AIBU to feel sad about how the internet's turned out?

I understand where you're coming from OP. The genie won't go back in the bottle.

For all the good stuff - being able to research your interests and hobbies, stumble across brilliant artists, musicians, connect with people with the same interests, there is equally, if not more bad stuff.

The addictive quality, the young people whose brains are being altered by the honours of scrolling, the mental health issues caused by social media, the speed at which damaging lies can flood the Internet, the batshit conspiracies that become main stream. The 'gossip' sites where individuals (mostly women) are ripped to shreds, every single aspect of their lives minutely picked over. The magnification of culture wars, the ease with which a mob can be raised. AI - the speed at which AI is advancing is terrifying.

I am worried reality will very shortly disappear up it's own fundament.

So I stick to crochet patterns and cat videos. And MN.

I was also a teen in the late 90s. I was in a chat room for Dawson’s Creek fans with other female fans. Then men would come along and try to sexualise things or to imply that the girls in the chat group fancied each other. They totally ruined a great chat room full of fun and laughter.

I also remember the early days of file sharing, and the sheer joy of finding music including music you hadn't heard for years, where you could tap into everything and no one owned anything, there were no adverts, none of it was buttoned down.

Isn’t that copyright theft?

No Mn without the internet!

I love the internet! When we were overseas for a year my son continued his music lesson online from the other side of the world. He kept in regular contact with friends via zoom calls and online games. I keep in touch with people worldwide.

I love listening to BBC podcasts and getting info on so many varied subjects.

I don’t watch porn and I never come across it. I love being able to follow what people are doing who I’m interested in, like writers and some sports stars. I even got a sports star to send a video clip to my son when he had a lockdown birthday!

we also run a business from the other side of the world and have easy access to customers all over the world via online adverts and articles.

Yes of course there are bad parts but the good IMO really outweighs it.

Kink isn't new, no. But it's naive to think that frequency of exposure to various stimulus doesn't create a ratcheting effect with regards to needing more and more in terms of intensity and novelty. The speed at which material can be acquired is a fraction of what it was in the past and so many more people are impacted by this who otherwise wouldn't have been. Also the privacy aspect - having hard copies of things that could be discovered, post that could be opened by the wrong person. It would take months or even years to obtain and a huge secure place to store the sort of material I could look at in the next 10 minutes on my phone. Not to mention the cost and time.

We can observe the effects of this in the phenomena such as 'the death grip', mainstream assumptions about deviant sexual practices that have emerged over the past ten years (personal smartphones vs family PCs) it's just so silly to pretend or genuinely believe the Internet hasn't changed anything with regards to disordered and disturbing sexual content and what that does to us.

Well

They wouldn't have been direct

But there were ways they advertised for more... uncommon ... desires.

Kink isn't new

I used to love Usenet.
Spent a lot of time on various discussion groups.

But I like watching videos about amazing stuff. There's someone who's made a YouTube channel about fish tanks (tanks for nothin) that's inspired me to acquire a fish tank!

There was practically a flasher in every road when I was a kid. Upstairs windows, alleyways, bushes in the park, local woods, bus shelters.

They were bloody everywhere - but we went round in groups so we would call them names if we saw one, throw things at them, their windows.

My point is- not having the internet wont prevent you from coming across men trying to expose themselves or from men trying to show you their dicks. Men have flashed at me, showed me photos of themselves, I've been sexually harassed at work, groped, cat called, manhandled, sexually assaulted and all of those things happened prior to the internet existing. Therefore, the idea that it's the internet that is causing it is absolute nonsense

Crikey you've had to put up with some vile behaviour!

To my mind the internet has had a huge influence on the normalisation of inappropriate sexual behaviour targeted towards women . Sex is now so commoditised and mundane due to the ease of access to unregulated porn via mobile phones - there is definitely a correlation between over-sexualised behaviour and increased widespread use of the internet and the infrastructure that supports it.

lol I am not saying I have a pure heart and am so innocent that I never see porn- where on earth did I imply I was mother Theresa?. I am saying that whilst scrolling online, I dont come across porn randomly. Of course porn is online but it's not something most people come across unless they actively search for it. Most people typing searches into google are not bombarded with porn sites unless they are using specific search terms.

My point is- not having the internet wont prevent you from coming across men trying to expose themselves or from men trying to show you their dicks. Men have flashed at me, showed me photos of themselves, I've been sexually harassed at work, groped, cat called, manhandled, sexually assaulted and all of those things happened prior to the internet existing. Therefore, the idea that it's the internet that is causing it is absolute nonsense.

There are many amazing things about the internet so to take the view its all bad is just ridiculous.

Totally agree. I'm concerned how accessing porn early will influence young minds and change the idea of what's normal or acceptable. People who have awful tendencies can find others who normalise behaviour. Then if course there's the actual victims who suffer for gain or pleasure, no matter how peverted. I joined a campaign to stop the annual dolphin slaughter in Taji years ago and ended up getting sent loads of images of abuse so awful that it still keeps me awake. When you ask yourself how low can you go, the answer is a bit lower. Thinking of the recent prosecutions of the people mutilating monkeys. The regulators are always 10 steps behind. There's a lot of good that has come through but on whole man's darker side prevails.

I saw a brilliant meme for this.
"Da y'all remember before the Internet, people thought the cause of stupidity was lack of access to information.
Yeah, it wasn't that"

I was listening to a World Service radio programme and it seems that the levels of female staff in Silicon Valley has decreased a lot. So the boyz are getting to call the shots. Also that our political parties are spending many millions getting onto tikTok and FB etc so increasing the profits of the US companies rather than UK newspapers - as all internet major companies are in the US, TikTok is Chinese but I think the one used in the UK is US based.
I wonder how much of the money that used to go to UK companies 30 years ago now goes to the US. I can't help feeling that our years of 'austerity' have also been contributed to by our years of paying out to Netflix, Amazon, Paypal etc instead of goods and services in the UK (where they'd be taxed).
In theory life is better with all the info at our fingertips eg mums asking for advice for their newborn however when you go out and about everyone is gazing at their phones. How many other interests, skills or hobbies that we used to do are no longer done - I'm think of boys playing hours of computer games as an example.

I have loved the Internet since I got on it back in 96, when I went to Cyberia, London's first internet cafe (near Tottenham Court Road IIRC). I started working in a university not long after and had Internet on my computer, I thought it was amazing. But it was deathly slow loading pages, and downloading anything was tortuous and probably virus-ridden (LimeWire!) I got a home pc from Tiny soon after, along with a load of disks like Flight Simulator, but I was there for the dial-up internet. It was all an adventure, from UseNet to ICQ, I have fond memories of Joe cartoon, crappy flash games and Dance I'm a pussycat. But anyone who thinks it was better then has rose tinted spectacles. There was loads of porn and it was so bloody slow, I do not miss waiting for pages to load! You really do have the world at your finger tips now, and I still think its bloody amazing.

Also, I feel like everything they promise will be good ends up actually shit.

Take cars for instance, people thought they meant freedom.

Now though, they are expensive and heavily regulated. You don't often have a choice whether to get one or not, traffic is anything but freeing. Parking is expensive. In a lot of ways, we actually have less freedom as our local services have been once again monopolised and have moved away.

I'm cautious about any new big tech that they try to convince us will improve our lives.

I feel the same, it is such a disappointment.

Personally I feel that most of the internet is now just bots and anything good has been suppressed by Google's algorithm.

It's alike how they ruined radio. It was easy to have unique, interesting radio but before you know it, it gets monetised, monopolised and ruined.

Stuff like Instagram and Pinterest are becoming unusable due to all the silly AI art crap and bots.

I think the solution to this is to go back to the idea of centering internet use around real-life stuff.

Like, if you’re into knitting, have a real life knitting group, make a group that is for those users and have real conversations and share real pictures of real stuff on there. That’s basically the kind of thing I do.

As opposed to scrolling page after page of bot-generated fake knitting images on Pinterest.

You're not being unreasonable OP, there's a lot to be said for that barrier to entry.

The optimism of the early Internet and its potential as a positive force in the world is long dead. Yes, its convenient for some things but we're like frogs being boiled as far as the effects on humanity are concerned.

lol . No obviously not. But I grew up in the sixties/seventies in Greater London when all we had to do was walk behind the Gents loo in the local park to see as much porn as I'll ever want to see. And in those days the pages were often stuck together with the previous users bodily secretions.

You think, in the past, when people with fetishes were searching for a cannibal to eat them alive piece by piece they just popped an ad in the local tabloids?

i don't think there is anymore crap/porn/fake news/anger in the world than there used to be. It's just more accessible now. In the past it was printed on paper in red top tabloids amd scandal sheets or on VHS etc and you had to seek it out. Now it's available after a few clicks.

that being said, I think the benefits of the internet outweigh the disadvantages.

@FrothyCothy Thank you for the link I'll look forward to spending some time looking at his Insta this later this eve! X

@GordonBlue I'm sorry you thought you had to print things to be able read them more than once? Even my mum didn't think that and she's 65! How old are you?

Depends on what you focus on. I use it very selectively .

Internet is just a digital extension of the world. So it's going to have its good and bad bits.

Find the good bits and ignore the bad.