| Well if you wanted a whole deep dive: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_8ZCzhoeQMg&t=828s But I can distill it down to 1. social media coalescing to maybe 5-7 different sites in the country, which all have a similar "minimalist" feel, based on non-controversial UX designs and trend chasing (TikTok being the current trend). 2. search engines (so, Google and Bing) steering people towards SEO optimized slop over the proper quality blogs/websites. You're incenivized to clickbait to get attention. you need to dig real deep to find the gold these days, and the pile is only getting deeper. 3. Monetization forcing more and more ads for companies to survive, if at all. Some sites went the paywall route instead, but news these days is very hard to monetize for the mainstream (again, social media will deliver it) 4. few/no personalization. The Myspace era shifting towards the Facebook era really killed this idea of having a real, unique brand and identity (due to #1). 5. Social media became both lonlier and more hostile, somehow. You don't really make "friends" on the internet the same way you may have been able to in the 2000's where you just find some MMO or chatroom and bond with others. But at the same time, everything is so loud. People aren't talking to each other on insagram/tiktok/twitter, they are at best talking about themselves as a brand (so, advertising themselves. Or maybe literally advertising on behalf of a company), or talking at other people about whatever little drama of the day/week is going on. When's the last time you had a proper conversation with a rando on Twitter? The internet is vast though, so you can indeed still find the fun. But you are becoming an excavator day by day to do so. And if you're into any more niche hobbies, I wish you the best of luck in finding others these days (the coalescing of groups to reddit and FB is a whole other rant). |