The internet is overflowing with bad content. Users are fighting back
greyenlightenment.com
greyenlightenment.com
Just look at the attitude on HN when it comes to z-library. Everyone here is entitled to take what whey want 'because of their circumstances'. An environment where everyone takes but don't give back, look out only for themselves, and strip the financial rewards for creation isn't going to lead to an environment like the old internet, or even like the old creative environment.
Perhaps very briefly. Once it went public AOL opened it up to anybody in a pretty short amount of time.
>the MBAs twiddle their fingers thinking how to exploit every last corner for profit and the whole thing goes to hell. Result: the current Internet.
I think ad blockers really did it in; the web anyway. Every year, the ad networks kept getting increasingly intrusive because of that greed and a technical solution was found and widely adopted. Unfortunately, that removed quite a bit of funding/incentive for anyone running websites.
It seems pretty obvious that people who support the z-library are the same people who want the Internet to be about "interesting people sharing their interests". Why are you using it as if it was a counterpoint?
* Many want to be landlords and leech off others, not providing any real value other than buying up a house and renting it out that someone else could of bought.
* The ladder is being pulled up from older generations that benefited from low cost college (that was financed by higher state taxes - which no longer exists) and now dont want to pay taxes to fund the younger generation.
* No one links to other sites, because we see everyone as competition.
* We don't trust each other or even like each other for the most part in the US.
* Hell even the pandemic proved that really one's freedom comes before the idea of even giving a damn if someone else got sick that might of had preexisting conditions.
I'm not sure if its hyper-capitalism or hyper-individualism.
Maybe its all related to knowing that our government isn't going to help you and is working on ways to make things harder unless you are one of the elites.
That being said, many people on youtube create channels full of information, sure many end up promoting garbage and some are loaded with worthless filter or clickbait titles/images, but the amount of things you can learn today for free is quite amazing, topics that just weren't covered before.
It really is - including practical, creative, technical, and academic topics.
My favorite thing about youtube is that you don't have to be a "youtuber" to upload videos. There is also no requirement for minimum audience size. The long tail of niche channels (at least the ones made by humans) seems a bit like the old web that people are nostalgic for, even if is within Google's ad-fueled kingdom.
It's also an amazing repository of popular (and unpopular) music.
My least favorite thing about youtube is how advertisements seem to have greatly increased over time.
The information age gave us information overload, something I don't think anyone predicted.
I wonder how things will be in 10yrs as people use more and more AI to generate low quality stuff and fluff. Will people tire of all this and seek out real human ideas and thoughts?
It was definitely predicted. Marshall McLuhan basically coined the term ‘information overload’ in the 60s. The sci-fi novel ‘Stand on Zanzibar’ also published in and 60s has chapters that are akin to a Twitter feed that give a sense of the wider world
Reddit is no longer filled with 30 something, educated, fairly well off professionals (or people who could well off but have chosen different priorities) accessing it from their computers as part of a creative cycle on their PCs. It is now filled with less well off, younger, and lesser educated/experienced people accessing it as a distraction from their phone.
Except for kind of in the recent travertine/hominid fossil thread (which was nothing compared to historic domain expertise) you no longer have domain experts pop up on most every thread with interesting responses. Even the humorous responses are algorithmic at this point.
Reddit is, in fact, dead. Long live Digg 4.0 reinvented as Reddit.
Have you ever played Metal Gear Solid 2 (2001)? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eKl6WjfDqYA
Many people who complain about this not being the case, particularly people on HN with a history of using the old internet, are actually complaining about not having the same limited, much more insularly participative internet they used to. Mainly, you just don't like that much of the far broader internet participation of today doesn't fit your preferences because it comes with all the usual foibles of wider humanity, so you either pretend parts of it don't exist in the first place, or apparently claim they're shallow, spammy garbage.