>>302173
I believe this wholeheartedly. Even fifteen years ago the Internet was absolutely bustling. Small forums, niche websites, a hundred billion blogs, self-hosted video sites, you name it. Now everything is a wasteland outside of Facebook, Twitter, halfchan, twitch, tiktok and reddit. And if you add up all the real, human users of those sites it doesn't come close to equaling what was lost IMO. When was the last time you saw a
real bustle of
real human activity outside of those shitholes? The last incident I know of was #GamerGate itself, and only when it moved to 8chan prime. Hell look at KotakuinAction on reddit. 140,000 subscribers, neat. Literally ONE GUY actually making 90% of their new posts. Why? Because he thinks those 140k "people" are real. Why is a thread there really, really lucky to get 100 replies? Because those "people" are
not real.
Everything is this pastel, bland, tasteless sludge of content but there are still millions of voices driving it and responding to it. And when you catch them in the right light, most of those voices don't sound convincingly human to me. I think the actual people who used to run the net have largely fucked off back to IRL outside the Facebook group they share with their grandma, and bots have filled the void because the 'net is monetized up the ass and nobody wanted that apocalyptic metrics drop.