Internet is no Longer a Place for Discussion

After yet another ban on reddit, got me thinking that internet somehow stopped being a place for a discussion. All these so called social media, that in theory allow you to express your opinion and communicate with people in reality only echo chambers for their owners, management or mods. Shit they like gets promoted. All these upvotes are not real expression of people's will but entirely an administration will. Things you post or create is never promoted for anyone to see and if you manage to get something seen by posting in comments, they either remove post or ban you altogether. Back in the days mods only removed spam, insults and the like. Now they remove cohesive well written posts only because they disagree with content. That is against freedom of speech. What I wonder is why people do not fight back against this soykaf somehow. Despite reddit being as biased as Pravda newspaper, no one created any viable alternatives to it. No one misses the freedom of speech and civilised meaningful discussions we had when online forums were still the thing? Not 40 years have passed since Berlin Wall fell and we now have an new Digital Berlin Wall that keeps us from information and open discussion.

>no one created any viable alternatives to it They have. There are so many. They just don't have ten million daily active users. It's the same reason why so many people are reluctant to switch away from Windows, even though they know full well that Microsoft is their enemy. To have freedom, you have to be willing to put up with some friction. Many people are unwilling to put up with any (new) friction at all, so they do not embrace free alternatives. Are you one of those people?

So you figured it out after almost 20 years, good job. Social media since its very inception has been a echo chamber not only by design but by choice. The reason social media become popular is because it allowed the normgroids to convince themselfs of the correctness of their flawed ideals by filtering out unpopular opinions and filling it with yesmen. None of these people miss so called freedom of speech or want intelligent debates, they just want to have their shortsighted moronic views reflected. Real life is no different, it never was, i dont know how old you are, maybe you were born after the social media boom and just somehow assumed that these platforms were there to discuss and debate rationally and intelligently. They never were and people never want to those things, they just look toward places to confirm their bias, real life is no different, try finding one place or person in the real world that is not looking to hear what they say from others. This is not the fault of technocrats or corpos or ai slop, this is a human fault that was there even before the internet. >>100510 Also what this nigga right here said, the barn door is open, the cattle could just walk right out, they almost never do. I have seen this so many times, not just related to technology but in general, people complain about problems even tho the solution is right out in the obvious open, they simply dont have the willingness to reach out and make a change for themselfs. People prefer to suffer and complain about it than to take a risk and make a change, that is the real source of the issue.

>>100509 You were meant to discover that in 2014. Do you remember when Elon fired 90% of Twitter? Those were the people who were paid to promote woke and globalist propaganda and make it look like those views were mainstream and to shadowban normal people. It never made money, it was constantly fed money by investment funds to do it. Now you are going to discover that journos lied to you all along.

>>100509 > What I wonder is why people do not fight back against this soykaf somehow. Despite reddit being as biased as Pravda newspaper, no one created any viable alternatives to it. * Lemmy & Piefed on Clearnet * Tenebris & Dread on Tor * Ramble on I2P

>>100512 Do you remember when Elon fired 90% of Twitter? Those were the people who were paid to promote woke and globalist propaganda and make it look like those views were mainstream and to shadowban normal people. It never made money, it was constantly fed money by investment funds to do it. Clever move of him, he just automated their jobs using "ai" and cashed in on all the wef sponsored money, all the benefits and none of the work. I used to think elon was just a hack who rides of others backs, but the more i look at the world as it is and those so called geniuses, the nature of "the hack" that makes so much money and how they play it is the true genius of it all. And now instead of shadowbanning people, they make echochambers filled with bots and yesmen herded into them feding their own intellectual feces back to them with all the gains kept for themselfs, its just true genius. Look at what happened to tesla, no smart man would want that repeated, so they sell broken useless gimicks to a guilable public that doesnt know what to do with their money anyhow instead. >Now you are going to discover that journos lied to you all along. You know the irony of it all is that most journalists actually lie to themselfs the hardest, most of them are so obsesses with their image, but actually get sucked into this mode of thinking to conform that it becomes a reflex that i believe they have become so ingrained in the idea of image that they only believe in the image they perceive themself to be perceived as. I think to journalists it is no longer about how the public thinks of them, but how they can maintain a false image of how they public perceives them and how they should be perceived by the public. In other words it is no longer about lying to the public but about lying to themselfs and the public has become a spectator to how the journalists view the public. All of it is one giant echochamber, the true genius of it is that it is so obvious and people can be utterly oblivious to it all.

still, something missing on various topic specific (game, anime or something else) forums that we had back in 2000s there were many people and there were vibrant debates, discussion and such, not everyone agreed with everyone but there was a certain culture of open debate, say what you want and such how and why did it disappear, where all these people went, its not like they all died out? certainly Financial Crisis of 2008 led towards many suicides but it should not have wiped them all out. Are they just sit somewhere out there quietly and refuse to communicate with anyone even online. That is kind of what I did before I somehow started missing online debate a few years ago and joined reddit only to find out it was not the same as forums of 2000s. or its more of I started thinking that real-life problems are not mere circumstances, but a systemic issue and I felt I need to tell people about it. That will explain why system bans me when I point at the issue. I even know what problem is, but I cannot solve it or is it that there is nothing left to say in face of it all, we learned it all and it left us bewildered and we instead contemplate all this information on our own

>>100520 One of two things took place: >They stayed around but did not go onto other platforms. IRC still have a sizeable userbase. Private Trackers are still alive and well. They simply stayed in place and didn't follow the heard towards Facebook, Twitter, et al. You can find these places with some effort, but the people who had these discussions can be found here. or >They moved on. Either migrating to Facebook, Twitter, et al, simply stopped using platforms and went onto other matters, or they use platforms but don't discuss with others. This never truly disappeared, those who remain simply were left behind in the march of progress. (Progress being subjective. Facebook and Twitter isn't progress IMO) The attention economy took over, those who do not participate in it are not known outside of it. Unless you actively search for people outside it, you won't be aware of those still having discussions. Instead those ensnared in it are watching whatever slop an algorithm decides interests them.

>>100520 That's a change in perception. In those days information was circulating in other ways, discussions were structures differently, participating in them was a certain niche with certain expectations. Nowadays you have other expectations from discussions, you look at topics in a different way, there is less natural chemistry to want to participate in such discussions. Many reasons, availability of information, being used to modern platforms not being too exciting for deeper discussions and sbuconsciously extrapolating it into simply not being interested in discussions anymore that much, etc.

>>100520 >certainly Financial Crisis of 2008 led towards many suicides did it even? anyway fwiw the internet has gone through several phases, in the early 2000s there was still a lot of the sort of exclusive nerdyness of the internet which has since been significantly evaporated. The demographic online has substantially changed from the predominantly male, white and relatively educated population that drove that sort of forum. Because things are so diluted its a lot harder for people to just find cool discussion forums that are not literally reddit, and reddit is kinda garbage.

>>100520 >how and why did it disappear, where all these people went, its not like they all died out? certainly Financial Crisis of 2008 led towards many suicides but it should not have wiped them all out. My take is most of them gotten old, i remember talking to some homies i used to hang out with on an internet game all the time, one of them told me he had cancer and could barely afford the medication, others worked and some had families. Then there are those who just got tired and left, most of us from that era have gone trough the motions so often we are sick of it all, its not only hopeless but pointless, people dont want to hear about problems or have rational discussions, they just want distraction. Young people especially want distractions and bullshit, most of them are so damaged they cannot hold one rational thought at all, they are purely impulse driven with no chance of redemption. Most of the cool smart kids sheltered themselfs from all this crap and live isolated with all the stuff they need and forgot about the world, there is no point to this facebook using twat public, they are zombies, you want to stay the hell away from all of it. Even real life turned to soykaf most of the normgroids went online on those echochambers and the people who are cool just fall in between the cracks irl and hang out in dark corners. The world has changed, people have changed but most are completely oblivious to it.

>>100524 this is a good point, nerds are intellectually superior compare to normal people, normal people are like apes compare to us, IT nerds that is why its so annoying, normal people in charge makes intelligent discussion as impossible as one with an ape >>100533 Thing is I am tired of seeing these old parasite retirees destroying everything we need and hold dear, while we are dying out, unable to do anything about it. I almost want to quote Ormus from Diablo II on it, about living like rats due to Mefisto's corruption monsters running amok in our former cities and internets. Why cannot we overthrow them?

People don't fight back because there's literally no way to, the world government has too many supporters.

>>100512 >It never made money Do you think twitter is making money now?

>>100595 Twitter has always been a propaganda outlet that's part of the nsa, just like facebook (which was literally DARPAs lifelog which they "cancelled" on the same day facebook released). elon musk / lone skum is just the public corporate face of a government department.

>>100581 the world government? do you mean the global system centred on the US, WTO and such or something else? I mean a more local problem about distribution of money and power inside existing countries.

>>100597 Elon isn't in the gov anymore. He left when he realized that in a democracy, you can not reduce the debt without giving the power to the other side. >>100595 It made a net benefit of 1,2 billion last year.

>>100713 >It made a net benefit of 1,2 billion last year. False. Thanks to Musk's cup-game asset shuffling, the net profit of the company is not publicly reported. But it is public information that the company's total revenue last year about $2.9 billion, below what it was since Musk took over. X even says they lost $577 million in 2025 "amid ongoing challenges such as debt". >https://x.com/i/trending/1999541061631283611?lang=en But hey, maybe he magically reduced costs by more than half and it'll be profitable in the future.

>>100509 >I posted on Reddit, one of the most censored places ever >they censored me >how could this happen to me?? Create or join a server on Mastodon, the communities may not be as large but they feel far more genuine and that matters. You're posting on Lain after all, so you should not be concerned by a small audience.

>>100715 Wait... If it is not making money now, then who kept it alive when it had 10 time more people working for it and why?

>>100738 Investors. They ran the conpany at a massive loss because they believed that if they monopolized the market enough, they could eventually become profitable like Amazon. It's also very convenient to have an easily controlled central website where a lot of people get their news and have political debates.

>>100738 >>100741 This is also the *exact* same reasoning Elon has in buying twitter, btw. He's not stupid enough to buy a company that he knows is a money pit just because they weren't respecting his frozen peaches. He also probably wanted it so he could easily data-mine it for his AI golem.

holy fuarrrk everyone on this site and especially this thread has absolutely lost their grip on reality. its genuinely quite sad and pathetic. get a grip or please get lost from society <3

>>100761 if you're not here to worship Lain, the God of the Wired, you can fuarrrk right off.

>>100762 did apple user spread his asscheeks wide while reciting terrence howard to get you to be this retarded?

>>100738 Musk is nothing more than a frontman for big budgeted projects that use the same pattern by starting rather open and more or less public programs which are meant to capture as many humans as possible before the trap closes on them. It's all the same trick of entrapment. The point is to centralize all human activities into supposed private entities that benefit from public grants too since the states are mere puppets in this process.

>>100509 Look, I have the same feeling. However, I also have a feeling the 2010s world, let alone 2000s world, let alone 1990s world - they are no more. You can discuss videogames, though. Use "Wiby" search engine to look up for small sites and such, too. As for the big sites, well... where I live, the big sites are blocked because l, apparently, the accesibility to a guide on performing self-destructive actions (sewer slide) is more important that a life of one of our citizens...

Oddly enough, I made a couple of threads on login/auth blocks (an archived copy of my first thread is available on the Wayback Machine FYI). I had enjoyed using the internet in the 2010's since it became an era of a new, open world. Now it's just hell, considering that people must have accounts nowadays, and even give out their D.O.B.'s if they want to access NSFW material - and it's became very clear that the internet has been barebones. In a way possible, this news removes the freedom for free speech, and for the likes of me, I cannot go on. People like me cannot go on with this anymore. This has to be stopped. My recent thread on this entire subject matter speaks for itself: https://lainchan.org/r/res/44024.html

>>100512 >>100514 The rich celebrity idolisation has made its way here too, too bad. Do you know why you're talking about a rich celebrity right now? It's because their publicists paid journalists to write about them, and to weave it around a story so that your unquestioning mind repeats it, and now you're here repeating it and talking about it. Twitter has had more censorship after its acquisition, than before, by a huge margin. It is now pretty blatantly an advertising and propaganda platform. But you guys are here talking about how somehow it was worse before. You are the ones who have fallen for what journalists told you, and that's a shame.

>>100794 The apple of anonymity has been removed, m8 hope you have some $ to buy a dozen of 298 Gb HDDs

>>100803 >>100521 >>100520 I have a following theory: "PERFUME INTERNET THEORY" The thesis is... Any "perfume" is something you cannot own forever. Some get discontinued, some get reformulated, some are still there but fall from the grace of fashion. What I mean is... the small, the cozy, the 'inner circle' Internet has never disappeared. HOWEVER, the userbase for "that Internet" has been as small as it was in the 1999 (e.g. very small, *niche*, even) Once you accept that, you... may find out you are interested in finding some new perfumes to try - and you just need to know where you should look for the new experience instead of looking for "the Grail" you owned once but not anymore. Details are... If you miss the 2000s |cool Internet| (FLASH games, livejournal-like blogs being serious and alike), FLASH can be resurreced with a RUFFLE plugin. >>100509 клёвый триколор, братан

>>100795 these people are hardly journalists, moreso propagandistic talking heads that say what theyre paid to say. they dont do anything that would qualify as journalism lol. welcome to the post truth era, where its cool to be anti government and a conspiracytard because a guy totally not in the govt told you to