Nah. Forums are mostly dead, most websites are ad-enhanced garbage and the proliferation of right-wing fucking morons in ALL THE COMMENT SECTIONS turned the internet to mostly shit. Its not anywhere near the quality from back in the days.
Yeah, mikrocontroller.net is still going strong :) The internet overall just was more interesting than today, simply because big corporations didn’t pollute it yet with their garbage.
You used to be able to find forums on any weird subject. Tech stuff has always been the easiest to find, it’s basically one of the only subjects for which you can even find somewhat active Lemmy communities (!).
Almost everything else has become Reddit communities or Discord servers.
or even worse than Reddit communities or Discord servers, they’re facebook groups a lot of the time too. I feel like I can’t find any association or organization for well, any sort of activity, without needing a fucking facebook account to be able to join their group on there.
Reddit is getting there fast really, popup after popup of constant nagging and such a terrible enshittified UI they just had to kill any effort to make it better by closing their API.
Discord servers are invisible to the outside world, which means you can’t discover the ones you might be interested in. And once you’re in, hope you don’t have to look for something in particular, because search function is terrible and the UI is actively fighting against you when you try to look any message farther back than a page or two. It’s really made for discussion, they tried getting better at being a content source but they still suck at it.
But yeah, any content that’s on Facebook may as well not exist for me. My account (that I had already created only so I could access walled stuff) has been closed for more than a decade now.
The problem is that people just use search engines that categorize websites with algorithms and serve the most popular ones (which are these platforms) so this is the only side of the internet they are exposed to.
The big, enshittified platforms take away most of the traffic and creative energy even from the couple of places that are basically cool, and on top of that many small sites have to deal with complicated regulations (a lot of which is kind of necessary because there is SO much violent propaganda on the internet nowadays, but at the same time they clearly diminish the experience compared to a site that isn’t strongly regulated but just doesn’t get targeted by bullshit as much).
It’s still is, the problem is that now most people think the so called platforms as the Internet.
Nah. Forums are mostly dead, most websites are ad-enhanced garbage and the proliferation of right-wing fucking morons in ALL THE COMMENT SECTIONS turned the internet to mostly shit. Its not anywhere near the quality from back in the days.
Not sure if forums are dead. I still get some information from (German) forums where the hardcore techies or enthusiasts hang.
Yeah, mikrocontroller.net is still going strong :) The internet overall just was more interesting than today, simply because big corporations didn’t pollute it yet with their garbage.
You used to be able to find forums on any weird subject. Tech stuff has always been the easiest to find, it’s basically one of the only subjects for which you can even find somewhat active Lemmy communities (!).
Almost everything else has become Reddit communities or Discord servers.
or even worse than Reddit communities or Discord servers, they’re facebook groups a lot of the time too. I feel like I can’t find any association or organization for well, any sort of activity, without needing a fucking facebook account to be able to join their group on there.
Reddit is getting there fast really, popup after popup of constant nagging and such a terrible enshittified UI they just had to kill any effort to make it better by closing their API.
Discord servers are invisible to the outside world, which means you can’t discover the ones you might be interested in. And once you’re in, hope you don’t have to look for something in particular, because search function is terrible and the UI is actively fighting against you when you try to look any message farther back than a page or two. It’s really made for discussion, they tried getting better at being a content source but they still suck at it.
But yeah, any content that’s on Facebook may as well not exist for me. My account (that I had already created only so I could access walled stuff) has been closed for more than a decade now.
The problem is that people just use search engines that categorize websites with algorithms and serve the most popular ones (which are these platforms) so this is the only side of the internet they are exposed to.
The big, enshittified platforms take away most of the traffic and creative energy even from the couple of places that are basically cool, and on top of that many small sites have to deal with complicated regulations (a lot of which is kind of necessary because there is SO much violent propaganda on the internet nowadays, but at the same time they clearly diminish the experience compared to a site that isn’t strongly regulated but just doesn’t get targeted by bullshit as much).