The Death of the Online Man

I wonder why the internet's greatest aspects have not been credited to those that made them, but rather the fora that they resided on? Is this effacement of the individual a part of the walled-garden effort and the rise of big tech in the internet? While perhaps this doesn't hold true in anonymized forums where the individual contributor is intentionally part of the greater community, like lainchan, most popular communities in the present age of the internet are anti-anonymity in the sense of requiring a handle and a definite online presence yet also anti-individual in the sense of suppressing that individual contribution. While in some cases you can see individual attribution, you'll also see a lot of "yo I just watched this awesome Youtube video" or "I saw this great post on Reddit." Going further on this, do any of these fora contribute to the internet outside of serving as an aggregate of the people that do choose to contribute on it? What has Youtube directly done for the internet and its community other than make soykaffy resets? It serves as an aggregate for content and profits off this, but it produces nothing and only burdens those who produce on it by forcing them to conform to its narrative, levying a toll on what income is made, and serving as a way for Google to exert its will on the internet (at least until recently.) Other fora and websites are similar to this, policing and extracting value from discussion yet never actually doing anything to aid it. Why do we lionize these fora and use them to define the internet, then? Yes, their definite cultures are ways to delineate the internet, but those cultures are made by the individuals on each forum, not the forum itself. Perhaps this is best explained as a symptom of the increasing corporatization of the internet; nothing unbranded can be allowed to exist on the internet due to how corporations have effectively taken it over. I don't know how to fight this, given my nearly-nonexistent experience in software development and deeper internet communities, so I'll leave this to you all.

Interesting thought.

>>20599 The credit goes to the created conditions, as man is viewed as cattle to the analysts such as sociologists. Money is the deciding factor in the creation of the conditions the internet currently resides under in the western world. What has been decided to be allowed to exist is fairly limited. It is seen as a means to an end to those with the money, as anonymity, privacy and psychological diversity are incorrectly viewed as correlated with abuse, when abuse is in reality only correlated with the abusers. The online man as you put it either has to be shaped into whatever has been decided for us by the conditions the money creates and shaped out of psychological diversity, or has to be outcasted to secluded spaces.

last image is highly appropriate. Where the corpse of mans' dreams lie, wild mushrooms will grow

>>20599 >How do I fight the de-humanization of the internets? Well, yes. Corporations did took over the main chunk of the webs. And yes, they will push on your face the most marketable, the least original and the most forgettable soykaf. But it has always been like this. For good content, for "human" content, you just have to do some digging. Dig your way through miles of miles of soykaf, in the hopes that you, may, find something good. And there is good stuff. There has always been good stuff hidden amidst the trash. Why don't I share some with you? And maybe, you'll share some with me... :3 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dP8Bq6e9fRU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qKpl-DJ3Ocs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NigetJ9nqgA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-k3TYNXwzHQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hlNWfslbSGA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cksMz4709rg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOQhVMxzCqs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_NYNuAdIv0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1xFpAkEkEI0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yabo2YQ6ZxI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SoIfcbsV13w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NBQ6_0IROfw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yabo2YQ6ZxI

>>20609 >using YouTube you're part of the problem

>>20611 heh? Why? What's wrong with yt?

>>20611 Not him, but that's just part of this day's meta. Yes, he - and me, bc I use it frequently as well - is part of the problem, but the core of the issue is the aggregation of capital (be it social, monetary, infrastructural or technologial) and the commercialization of the interwebz. Shortly after Google purchased Youtube did the normals start flooding it, and after it was a normal place and it was possible to make money out of it, did the soul-sucking start. I've recently tried using alternative platforms and other roundabout ways (bitchute (a crackpot christian/rightwing containment site at this point), toogle (killed off by Google), invidious (still works, but kinda buggy quite restricted in terms of user features) and one platform the name of which I can't even recall, because they were driven out of business years ago) to watch videos. But, as you can probably see from the examples I gave, it's no use because the normals are still clinging to Youtube, because that's the standard. Everyone's there and more are coming from the developing countries. Besides, it's easy to criticize, but it's not like you're presenting any solutions yourself either.

>>20599 >I wonder why the internet's greatest aspects have not been credited to those that made them, but rather the fora that they resided on? Isn't this simply because most people don't try to attach their internet identity to their real identity and don't try to maintain a consistent internet identity? I remember watching a Speedrunning documentary on the challenge presented by one of the levels in Super Mario Bros. (World 4-2?). The guy who solved the problem, his name? I kid you not, it was something like xX_420BlazeIt_Xx. Then, there's the tendency for those that gave great contributions to just up and disappear, leaving that account behind entirely. What you attribute to the corporatization of the internet, I see as the mere consequence of people being able to not take their identity seriously. All you really have then, is the content, not its creators and the communities that gave rise to that kind of content and the platforms that gave that content a place it could receive exposure it otherwise wouldn't.

OP here, good responses from you all. :) Apologies for the soykaffy art, but I can't reach the good stuff right now so this'll have to do. >>20607 >What has been decided to be allowed to exist is fairly limited. It is seen as a means to an end to those with the money, as anonymity, privacy and psychological diversity are incorrectly viewed as correlated with abuse, when abuse is in reality only correlated with the abusers. Those with money deliberately encourage this perception of anonymity in an effort to suppress it, but I do agree that the general sentiment against the online person has shifted negatively as corps sunk their claws into the internet. >The online man as you put it either has to be shaped into whatever has been decided for us by the conditions the money creates and shaped out of psychological diversity, or has to be outcasted to secluded spaces. I think you're spot-on here, it's now people that confirm to the top-down orthodoxy of a community rather than creating an orthopraxic culture that defines the community from the bottom up. Because culture no longer stems from the people of the community, their other contributions are delegitimized and suborned to the central platform. The presence of the online man stems from their influence, and this influence is destroyed where corps run the show. >>20608 I chose the images because I felt that the surreal and austere fit the post the best. >>20609 I think I need to clarify here; ninety percent of the internet has always been utter soykaf, and there is a human ten percent that is worth wading through all the dreck for... but most of that ninety percent is still made by the online man. The real issue here is that there no longer seems to be a human behind the sea of soykaf, everything has become homogenized and branded and people forget that there's somebody clacking away at the keyboard to make the content you see on the internet. A lot of that is due to the rise of bots and [REDACTED]s, but there has to be a few people left on here. Anybody? >>20615 See above for a bit of a response to this. My rant did a soykaffy job of explaining it, but I was referring more to the idea that the internet is built by humans and their contributions and people seem to forget that now. I think that what you described is part of the beauty of the internet; an online presence doesn't have to be overbearing and revealing, but there is still somebody behind that presence.

>>20599 Considering that not all online platforms(what you refer to as fora) are equal, often times the stage you perform on really does make a difference. Not enough to claim that you don't deserve equal or greater attribution, but people do say the suit makes the man right? It's very easy for platforms as big as YouTube or Reddit to overshadow their content creators. Most people would probably say that if not for YouTube existing, that most YouTubers would not be able to do what they are able to do, or at least with the level of audience they get currently. There's only so many people on YouTube that would've been able to make it on any platform and that you could say would be equally successful anywhere else. And even then, YouTube would still be the best choice for them, because it's the lowest common denominator platform that the majority of people know and can get on now. That's significant. Significant enough that most people will probably credit the platform before the creators on the platform. I doubt it's a conscious thing people do though. I think it's just a natural phenomenon. My guess is that only a subset of people are so great that their success is beyond any platform they may happen to work in. It makes sense to me because most people are not actively seeking out particular kinds of content themselves. Most people are led around by other people's recommendations or algorithms. For example, they were going to be on YT or Reddit anyway for X, but then they happened to see Y in the recommendations or on the front page or something. If not for the platform, Y may have never gotten their attention. In that case, many people would argue that the platform played the most crucial role.