, who came to really get something more out of this online connection than your average normalfag. The average normalfag was out there having superficial, dumb relationships for the most part, but perhaps that was what they needed to be doing at that place and time. They were learning their lessons or whatever. We came to appreciate this ability to reach out and connect, because we didn't have anyone to connect with IRL. But even a lot of normalfags got SOMETHING out of the occasional online connection. But see… fucking boomer aunts ruined everything. See at some point around 2018 or so? Maybe earlier. I made the very rare journey and visited an aunts house (when even she wasn't there) and discovered that she had Youtube as an 'app' on her living room TV. It hadn't even really occurred to me that this was something that existed - I was still living the delusion that the internet was something you accessed via a PC, or at least a smartphone. I had no idea that it had now become normal for even the average boomer to watch Beatles documentaries and performances via Youtube on their living room TVs. So the internet had already pretty much merged with home devices like TV's, and sure my aunt wasn't posting on Wizchan via that TV, but these highly commercial parts of the internet had really overtaken everything.
This is what destroyed most of imageboard culture - is that centralised commercialised internet, which really ties very closely to the whole central banking thing i mentioned, basically eating up everything - I think it was about 2016 when we started to see every second fucking video on Youtube have a 'Wojak' or 'Pepe' inserted in the preview image, or where it became this "cool" thing for people to make constant references to those cultures. It was simply people trying to make money, having access to Encylopedia Dramatica and that sort of thing, and being aware of enough of 'internet culture', that they started basically appropriating it for their own purposes - mostly to make money. Discord was cancer for imageboards, they took every fucking meme image and reference and you couldn't even load the app without it throwing these references in your face obnoxiously, it allowed cliques to work together to push their own insane crap on imageboards, and again universalised that culture, that had earlier on been at least somewhat niche. Then you face Facebook, Instagram, Youtube etc all providing monetary motivations for people to produce content recycling 'internet culture' references, and mining into all the minutiae of otherwise mostly ignored cultures. The attacks on Wizchan and so on came from this same tendency (oh of course the MSM were another factor, backed by this infinite money machine, authors are motivated to stir up hate and hysteria against outlier groups - and who made a better target than wizzies and "male virgins", etc). So basically, the worship of money corrupts everything - there's this great movie 'Withnail and I', and towards the end there's a quote like "They're selling hippie wigs in Woolworths, man", pointing out basically how what the speaker viewed as an authentic movement and culture was turned into this thing that gets sold as a joke product and reference in supermarkets. Same fucking thing - the entire culture created by various imageboards and centered on 4chan got pimped out by thousands of individuals trying to 'in group' themselves and appeal to "internet culture", but this in term RUINED things by basically drawing in millions of people who didn't belong or truly understand the culture who would then dilute things, and also just reducing all the ideas to meaninglessness. In Matrix Resurrections, which I referenced in the first post, there's a scene where they're talking about how the architects of the system added "AI" type bots throughout the Matrix world, to sort of 'outnumber' and isolate the real humans. I think that's a good analogy to what happened. Would the average Wizchan poster today know much of the history of the site or the history of Wizardry? I'm pretty sure not, so you have people who don't even understand the real concepts, taking on the identity (I saw some mention on Twitter of someone's teenage female friend thinking of herself as a 'Wizard' in the Wizchan sense) of Wizards and posting with all sorts of false assumptions and understandings, which then isolates and alienates those who had a truer, better understanding of the histroy. To some extent I guess that's always the case with ANY group of people or culture anywhere, especially online communities, but it was made so much worse by this commercial, centralised internet aspect.
[Excuse me jumping all over the place, I had a bit to drink and I'm quite unfocused]…
>>215902 So take note that basically the commercial internet - all those big players like Youtube, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok etc really want this low, intelligent, low consciousness engagement. Once thing I noticed more recently with Youtube rolling out that 'Shorts' thing is that if you watch through those randomly, it's almost like someone deliberately set out to make the most INauthentic, FAKE, bullshit things possible - it's all like CREEPILY fake, not just everyday bullshit fake. Like 'prank' videos that are obviously staged and that sort of thing. It's so weird. But I think maybe that's part of the draw - it almost hypnotises you, and maybe the really dumb people are really buying into these videos as representing something real, while perhaps those of us who pick up on the fakeness are also entranced by the fakeness. I don't understand it entirely but I'm sure if you've watched through the 'Shorts' feed on a fresh session you'll get what I'm referring to. The system wants to feed us with this goyslop trash fake nonsense, and if we're not careful we can easily become entranced or feel helpless in the face of it. I actually got physical nausea and a sense of extreme terror after watching the same sort of 'shorts' on the Snapchat app after installing that.
All of that culture from the mainstream now dominates imageboard culture. People post Youtube links to influencers and e-celebs. People post .webm's of clips from Youtube. People post clips of hot succubi from TikTok. People post their discord links and\or boards are already dominated by discord cliques. It 100% dominates imageboard culture. Everything that gets discussed comes from rage-bait propagated by the MSM or e-celebs acting as 'reaction' to the MSM.
So yeah, there's this commercial aspect ruining things, it's a serious problem and can be addressed in various ways (for example, you could have boards that absolutely disallow and block anyone posting any content from any of those sites, that would be a start). But there are also things that come from posters and their own issues. There's so much 'combativeness' and a lack of understanding of the need for engaging with ideas in a detached manner. There are too many shitty people who'll flame posters trying to say anything meaningful. One thing that's really notable on 4chan for example is that everywhere you go, for a good 10+ years there's been constant "BBC\cuck" bait, that gets posted not just as images but as text. Why has there been no significant attempt to disrupt this? Why are people still able to post "made for BBC" as text? Seriously think about how banning that simple line of text, one line, that has already been expressed a million times, could have elevated the level of conversation? But I think - it's almost like most people on that site today are so CONFORMIST to how they THINK the average 4channer should be, that they're afraid of complaining about this, they have become accepting of it, even though the intent of posting that 99 times out of 100 is to just derail, annoy, and harass.
There needs to be a sort of exploration of formulas of human psychology here. Just think about it, you open a thread and the first three responses are genuine discussion of an issue of interest, written with intelligence and maybe a bit of humour. You feel engaged and want to keep reading, and maybe end up contributing interesting ideas of your own. But at some point, if a certain percentage of responses are just nonsense, stupid, trash, or even clearly just deliberate bait or whatever - you will end up yourself not taking things seriously, possibly posting something stupid or trashy yourself. We really need to look at how this works and what motivates us, because with some SIMPLE small adjustments I think we could vastly improve the culture and make it more worthwhile for all of us. The higher quality the community is - the more likely lurkers and people who might not otherwise even consider posting are going to post, and contribute more. Instead of wasting an hour scrolling through barely readable ramblings and then feeling depressed and alone - you might spend an hour being stimulated by ideas, then feeling empowered to go off back into the world alone, solve your own issues, be more confident, and so on.
Anyway my point is - nobody should feel hopeless. I have some bad news and some good. One day you die, and everything you worked for comes to nothing… well I believe there is more to it than that, and that perhaps everything we did matters, but lets at least ground ourselves emotionally in the reality that perhaps everythign is pointless. Even if that's the case, don't we want to live the best life here now as possible, including work towards positive, functional, healthy connections to others? That's really the only option we have to try for. Feeling hopeless or posting doomer shit or saying it's over and dead goes against this. Stop doing it, and instead at least TRY building something. Hell loving a pet rock would be more healthy and functional. Creating something small that only you'll ever know of would be good. OR if you're really interested - try contributing to a forum, building your own or something. Pick your battles. I think we can essentially give 4chan up for dead, though even then something you post on there could give someone some benefit, even if it's someone living 10 years from now asking ChatGPT7.0 about some personal question (this is another issue online cultures are going to have to work against or with - the issue of mass appropriation of data by these fucking corporations). Posting on 4chan is pointless, various intelligence agencies and governments and academic institutions have basically declared war on it and they justify this on "moral grounds" that some posters were racist\sexist\extremists or whatever. Elites LOVE to use those sort of excuses - don't forget that they do not have total control yet, and believing that they do only serves them. They generally can't openly go against boards that act within the law and so on. So really, if we can find some way to build cultures in "legitimate and legal" spaces, we have room to connect and build together towards defending our rights, liberties, and so on. Why the fuck are most people still absorbed in national politics when people can get together online and in large enough numbers have IMMENSE power? Again it comes back to what I talked about earlier - the people doing this are themselves trying to maintain a status quo. I noticed this with a lot of what I call "male consciousness" issues, that is issues around mens rights, gynocentrism, feminism, etc - lots of people are constantly attempting to dumb things down, to sidetrack the issues, etc - because most people are driven by inherent gynocentrism and misandry, most males, even those who insist they hate succubi, are actually trying to just act edgy and wounded so they can find some roastie to shack up with. There's constant trampling of consciousness of all sorts of issues by those who are 'bought off' materially by money, pleasure, status, etc.
I've posted on Wizchan before about the power of LLMS (I hate these corporations and governments getting even more computing power, but if we don't make use of these, we're missing out on an opportunity to fight that power) to help automatically moderate and thus improve the quality of posting on these forums, so that we use them for functional communication rather than just shitposting into oblivion. You can use GPT to create your own imageboards or own websites, and in creative new ways that could bring out the best. Things have never been easier to be your own moot. In a couple of years, even a local computer will be able to take the ENTIRE text contents of an imageboard, even all the contents of 4chan, and process it so you can "speak" to a board like that, and you could even use it to mass-generate analyses and detailed histories of the board itself so that nobody could really misrepresent things about the community. All of us can be using technology to 'level' up, I'm looking forward to possible training an LLM on the entire text speeches\writings of Manly P Hall and Alan Watts and creating 'personas' I could interact with. In Matrix Resurrections, there's a scene where a point is made about how despite the "machines" having enslaved humanity, some AI have become allies and allowed humans a greater hope of fighting the Matrix. So imagine in just acouple of years, we Wizards can be learning at accelerated rates, engaging with 'human like' characters like Alan Watts or whoever they hell you want (so long as you've got enough content) and then as a more educated person then communicating your insights and learnings to other real flesh and blood humans online? With image\video generative-AI I think it might really be possible in a couple of years to create our own online platforms like Habbo Hotel or OSRS but specifically for our own subgroup - so we could have a beautiful interactive Wizardly world to communicate with other Wizards, and if we trained an LLM on our own Wizardly content - we could actually speak to and learn from the 'collective intelligence' of Wizardry or ghost-like beings of individual posters. It would be cool. Yes it's entirely likely that these technologies will be used to make the world an even more evil place - but until that happens maybe we should make a little effort to try to make our own lives and those of others a little better.
>>215901 >>215902 >>215903 >>215904 These are great posts that will likely go ignored due to their length, elite banking families and Matrix references. Most of what you've described I have seen and experienced first hand in online communities. At this point, given my skills and interests, I will take my chances fostering a community locally. I wish you the best of luck and I really hope you don't waste more than a few minutes on sites like these. Godspeed and I hope you find your happiness.
>>215901 old internet was good because the people on it weren't awful. You can't fix current internet without fixing people in general. It's not that the normies got access and that's why it went to shit, people in general have just gone to shit, and their access to internet probably has something to do with it. The commercialization of the internet has only resulted in better content and sites being built. They succeed because they're better than whatever BBS people built themselves. You act like people using pepe memes was some plague that ruined the internet, but that had nothing to do with it. Access to internet is literally changing people. Their desires drive what content is created, so we've seen increasingly shorter and shorter form content with its entertainment value increased to the max because people are becoming addicts to this sort of content and their attention spans have been diminished.
This is the main problem that is driving this dynamic, and the commercialization does have something to do with it because it drives people to create what content is most engaging and addictive, but it would have happened without that as people are naturally drawn to what they are drawn to. There is constant competition for people's attention and anything that fails to be entertaining enough, to deliver those hits of dopamine, is ignored. With the ad funded model of the internet, being ignored is literally a death sentence. Everything that is not "fun" is being drowned out by things that are and the non-fun things can't compete and slowly get squeezed out.
You can see the effects of this dynamic on imageboards when people will just outright refuse to read long posts saying that it is too much effort. Their attention spans have been worn down with constant exposure to "content" and they now need a hit of content that releases that dopamine with minimal effort because after time your dopamine hit gets reduced and even the best stuff barely gives you a hit. People can't make themselves get through a long post unless it is constantly slapping them with that dopamine. What triggers that response determines what people are addicted to. For some, they end up addicted to the feelings of self esteem and self worth that come from attaching themselves to a group identity then masturbating about that group's achievements and "vanquishing" its enemies. What people are addicted to drives the sort of engagement that happens online.
>>215903 >But I think - it's almost like most people on that site today are so CONFORMIST to how they THINK the average 4channer should be, that they're afraid of complaining about this, they have become accepting of it, even though the intent of posting that 99 times out of 100 is to just derail, annoy, and harass.
This is another effect of the addiction. What triggers bad feelings, what triggers good feelings? People do what triggers the good feelings. Being accepted feels good. Being challenged feels bad. For leftists especially (but not exclusively), feeling morally superior feels good so they will engage in the "woke mob" to shout down anyone who engages in insufficiently polite speech. The right doesn't like that so they go to spaces where the opposite is true, saying anything that isn't racist gets you violently shouted down. groupthink dominates in dynamics like this simply because people are seeking that next hit of good feelings and groupthink helps them get it.
The problem is that the format itself is so conducive to delivering these opportunites over and over again. That's why people become addicts. It's not like normal life where you can only interact with so many things in such an amount of time because of the limits of physical reality. The format of the internet is fundamentally mindfucking them.
I also think that the long term credit cycle has something to do with it, the global interest rates of near 0%. Debt to GDP ratio is becoming unsustainable. Too much credit has been extended, too many debts remain to repay, too much competition between everyone and too much inequality. All that credit being extended leads to lots of growth and wealth, but because access to credit and capitial is not equally distributed, those with better knowledge of how to navigate the financial system end up reaping outsize rewards, especially the lenders themselves. The last time we had this global dynamic there were eerily similar things happening to people. We had the world wars, Hitler, fascism and all that. Now we have the same situation with people becoming fascist and interest rates low. The central bank choosing to do QE to deal with it is not helping. QE is inflationary which is a regressive tax that makes inequality worse. Eventually if inequality gets too bad, people end up feeling like slaves to the wealthy and competition raises to the highest levels, societal fragmentation happens and people turn on minorities within their own societies as scapegoats. Eventually this leads to war of one sort or another as everyone loses their minds and becomes fascist then various factions fight it out with one another. Enough people die and enough assets are destroyed that people need to do a lot of rebuilding and the period of credit expansion begins anew for another 100 years or so. With interest rates at 0, opportunities for growth are almost nil, but pressure to succeed is at its utmost. We got interest rates back up, but only temporarily because QE just expands the credit bubble even bigger rather than actually deflating it. They bought us some breathing room but the basic dynamic is still fucked and the 08 crash will happen again but for real and until then, you can expect people to continue to get crazier.