I think I’m done entirely with mainstream internet “content”

I’m getting more and more frustrated with the internet as time goes on, I feel I am getting less value for the emotional energy and time I am putting in than ever before.

Everything online is designed to waste your time now, everything is designed to suck you in, make you spend 10 minutes looking for 30 seconds worth of information, make you scroll past gore and porn and AI generated slop and the mutterings and ravings of the most venal, ignorant people in the world to find literally anything worth touching.

I think designed is the really offensive word here, there was never a point in time where being online didn’t involve dealing with idiots and scum, but it was rare to get that crawling sensation at the back of your neck that I do more and more these days: This is all deliberate

I am primarily, though not solely, talking about the five or six main sites that compose the “internet” in popular conception, Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, Google, Discord etc.

The privacy argument has been lost, most people don’t care enough about it to stop using these services, so I’m going to put aside the myriad privacy and control concerns with these services¹. they get talked about endlessly, if you’re browsing this kind of site you’re probably already familiar with them, if not I’ll link some resources for you to read on your own time.

I think these sites fail on merit, they are terrible at what they are allegedly supposed to be for², which to the average non technical user will be a more compelling reason to move away from them.

It is also a much more fundamental problem than the technical issues of data collection and dark patterning; front ends and extensions cannot polish a turd enough for it to taste good.

The content is shite, your front end is letting you access it in a nicer, more privacy respecting way, the plate is nicer, you’re still putting shit in your mouth.

Invidious and Piped give you ad-free & tracking free access to the same banal drivel and algorithm chasing morass as youtube itself, Nitter lets you enter the attention vortex and lose hours of your life without an account, they’re just the friendlier faces of the same monstrosity.

Fortunately, I’m already completely disconnected from most of these “services”; I don’t have a Google account, I don’t have a Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, whatever else the kids are using these days, I lurked twitter for about six months and knew by hour 2 that it was bad for me, and recently resolved to quit³.

Unfortunately, their poison has seeped through into many secondary and tertiary services, and many others that are moving away from these services seem to be rejecting them for technical, taste or political rather than fundamental reasons, going on to build cargo cult replacements that are maybe a little nicer to their in groups but fundamentally functionally similar, replicating similar behaviour.⁴

So what do I use?
There’s the real issue, I know these platforms are bad for me, and not worth engaging with, but what do I replace them with?

Quite possibly the answer is nothing, for many of them, older models of media for some, but there are still things missing, solutions out there but not found. Maybe its a question of more effort, maybe I just learn to live without.

Either way I’m opting out.