I feel like things on Lemmy were pretty chill several months ago, and that’s started to change.
People used to talk each other like they would talk to a neighbor. Now I get the sense that people have become quick to be negative, attack, and not be constructive.
Am I crazy in feeling like the vibe has changed?
I like your theory and wanna agree.
In 00s and 10s, my friends and I used to engage with the Internet and each other in a very different way than in the more recent years: We basically were the content generators for ourselves, making conversations based on our ideas fueled by movies, books, or pure imagination, with a lot of jokes and other content that, compared to today, probably took much more effort; we made ambient music with a shitty mic, gathered together, somewhere away from our homes, to talk and watch shit on some weak-ass laptops, maybe game and talk on said laptops, maybe game online, share stupid proposals for our art projects like making music or writing stories or drawing, sharing results.
Of course, we recited some jokes, rein reenacted some, and ironically enough, the most repeated were the ones coming from short-term content, like the z0r.de flashes or skits from collection-type videos like the GMOD Idiot Box. Back then such short-form content was more of a rarity, it seems, so we still had a lot room for creativity and something more meaningful and such, while now this type of content has filled way too many spaces, with much lower quality, too - we’ve seemed to have stopped creating, despite having arguably much more fuel for it thanks to the many changes our lives brought.
Thinking about this makes me browse the Internet a little less and focus on writing or reading, two things I’ve been most creatively engaged with since I was a kid, hoping that can bring creating stuff back to my life and the lives of my friends and family, at least to some degree, as opposed to just consuming lazy content and having even lazier, meaningless, dull conversations with people I care about.
I was just commenting on this to my gf a couple of days ago - I’m browsing and posting on the internet less so I feel more free to do things in a way that I like without thinking about the what audience they’re for.
In a way the awful state, and what I view as a downfall (remains to be seen), of big sites that everyone has been tied to for essentially a decade feels like shedding chains. I hope more people quit and spend their energy elsewhere. It doesn’t have to be another site, it can be any offline endeavour.
I’m on Lemmy because I’ve come to a realization that the reason I enjoyed internet back in the day was, as you said, a different type of engagement. And I don’t think it will ever be as it used to be. But a big part of that engagement was conversations like we’re having right now. At least in my algorithm enclosed corner of big social media sites I don’t see people reacting and having a conversation. It’s just a reaction, thanks, like, bye. Sometimes there’s arguing. But never a conversation.