[mindwok]

I often wonder what the internet would look like if we just banned paid advertising. Facebook, instagram, X, TikTok, they’d all have to start charging users to stay alive and I don’t think anyone would choose to pay for the brainrot. I’d like to see us remove the incentives these companies have for just gluing us to our phones.

[Gigachad]

Social media is probably somewhat responsible, but I don't think it's the biggest problem here. It's the fact that Gen Z is checking out on life, for many people there is no hope of owning a house even if you give up all luxury spending and grind, it's impossible for many on a typical job.

It's also getting increasingly more expensive to hang out with friends in physical spaces. Every business needs to pay increasingly high rents, and charge increasing amounts. You could go out to the bar and spend $100, or you could stay at home and play video games for free.

We are living in an era where the old and rich have taken over and continue to extract every last drop of wealth from the people who have the least.

[techblueberry]

“It's also getting increasingly more expensive to hang out with friends in physical spaces.”

It was a very narrow window of history, if at all where this wasn’t true. Like I spent most of my teen years at people’s houses or backyard or parks and it was fuckin great. All my best memories were spent doing nothing with people I liked. Even my clubbing years while fun were relatively forgettable compared to the mischief of running around with my teen friends not spending money.

Smoking has gotten more expensive though, maybe we should subsidize cigarettes for young men.

[FranzFerdiNaN]

> Even my clubbing years while fun were relatively forgettable compared to the mischief of running around with my teen friends not spending money.

When people say that hanging out is getting expensive they didnt mean when they were 10-15 or so. Its easy to not spend money at those ages. Its not when you're 20+. You cant run around the neighbourhood anymore, or eat stuff your parents bought

[techblueberry]

For most people in my parents generation, going out to eat at all was a luxury. Some of the most tightly knit cultures of the world are also the poorest.

[esalman]

I was a terminally online youth in 2000s, both before and after social media and proliferation of smartphones.

Money is not and issue here. I was a middle class youth in a developing country, and internet was expensive. People who didn't have the means simply didn't go online. Contrast with the present, even lower income people have smartphone with free carrier provided Facebook. Radicalization is much easier now.

[thefz]

> We are living in an era where the old and rich have taken over and continue to extract every last drop of wealth from the people who have the least.

That's capitalism and its effects for you, sir.

[FeloniousHam]

Ugh, capitalism

[FranzFerdiNaN]

> We are living in an era where the old and rich have taken over and continue to extract every last drop of wealth from the people who have the least.

Exactly as capitalism always intended. We are finally reaching the dream of the system, arent we happy all!?

[Gigachad]

I feel like this is a lazy answer because there have been plenty of examples of eras where wealth equality was much better, for long periods of time. And they weren't periods of radical communism or whatever.

We just didn't tax the middle tier of workers so intensely while giving everything for free to the ultra rich. That isn't really a part of capitalism itself. It's just the specific scenario we ended up in today.

[FranzFerdiNaN]

> We just didn't tax the middle tier of workers so intensely while giving everything for free to the ultra rich. That isn't really a part of capitalism itself.

This is literally capitalism. It's the very first sentence on Wikipedia: 'Capitalism is an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and their use for the purpose of obtaining profit.' Its literally the owners get the money, so the ultra rich get more and more the money because they own more and more. There is absolutely nothing in capitalism that says that workers should get anything. Its just an annoying part of doing business, that companies do their very hardest to avoid as much as possible.

[socalgal2]

I don't think it would change at all. Look at creators on Youtube. The majority are clickbait and other crap, people trying to get money and/or influence. It doesn't require advertising by the platform. All it requires is the internet itself and nearly everyone on it. Ads might have accelerated things but the basic incentives are "more viewers = more money / influence", with or without ads. And those incentives eventually lead to where we are.

[mingus88]

Creators on YouTube do it for monetization. There are now multiple generations of youths for which “influencer” is their desired career. If you make it, you make it big.

They might pull in more money with sponsorships but they only got there because the algorithm put them at the top where the money is.

Don’t believe me? Look up the woman who shot up google HQ when they demonetized her channel.

[Poomba]

I know someone who got addicted to the influencer money in Tiktok and dropped out of a med school program because making 5 figures a month, taking videos of you wearing fancy clothes was way better than slogging thru med school

[mingus88]

For those of us online in the 90s we don’t have to wonder

It was literally a utopia before business came along. Every site was built from passion, with no expectation of getting anything in return. It was a global community centered around sharing knowledge.

I’d go one step further and ban the consolidation of platforms by billionaires. The open internet no longer exists or will ever exist again

[jjpones]

I am younger, being part of online forum communities in the late 2000s (primarily video games and art centric ones) and I truly pine for the era of the internet free from algorithmic feeds, infinite content scrolls and profit incentives. There was some profit incentive, but it was purely for administrative purposes to keep the site up.

[positron26]

> Every site was built from passion, with no expectation of getting anything in return. It was a global community centered around sharing knowledge.

It's a bit of false nostalgia but also it was the era of early adopters. Their concentrations in new spaces always make them better because their motivations are perpetually directed outward from where we are as a civilization. They frequently have to move on as the space they create for themselves becomes drowned out. HN has attempted to remain relatively secluded, and that has been effective up to a point.

The real dilemma there is that the early adopters who make things good need isolation while the "go with the flow" crowd needs a way to support early adopters without themselves getting in the way. Just from a basic computer science perspective, the early adopters need ways to create efficient back-pressure on later adopters so that early adopters can exist without permanently being chased and drowned out by later adopters.

The internet created something analogous to a 2D plain-world where nothing was out of reach for anyone. Without creating some 3D structure, some stratification so that people who get out of the plain can more directly communicate at longer distance, the noise is so inefficient that only those who don't value their time or those who profit off of the poor connectivity will participate.

Baking fresh cinnamon toast comes to mind. Some will accuse me of becoming distracted, but it used to be more common to speak on every open-access forum as if talking to another person in the room. We still do on different formats like IRC or less serious threads of less serious places, but it is diminished as internet culture emerged. Internet culture sometimes expects you to treat every conversation as a conversation with a forum full of angry combatants. A little bit of structure would re-humanize that culture by putting us back into our more human-sized enclaves where there is no need to gatekeep and no audience to perform to.

[AuthAuth]

I'd like to think parents would be more involved if they had to buy their kids internet things but they'd probably end up swiping their creditcard on the same stupid stuff.