What you're describing sounds more socially healthy than modern usage. It was kids exploring the world digitally. Now that's been captured by digital fiefdoms actively manipulating their users into unhealthy levels of engagement by any means necessary.

Internet used to be a village, with nice cozy places and communities but also shady weird individuals and houses you're not supposed to enter

Now it is a shopping mall, sanitized, organized, brands and ads plastered all around, not really for socializing and community but more for products and marketing, you can still find a bookstore or a cafe but in the end, shopping mall is there to make you shop

This interpretation is funny considering the other post in this thread bemoaning the loss of the shopping malls of their youth. As a metaphor it's on the right track, but the way the internet has been commercialized is even more extreme than a shopping mall, in the sense that experience is individually curated for each visitor and every tap, moment of hesitation, and utterance between friends is catalogued by the "store owner".

And it's a shopping mall that has a bunch of big stores that openly sell meth, and advertize for it aggressively.

Internet before 9/11 and after 9/11 basically. What the Patriot Act did was eat at the foundations of freedom that American founders set out to create and the internet became public enemy #1 overnight, something that had to be controlled, regulated, and monopolized by American corporations in the form of social media, search engines, youtube etc.

Like the rebellious soviet youths finding itself through Viktor Tsoi, the pre-911 internet offered us Western kids a brief moment of true freedom, we didn't need heroes, because our minds were free from algorithms designed to sap every bit of happiness.

> actively manipulating their users into unhealthy levels of engagement

Which is the root issue here, why don't we ban online advertising as a business model or significantly tax it to create a cost of x engagement

> the constant comparison hellhole like Instagram that is causing mental illness.

Anecdotally, Instagram ranks much lower than Reddit for causing problems among the young kids I’ve worked with.

Reddit is an absolutely cesspool of misinformation, fake stories, propaganda, and rampant doomerism. Scrolling Instagram can’t hold a candle to the militant doomerism that seethes from sites like Reddit.

I think it’s an uncomfortable truth for techies who grew up with Reddit while sneering at photo sharing social media, but the content on Reddit is extraordinarily cynical and depressing.

Reddit now is not even vaguely close to the site it used to be. Doomerism is popular on Reddit because the power users are Reddit are basically everyone who failed life. Can't get a job, can't find a partner, no friend, and normally for reasons their own fault.

Those people used to be social shunned and live on the edge of town but now their voice gets amplified 1000x because they are willing to live online 24/7 and take control of discourse.

Can you really say they failed at life when they have so much power over society? Some moderators have control over an audiance of millions, something media moguls like Ted Turner dreamed of in the beginning of his career.

If anything the real losers are the people like you and me who frequent the site but didn't take advantage of the opportunity that it provides.

> Can you really say they failed at life when they have so much power over society?

They don't, it's all temporary. Other communities and companies are being created to circumvent this.

> If anything the real losers are the people like you and me who frequent the site but didn't take advantage of the opportunity that it provides.

What am I exactly losing out on by not visiting?

What opportunities do reddit provide for me in comparison of me going swimming tonight?

What are the benefits of an hour worth of scrolling, exhausting myself mentally reading people's comments?

Reddit is so huge that making general statements about it is as useful as making general statements about the web.

You could be reading about interesting places near you where to go swimming. About swimming techniques. Cool adventure stories related to swimming. Etc.

There are plenty of useful posts and comments. They are also hidden in a sea of shit, just like the rest of the web.

> There are plenty of useful posts and comments. They are also hidden in a sea of shit, just like the rest of the web.

Sure, but such information I could look up the same from some swimming book at the library and find it quicker. The time required to discover those comments are not of worth when I just want to go swimming, I don't swim for anything other than leisure and just paddling about.

I think its hilarious you think reddit mods hold sway over society when the rest of us who don't use reddit consider it to be 4chan with login

one good examples are city subreddits. they are almost always toxic and negative. lately they cleaned it up but I remember subreddits like r/vancouver were a cesspool of angry white locals who were convinced the CCP laundering money was why they couldn't afford homes

How do you define doomerism? On the opposite end there's toxic positivity where Problems Aren't Real.

I think that the first lesson anyone whos signing on Reddit should be, to approach each post with a belief it is fake and is trying to see if it can deceive you. I know that for the hn crowd this sounds as obvious as the everyday weather, but not for kids with tech-illiterate parents.

Whatever there is to say about 4chan at least I think at one point it directly told this message.

> extraordinarily cynical and depressing

You mean, like the reality humans created for themself to suffer in?

> Anecdotally, Instagram ranks much lower than Reddit for causing problems among the young kids I’ve worked with.

It's hard to tease out causality because Reddit overuse would have more self-selection of kids with preexisting depression. Happy kids would see no reason to doomscroll Reddit.

Instagram on the other hand is more compelling to everyone, and what you might interpret as positive content could be interpreted by a teen as being excluded by the popular kids yet again, with no easy way to opt out because unlike Reddit everyone at your school uses the platform and expects you to be on it.

You need a social life to be on Instagram, so it has some kind of positive selection, even though those same people might get lost in the fake Instagram world.

I'd like to see this backed by data. I believe the anonymity of the platform helps remove a lot of the stress, bullying etc. that make instagram so toxic for teens. There is shit content on both platforms. But no one at school associates your social standing with your reddit account karma.

Yes, I felt the same too. You said what has been in my mind but I was unable to articulate it. Sometimes I would be shown random post from extremely distasteful subreddits which I never subscribed to (awefuleverything I think). Sometimes I would get messages from random fake accounts with nude pictures of women asking me I am indeed. I haven’t used Reddit in a while. I used to be addicted to it. At its beginning Reddit represented freedom promised by the internet. Maybe because if that people don’t dis Reddit but focus on Instagram.

We didn't have a portable pocket computer with access to all the practically infinite multimedia refined (to be increasingly addictive) content either...

Sounds a bit cliché but those days we used internet to escape the real world. Now it's backwards. But the real world is getting worse. Those days with internet 1.0 that was a wonderful digital world for lots of us.

Internet would be like this 80% if you used PC and avoid social media scrollholes. The infinite scroll of phone app is the adictive cancer. Internet usage with PC is like slow food.

The difference between the internet of the 2000s and the 2010s is how profitable it was to push things. No one got paid to get me to click on lemonparty, they did it because it was (to them) funny. Nowadays, there are industries that exist solely to get me to click on garbage, and it turns out profit is a much more powerful motive than comedy.

I can ignore/laugh with/block/modreport That One Guy, I can't do anything about an infinite number of marketers.

just a testament to how much freedom of speech and expression we had then vs now

hai2u has strangely been scrubbed from the internet while lemonparty, meatspin, 2girls1cup lives on

the person in hai2u was actually jailed for the content he produced in American court

> I turned out just fi

whoops