Animal torture is such a fringe and infinitely small area that even if it’s deplorable it’s not, and never has been, prevalent in any meaningful way.

Funny enough the first fallout we had among admins when we started The Pirate Bay was about a cat torture video that forced us to take a stance on freedom/anti-censorship vs decency and compassion. (The latter won, but not without losses in the team because they found it hypocritical that we “censored” uploads.)

Tho I think those kinds of things weren’t as easy to discover or as widely talked about as the internet was largely a hobbyist thing at the time

Today's internet is a far cry from those ideals. It's about a handful of enormous companies sharing private data, shaping the way people think by promoting fake news and suppressing differing opinions. It's about making a buck of advertising which makes it impossible to surf the web without add blockers. Social media has devolved into a cesspool of hate and a fake sense of self worth.

I'm starting to think that the entire internet is a net-negative, especially when compared with desktop computing and occasional ability to connect to other specific endpoints which we chose — doing the computing we wanted to do with the tools and people we wanted.

Today, the entire world of computing and internet seems like being hooked into a giant scam-land, where it is just a giant effort to avoid everything from constant flashing adverts (that screw up any dark-screen setting) to outright hacks and scams, despite having multiple layers of filters in place, and the FFoxes, TBirds, & DDGs of the world, who try to preserve some hint of independence struggle to merely survive.