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Do you think internet was a mistake?

the interent

  • Was a great idea

    Votes: 31 19.1%
  • Was a bad idea

    Votes: 7 4.3%
  • Only social media is bad

    Votes: 93 57.4%
  • I am too young to remember the 90s

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • Internet is awesome but I still think it is a nightmare that already doomed us all

    Votes: 31 19.1%

  • Total voters
    162

22:22:22

NO PAIN TRANCE CONTINUE
Well. I think it was originally with foresight intended for personal/general/social experiment gathering in a myriad of ways with some positives as a inevitable side effect.

There's more to it but yeah

I'm sure it was a precursor to things to come.
 

AREYOUOKAY?

Member
Because someone has to say it.

Porn.

p5F6CLu.gif
 

Nitty_Grimes

Made a crappy phPBB forum once ... once.
People who wouldnt have the balls to say something to your face but will happily hide behind their keyboard and spout off any old insult.

Social media has ruined it - the internet is amazing.
 
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Alebrije

Member
As a pre internet user I can asure internet is the best invent in recent decades. it's a Game changer.

Yes it has a dark side but the bright one is bigger and has let humanity to develop faster ways yo solve problems.

Just imagine the COVID years without internet.

Influencers are just basically the new news anchors, or tv show hosts like Ellen , Oprah, Dr Phill, Difference they are more diverse, but basically offer the same: waste your time on stuff that won't help to improve your life.

But in general internet is great
 

Hugare

Member
I met my wife and met many important friends that I have today because of the internet. And I use it daily for work.

I would still kill it with fire if I could. The damage that it's done for society is immeasurable.

And I dont blame social media itself. People are shit. The internet just facilitate them to be shittier.

People will never, ever use the internet only for good. And with AI now to make things even worse by faking voices, faces and etc., be prepared for a trainwreck.
 
It was great when it was a box in the corner of a room, it began to decline the moment you could put it in your pocket. Being able to interupt peoples lives 24/7 was too much to resist for everyone trying to sell you something or make you the product. Was it a mistake? Probably not, it has a hell of a lot of positives but they are countered with how easy you can be pulled into it's negatives and I'd say the negatives outweight the positives overall.
 

rofif

Can’t Git Gud
It was great when it was a box in the corner of a room, it began to decline the moment you could put it in your pocket. Being able to interupt peoples lives 24/7 was too much to resist for everyone trying to sell you something or make you the product. Was it a mistake? Probably not, it has a hell of a lot of positives but they are countered with how easy you can be pulled into it's negatives and I'd say the negatives outweight the positives overall.
Yeah well said.
Internet does a ton of work for us but tbh, we are probably getting dumber and socially it’s a disaster.
Doing all those tasks and research manually was also probably good for our brains rather than blind internet download to brains
 

nush

Member
People who wouldnt have the balls to say something to your face but will happily hide behind their keyboard and spout off any old insult.

Social media has ruined it - the internet is amazing.
What the fuck did you just fucking say about me, you little bitch? I'll have you know I graduated top of my class in the Navy Seals, and I've been involved in numerous secret raids on Al-Quaeda, and I have over 300 confirmed kills. I am trained in gorilla warfare and I'm the top sniper in the entire US armed forces. You are nothing to me but just another target. I will wipe you the fuck out with precision the likes of which has never been seen before on this Earth, mark my fucking words. You think you can get away with saying that shit to me over the Internet? Think again, fucker. As we speak I am contacting my secret network of spies across the USA and your IP is being traced right now so you better prepare for the storm, maggot. The storm that wipes out the pathetic little thing you call your life. You're fucking dead, kid. I can be anywhere, anytime, and I can kill you in over seven hundred ways, and that's just with my bare hands. Not only am I extensively trained in unarmed combat, but I have access to the entire arsenal of the United States Marine Corps and I will use it to its full extent to wipe your miserable ass off the face of the continent, you little shit. If only you could have known what unholy retribution your little "clever" comment was about to bring down upon you, maybe you would have held your fucking tongue. But you couldn't, you didn't, and now you're paying the price, you goddamn idiot. I will shit fury all over you and you will drown in it. You're fucking dead, kiddo.
 
Yeah well said.
Internet does a ton of work for us but tbh, we are probably getting dumber and socially it’s a disaster.
Doing all those tasks and research manually was also probably good for our brains rather than blind internet download to brains
Yeah, socially it is poison; especially when the majority of communication is done via text where nuance is complelely lost. Fine for talking about mundane things but for getting deeper and actually engaging with someone, yeah, it's a struggle. It also takes really long to do! 😆 Much easier to bash out a couple of sentence hot take about the latest current event and move on to the next app you're addicted to. Hell, so many times I browse GAF, start to type a response to something and then just bail out because it's too much work.
 

rofif

Can’t Git Gud
Yeah, socially it is poison; especially when the majority of communication is done via text where nuance is complelely lost. Fine for talking about mundane things but for getting deeper and actually engaging with someone, yeah, it's a struggle. It also takes really long to do! 😆 Much easier to bash out a couple of sentence hot take about the latest current event and move on to the next app you're addicted to. Hell, so many times I browse GAF, start to type a response to something and then just bail out because it's too much work.
And I hate the kings and queens on twitch and YouTube. They are bigger than celebrities. You say something in asmongold chat? Ban. He gives you a false stage to reply but not enough time and he will ban you anyway for having different opinion.
Toxic af
 

Danknugz

Member
The internet started out great because it was primarily only used by smart people (scientists, universities, scholars, etc)
 
And I hate the kings and queens on twitch and YouTube. They are bigger than celebrities. You say something in asmongold chat? Ban. He gives you a false stage to reply but not enough time and he will ban you anyway for having different opinion.
Toxic af
That whole situation is just flat out bad for even trying to have a conversation though; no one is on equal footing and it's in the favour of the streamer to dunk on random people.
 

rofif

Can’t Git Gud
That whole situation is just flat out bad for even trying to have a conversation though; no one is on equal footing and it's in the favour of the streamer to dunk on random people.
Ah so maybe you are aware of this.
it's really toxic. I was banned like that and I felt like shit being put on the stage.

I said something that it's not fair since he is a big streamer and people are allowed to have different opinions.
He randomly puts me up, 50k people watching and said "yeah so explain your statement". Not sure why, but all of sudden my head is empty. 50k people are watching, I just got stressed over nothing.
I typed something among the lines "I am anxious rn and I am not able to answer so fast, give me some time" and he banned me...

Yeah... he talks every single day in front of tens of thousands of people. I type in foreign language and get limited time to answer and I am not used to "public" speaking.
And bet your ass, ton of people sent me DMs "lol fuck you looser" but also tons of people sent me dms that they were banned like this.

And that's all fine - it's his chat. But how fucking toxic and petty is that. To ban people who put him there. Permanent ban I might add
 
Social media, with the exception of YouTube, is really what's bad about the internet.

But the idea now that you can order things online, pay your bills very easily and look up information is pretty awesome.
 

dan76

Member
Yes, it was a mistake. It has good things about it, but it's not worth the price we are now starting to pay.
 

wondermega

Member
As it gets more advanced by a couple of generations, the issues that we have with Internet (and tech) in the modern day will probably seem quaint. At some point soon - who knows how much of this is true already - we will each be a tracked profile, with an AI (or whatever) that's able to relatively easily predict (and more concerningly, direct) where you will be regularly, how much money you will spend on what products, what type of people you will associate with, clothes you will wear, food you will eat - music you will listen to, games you will play, etc etc etc. Again I am sure some amount of this is tracked (and interacted with/directed) already, but on a profoundly more microscopic level. Where social media currently moves kind of in waves (in how it "controls people,") I suspect it will get much more elegant and effective in ways that will seem much more nightmarish from a modern perspective.

Can we stop it, what does any of it mean? The genie has been out of the bottle for a long time now.. this current situation has probably been put in motion since the advent of moveable type, honestly. Maybe even since anything beyond very simplified language first appeared.
 

mclaren777

Member
I legitimately think it's one of the worst things to ever happen to humanity.

I would retroactively Thanos-snap it out of existence if I could.
 

Comfortgel

Member
To be fair, even social media isn't inherently bad - what ruined the internet is when companies started monetizing users with "the algorithm" and companies figured out SEO. Have you tried using Google search for anything lately?
 

Pejo

Member
It's a huge net good for humanity, but just like any tool can be used for all sorts of reasons.

I personally want early 2000s internet back. When the mainstream still were unaware about most of it and what it could do. Mass appeal and adoption really ruins most things, and I think the internet is a prime example of that.

Also it gave a public square to idiots, for them to all band together. That's been probably a net negative. I doubt Flat Earthers would exist if not for the internet, and that's just a super easy non-controversial example.
 

22:22:22

NO PAIN TRANCE CONTINUE
As it gets more advanced by a couple of generations, the issues that we have with Internet (and tech) in the modern day will probably seem quaint. At some point soon - who knows how much of this is true already - we will each be a tracked profile, with an AI (or whatever) that's able to relatively easily predict (and more concerningly, direct) where you will be regularly, how much money you will spend on what products, what type of people you will associate with, clothes you will wear, food you will eat - music you will listen to, games you will play, etc etc etc. Again I am sure some amount of this is tracked (and interacted with/directed) already, but on a profoundly more microscopic level. Where social media currently moves kind of in waves (in how it "controls people,") I suspect it will get much more elegant and effective in ways that will seem much more nightmarish from a modern perspective.

Can we stop it, what does any of it mean? The genie has been out of the bottle for a long time now.. this current situation has probably been put in motion since the advent of moveable type, honestly. Maybe even since anything beyond very simplified language first appeared.

Hey. Someone who get's it

It's a deep lol state information gathering system in it's core essence. The positive and negative implications were designed and bound to happen as to, well, "reasons" let's say. On the superficial level it's one or the other. But Internet and anything "smart" is.. nvm.
 

MarkMe2525

Member
At one point, I looked at Wikipedia as an example of how good intentioned people would make sure the internet would become a place of enrichment and truth. Unfortunately, 98% of what comprises the internet is garbage at best, bad for humanity at its worst.
 

xrnzaaas

Member
It wasn't a mistake, but it's not such a good place as 20 years ago - you didn't have social media, censorship, mass privacy violations or google as a monopolist back then. I'd go back to the good early years of mass adoption of the Internet in a heartbeat.
 
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Azelover

Titanic was called the Ship of Dreams, and it was. It really was.
Not the internet, but I think the smartphone was.

Just pay attention anywhere in public, everyone with their heads down. No real communication. That was definitely a mistake. And I believe we will pay dearly for it as a society in terms of mental health.

Within a decade or so most people will be taking psychiatric drugs. That ain't good.
 
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-Minsc-

Member
No. All of us who use the internet make plenty of mistakes when using it. One of the biggest is making online interaction a replacement for face to face.
 

Neff

Member
The internet isn't a mistake. It's a logical and inevitable invention.

However I'm not going to lie about the fact that I often miss late '90s/early '00s internet. Normies hadn't discovered it yet, and it was more or less solely the domain of nerds with PCs, and as such was governed and influenced by people who at least had a couple of brain cells to rub together. A stark contrast to today where the vast majority of human beings can easily go online, and for better or worse, modern internet culture reflects that.

I wouldn't go back, but it goes without saying that the average person is shit at participating in the information superhighway.
 

Jesb

Member
Most definitely it was. It ruined so many things. So many lives. More evil has come out of it.
 

Dancer_BV

Member
I don't think the internet was a mistake; it's led to incredible things, just as it's led to all sorts of bad things. The same could be said for pretty much everything in human history. We discover we can harness fire to sustain others, and we discover we can harness fire to harm others. Was learning to use fire to reach our goals a mistake?

It is a spiral of wondering if we should blame means to ends or if we should blame the people who use these means. The internet's worst attributes are correlated to the fact that it's the easiest way for people to express themselves however or achieve whatever they want to. If that was clamped down on, maybe the internet wouldn't be considered so much a mistake.

Next in the cycle is considering why people act the way they do, the point of necessitating a muzzle on their means of expression; to the point where a platform of the freest form of human communication is feared and hated because of it. This can scope out and broaden seemingly indefinitely.
 
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