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Comment by local_crmdgeon | Hacker News Reader

I miss that in general. Everyone has become a Cool Internet Person who acts like a celebrity, or at least in a homogenized way. I miss the internet of weirdos, that felt separate from the real world.

I worry a lot that I contributed to how this is now, too, in my professional life.

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Sometimes I feel bad for having been a customer of digital devices and internet, and then going into computing studies.

It's strange to observe a world I dislike even though I was part of the wave driving the change.

Internet is still full of weirdos.

What changed are primarily two things:

1) The social media war hasn't been won by those platforms that offered users possibilities to customize their page (MSN spaces, myspace, tumblr still survives) but by pre-canned, limited but simple platforms.

2)Internet citizens are increasingly less anonymous on all those platforms which makes them further unwilling to be unfiltered.

All frontiers close eventually. I wouldn't take too much on myself about it, if I were you.

Honestly, internet of weirdos that feels separate from the real world is on private discords now. I pluck people from various semi-public communities that seem cool and build cool private communities.

There is a huge difference between pockets of weirdos sharing giphy memes in walled gardens using tools provided by a corporation and what felt like practically the entire internet being comprised of, built for and used by absolute weirdos.

Fair enough. It just became too much of a risk to put your full private self out there on the internet unless you're a special kind of DGAF, I think.

Those discords are full of "weirdos" who are all exactly the same. I'm talking about the self hosted blogs about how the moon landing is fake that also explained how to emulate NES games, BBS' etc.

Every Discord I've seen is just a bunch of Zoomer communist furries which, while not exactly your average bunch, are all very similar to each other and everyone on Twitter and Mastodon.

Why do you think you contributed?

Edit: maybe “how” would be a better word to use.

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