[OliverGilan]

Whenever I read articles like this I have a lot of sympathy and also a little confusion. Maybe it's because I DO have an adblocker but this just isn't my experience on the web. It feels so easy to use the web and generally avoid the deluge of shit OP talks about. I pretty much only go to sites on my bookmarks. I don't read the news (maybe that's a big part of this), I read blogs, forums, and then do some shopping. The rest is just work related stuff. The only time I'm ever really exposed to this sort of crap is Twitter but I curate who I follow and I try to stay on my chronological follower-only feed. Yet every time I see my parents using the internet it looks like an entirely different experience. It's unfortunate and sad

[Nick87633]

Yeah, just go to any news website or turn off adblock and scroll past your actual content, you get into the swamp real quick.

[Balgair]

Once, not so long ago, inexplicably, I waded into the fetid swamp that is a new article's comment's section. There was a particularly unhinged commentor, we'll call them Pat, that was railing against the newspaper's staff. For some strange reason, I looked up Pat's past comment history, and it was mostly, though not entirely, all screeds against the paper.

The paper is the Denver Post. The Post is a paper thin shell of itself, gutted by the machinations of hedge funds too greedy to realize that sub-prime newspapers are even worse investments than world class ones. The Post even ran a picture of the wrong stadium for Opening Day for a few years, I think. Most of the Post's good staff had left years ago for the 'greener' pastures of purely online journalism.

Pat had further filled out their entire profile for commenting and said that they were a proud resident of Des Moines, Iowa. Seeing as they spent nearly all day commenting on the Denver Post, I had questions. So, I made a profile, got a free 30 day subscription and ability to comment, and then asked Pat the questions. Namely, are you a real person, are you really living in Iowa, and why are you spending all your days on this earth railing against a zombie newspaper in it's comments sections?

Pat confirmed that they were real, and that they lived in Des Moines. Further, and I'll not forget this, Pat said that the reason they spent all their days attacking the Post was "I just really fucking hate the Post, Rocky Mountain News was better and should come back" Rocky Mountain news had been truly dead for a decade at this point and was never coming back.

I could ask them more questions, and try to dive into their strange psychology, but lets be real, Pat is crazy. I have since returned to my policy of never reading the comments section. Thar be the weirdos.

[benjaminwootton]

I used to have the OPs experience and found the web equally as toxic.

It all got too much for me during Covid times however, and I did a huge detox and cleanse of my online content. I left LinkedIn which was my main source of my angst, blocked the news sites at the router and unfollowed thousands of accounts. I also installed a bunch of adblockers.

The habits have stuck for the most part, and life online feels so much lighter.

[JKCalhoun]

It's sad though to think of what fraction of people out there on the web are unable to jury-rig their network to block the toxins.

[MacroChip]

My thoughts and experience as well. Seth does not suffer or get exhausted online. He's had his list of what to avoid internalized for a long time. As do I. Believe it or not, you have some agency when using the internet. Even in the face of "the algorithm" (what that has come to mean).

Be sure to drink your Ovaltine

[zol]

I run into frustrations whenever I search for anything to do with products or something popular like parenting. Results are swamped by garbage as filled SEO content some of which I swear is written by chatGPT. I don’t know why Google doesn’t penalize those results. Come to think of it they don’t seem to mind surfacing content that’s behind a paywall either. I’m really not sure what’s going on over there these days…