The decline of social media and the internet

Side Room
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Honestly to some degree…im like good riddance

Being that such are increasingly becoming farms to collect data for commercial and political advertising.

Also people are increasingly using such as platforms to impose themselves onto others.

People are trending back towards discord and chatrooms because less commerical/political bullshit being imposed.

In a few years we will go back to something similar to whatsapp groups.

Also ai agents will scour the web for us so that we dont have to surf the internet.

Dont worry though im pretty confident that social outcasts will maintain their online safe spaces.

Not reffering to idmf…

Im talking about those wierd subreddits

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Social media and the internet in general is good in small doses, and always has been for that matter. I still find it a useful tool, but I also don’t have any social media other than this and a Pinterest account…

This is true.

Hmmmm… I dunno about that…
I dunno what’s changed, but when I last used discord most of the people there were worse than twitter twits.

If people catch on to Melon Husk’s brain implants then eventually we’ll be watching cat videos from the inside out. And everybody’ll just be sitting on penis rockets drooling with bloodshot eyes. Maybe. Possible future.

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It’s not declining; niche communities are just becoming niche again. It’s the circle of life :smiley:

Everyone jumped on for 5 minutes when EDM was hot shit, and then again when AI was tricking people into thinking they were creative geniuses. Now that the effect is wearing off a little, we’re just back to where we used to be. If you’re still making music after all this time, you outlasted them, and there’s even more of a reason to realize that what you do is special.

Honestly, IDM and even music production in the traditional sense (whatever that even means) is more likely to become less popular with the way things are going, so I consider this to be a really cool gift. Maybe the value of real music will rise again, too, or I’m just too optimistic for my own good.

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That is the scariest part of it all. As if people weren’t dumb enough already…

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I think there will always be a certain public for real anything when it comes to art (music, literature, drawing, painting, etc.). Yes, it will be a minority. Hasn’t that always been the case?

Of course the masses will listen to Elvis Presley or The Beatles’ new AI album in 2028.

On the other end of the spectrum, there will be people who understand that music is heartfelt & real, that it’s not just another disposable means to be entertained for the next 2 minutes. That you don’t “consume” music (I fucking hate that “consume” term when it comes to artistic endeavors) but you experience it and you let it take your mind to extraordinary times and places.

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Good assessment.

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Deleted my FB & Messenger recently, guess that explains my stance on this whole thing.

I mean yeah, this stuff used to be pretty useful back in the day, but these days most people don’t even talk to me online and those who do, well, they usually just send me memes I saw already, so I guess there’s no use in that. Besides, folks who care know how to contact me via other channels.

But yeah, I feel like social media platforms like FB have always been a Trojan horse. You know, they sold 'em to us on the presumption that “hey, you know what, these’ll help y’all keep in touch with yer friends and whatnot,” we took the bait and aside from this crap farming data, it had a tremendously bad impact on the society as a whole. Now pretty much 95% of people just spend their time mindlessly scrolling their feed and folks are getting more and more difficult to interact with in general. Crazy times for sure.

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Its just basically porn, politics, shitposting, trolling, ragebait, commercials, shopping, and scams and safespaces.

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Social media is cable TV for the 21st century. Tons of nothing everywhere, indefinitely. No remote needed anymore. Such progress!

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Doomscrolling is the new channel flipping, I’m pretty sure.

Also, this makes old-school television seem at least somewhat educational in nature. Sometimes you’d actually hit a documentary and accidentally start learning shit :smiley:

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People are so mean for some reason. Not as mean as 2010’s internet when people had a huge anti-SJW phase and it was cool to bully people and evil to not bully people, but still.

(Yap alert)

I signed up here to ask a question about a song lyrics (I already asked it) but I didn’t trust Reddit because people on Reddit will give you dislikes, leave hate comments for no reason, and act like the smallest mistake is the worst thing ever on the planet while they’ll defend terrible people who do actually bad things.

And on Tumblr I saw nothing but creepy weirdos, like this one person on Tumblr thought writing about innocent dogs being brutally murdered was a good thing, and that it was evil to be against it. One person thought North Korea never did anything bad. And one person even compared being a l0li con to being a Jew in the H0l0caust and compared anti-l0li cons to H!tler. I didn’t even consume stuff like that and no matter how many times I press “not interested” or blocked, it would still appear. And that website made Twitter look like a peaceful zone with no arguments ever. Also, it’s like when you report accounts these days, your report just goes to a shredder box.

I’m not the one to say “The 2000’s internet was much better!” Because the 2000’s internet was worse in many aspects, but at least then, you wouldn’t have these cruel people in mainstream websites. They’d be in their own cruel people websites away from all the normal people.

(Okay yap alert over)

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it definitely sucks on mainstream platforms. They have recommendation algorithms that push primarily ragebait it seems. Even on something like youtube, it feels like you really have to work to get rid of all that crap.

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve just seen the same stuff everywhere on the internet, so social media has frankly started to bore me. Yea, random political stuff can be interesting the first time, but not the thousanth. Same arguments, same responses, same “clever comebacks”. As Andy Warhol put it, everything is television.

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If there’s one saying that has never rung truer in 2025, it’s “misery loves company”. People are miserable. Instead of working on fixing that, they unleash their pain onto others. A sad tale as old as time.

Absolutely.

Fuck News (and to a lesser extent: CNN)’s rise over the last 30 years has demonstrated that making your viewers scared to death about everything, hostile to non-viewers, and generally miserable, equals making billions of dollars. Simply because preying on emotion is MUCH MORE powerful than preying on rational thinking. Simply put, strong emotions create and expand addiction. Like the rat pushing the button for their hit of coke, humans that fall prey to this keep coming back.

In the US, truth, facts and overall basic reality have disappeared from the minds of half the country.

Between:

• the already beyond dismal levels of general education in so many states

• the GOP’s relentless destruction of anything that could make people more intelligent (like dismantling the Dept of Education) so that they can control the sheep

• the continuous horrors that are force-fed for views on social media so that a Zuckerberg can constantly expand his (currently standing at) 2,300 acre doomsday estate in Hawaii

• the fact that any moron (or AI bot) can type on a keyboard and/or record and upload a video, and have their voice amplified a million-fold (and, as I’m sure you know, the stupidest people usually scream and shout, because they are incapable of logical, intelligent, calm reasoning)

…most of the so-called “media” have become fanning the fire to make money for the 0.01%.

Somehow, the billionaire families that own us think that, should it all go to shit (think: civil war or even WW3), they will be safe. Good luck with that. They seem to forget that the MAGA cultists and other extreme fanatics are all heavily armed and even the stupidest of human beings, when backed in a corner, will bite his master.

And with all that said, take a breather:

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Oh I know Fox News. I remember when they were complaining that the green M&M gone woke because she wore sneakers instead of high heels. I was just laughing when I heard that

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Yeah =^(

It’s weird because I rarely even have this problem with TikTok of all places.

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It should also make sense, considering IDMf is a community of people rather than a site filled with 95% propaganda and bots pushing propaganda. Even our worst opinions come with an asterisk of, “Hey, that’s just my stupid opinion” and we all move on.

My biggest issue with sites like TikTok is the blatant misinformation about things like ADHD and ASD that I end up hearing through the grapevine and sometimes have to mildly push back on, but if they managed to get rid of toxicity on their platform, that’s pretty cool. I guess their overlords are slightly less-invested in (let’s be honest, largely American) politics and more hell-bent on gathering your personal data instead :smiley:

Obligatory, “Hey, that’s just my stupid opinion”

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*my opinion…

So sick of the crap…

We are the common folk…and they want more pawns that they can use…the more numbers they can get to rally behind their agenda through political patronage the more power they have.

Theres a difference in citizens being civically engaged with community politics for issues that matter to their community…and participating in culture wars by being a minion.

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*my opinion…

Insert sociology…that examines and dissects the sociological theories of both the right gop republicans and the left liberal democrats. Juxtapositioned with a variety of evidence and history…and links all the commonalities to pinpoint the problems and come up with solutions.

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Basic cost-value analysis: if what you put into it (time, effort, thought, general agitation, every last bit of personal data and everything you type) is less than what you get out of it (knowledge, companionship, someone to yell at, cat memes), just don’t do it. It’s that simple.

If more people went from “it’s awful but it’s all we’ve got” to “fuck this, I’m out”, the revenue streams would dry up and the landscape would change. That won’t happen because people would rather complain than inconvenience themselves, but it just propagates the continued suck.

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