I feel like something bad is happening and I am unsure how much of this is me being negative. I "quit" the internet in late 2018 due to severe addiction and years-long disengagement in my hobbies (reading, programming, thinking, music, art, ...) and only recently have started reintroducing it into my life, for example, catching up with what people do on YouTube, trying to get an idea of "what people are talking about". It feels like a fever dream and I am unsure whether this is due to me picking up my extremely unhealthy internet browsing habits that I had pre-2018, and I wonder whether there is a "healthy" internet that I am not seeing.

I made a twitter account recently and followed Jonathan Blow, Sebastian Lague, and 3blue1brown. I just scrolled through the default twitter page and I got karen videos, a naked woman in a car caught cheating, israeli soldiers harassing someone, a police dog mauling someone. I made an instagram account to see 3blue1brown videos on my phone and went to the default page (I assume it knows nothing about me) and I was given videos of disabled people doing sports which are clearly meant to be "funny", with extremely hateful comments apparently from children, spelling out the N-word with separate letters, etc. That was in 3 minutes of using Instagram and I gave up. I am interested in game development and a google search of "game development" gives me absurd "industry knowledge" youtube videos and r/gamedev. r/gamedev is just "meta-commentary" pointing out "societal problems" of game developers, you won't make money, noob assumptions, angry at the world, even mixing in discussions of depression, self-hate. It is a mess. Where are the people talking about neat collision detection tricks? I am aware that this is the "surface level" and I will eventually need to find and curate a variety of incoming "feeds", such as group chats with good engaged people, great forums, etc., but I just don't feel like it is "natural" to find them. I feel like I need to start a project for myself to intentionally build my own "algorithm" which leads me to find enriching content. I feel though that that is actively going against what "the internet" wants me to do. It is so easy to find such hateful things, and I am worried it will bring me back to being as depressed as I was before quitting the internet.