[weitendorf]

I completely agree. This is cool and fun and interesting, and dares to be unique. That’s what the Internet should be. It’s legitimately dangerous how reliant so many people are on computers and the Internet for entertainment, information, and their livelihoods almost entirely as passive consumers or users.

We need to bring back something like the MySpace era, I think.

I think it’s underrated how much devices, tools, and a handful of companies contribute to the current stage. Everybody wants to monetize consumers’ inability to do things on their own, developers’ potential to make money with their product and get locked in ($$$), and funnel people into things. But at the same time, that’s pretty much the only way anybody has been able to consistently get paid and keep up with technology by making software. It’s just very hard to get unstuck when your primary computer is a phone that is basically impossible to use as anything but a pacifier for the mind, and every platform wants to keep you from discovering anything outside of it.

I’m hopeful that better tools, AI, open source, and normalizing rewarding helpful people and things on the Internet will bring us back to what it could have been. Why is there literally nowhere to go anymore that doesn’t feel abandoned or like marketing slop? Maybe we’ll have to login with real names to access what comes after that, but maybe it won’t be so bad if we get to decide for ourselves how/what we do with it.

[immibis]

Problem: the Internet is dangerous now. What you put in "your space" might get you fired, deported, etc. (Even if you think you're only posting safe things, consider the person who finds your space might not be sensible.) And not just people - everything you ever post can be assumed to be saved by countless "AI" systems by well-resourced groups, for future bad people to search through. See the imprisonment of Larry Bushart[1] over a Charlie Kirk meme. In most scenarios that's an okay thing to do, except when there are bad people in charge who are data-mining social platforms.

Posting anything is a risk. What benefit do you get from it - does it outweigh the risk? In the past, both the actual risk and the perceived risk were lower.

This concept explains the move from openly public forums and blogs to more private group chats - including Discord which is somewhat less public than the world wide web (and also feels less public because it's not random-access from a user perspective, although data slurpers will have no trouble).

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/oct/31/tennessee-ma...

[weitendorf]

That’s definitely one major and related factor, but I do think it’s separate from the problem that all most people can do on the Internet is consume or post on someone else’s website. Participating in the Internet doesn’t have to be just writing down your opinions on somewhere that shows up on Google Search.

There’s this technical-nontechnical dichotomy that I think really holds back the potential for rich/diverse Internet applications, because the interest and specialized knowledge necessary for eg a “24/7 remote plumbing video chat” service or “open source education-adjacent gaming” is primarily held by nontechnical people. Not that technical people couldn’t do these things, but the people who would want to make them “their thing” probably aren’t professional software developers.

Anyway, I think we’re culturally ready to learn how to forgive people who make forgivable mistakes and grow from them, even though there might still be some “cancel culture”. It’s just better for everybody because it disempowers the people that would abuse it, and everybody makes mistakes or changes their mind over time anyway.

[plastic-enjoyer]

> Problem: the Internet is dangerous now. What you put in "your space" might get you fired, deported, etc.

> Posting anything is a risk. What benefit do you get from it - does it outweigh the risk? In the past, both the actual risk and the perceived risk were lower.

Yes, because people post openly their hot takes to the whole world. Their internet personality is completely tied to their real-world personality. One of the best things of the internet was the anonymity you had. But at one point people started to think it was a good idea to throw this away.

[weitendorf]

Every new generation reinvents itself to fix what it sees wrong with the ones before it. But they can’t undo what already happened. The Internet is too deeply embedded in our lives now and too useful for that to change. And if bad actors insist on polluting the commons/letting AI run loose on it the only way to get any kind of accountability is for there to be identity mechanisms whenever you’re interacting with people beyond those you already know.

But regardless, it’s like a party that started out as a group of friends, then an entire subculture, then an entire personality type, then everybody else kinda watching through the windows, and now all those people are here but too shy to participate. I remember the end of the anonymity era, and looking back, it really did enable people to just be cruel and nasty in a way that scared away 90% of personality types.

Now a different kind of personality just sees the whole thing as a dump, strip mine, or a mark and the rest of us grew up. And I see an entire generation who truly internalized the cynicism of anonymous Reddit commenters who probably knew just as much about the world as they did, who are real people looking for any kind of authenticity or help they can find, and settling for that.

So, I think people are almost ready to start being truly sincere, forgiving, and graceful to each other on the Internet as long as they can expect to receive it back in kind. Partially because we have no choice, but it would be good anyway.

[klondike_klive]

I don't share your optimism but I'm glad of it!