Why are people so pessimistic about the internet these days?

[DiffydaDude]

The question in the title is kind of rhetorical, but this is something thats bugged me for a while. Ever since abt 2016, it seems like a myriad of the people i see or know online see the internet like a graveyard. Everybody mostly talks about how the world is supposedly becoming a technofeudalist enshittified affluenzatopia or whatever, and this is the only sort of thing people really talk about with interest. It feels like, like my friend seabhac said, nobody knows how to talk about anything else anymore because, at least since that terrible pandemic began almost 5 years ago, its the only thing people around me get really engaged with talking about. Ive always been kinda disturbed by how much people changed the way they did things in the last 9 years, from the way people draw art to the way people talk online to a whole bunch of other things. I had trouble trying to express this in the past but i think i finally found a term that fits what im looking for.
There was this thing in the 1880s and 90s called "Fin de siècle" and i found the wikipedia article for it a bit ago and it sounds nearly exactly like how people treat society to day. Almost like we're going through a Fin de siecle 2 or something.
The reason i bring this up is because I feel like if we want an actual better internet for people to be around, we need to like, let go of whatever this "fin de siecle" feeling is. And i feel like i have a lot of good reasons to show why.

• These days, nostalgia is the real big thing. today, most people online long for the days of windows xp and call windows 10 a privacy nightmare. however, this page describes the contrary. It also calls IE and XP a privacy nightmare just like we do with w10, for many of the same reasons too! But how can both be equally bad if obviously xp is the better choice? unless that is, our views of these things changed entirely.
• I feel like the way people discuss and depict things has become not only more fin-de-siecle-esque, but also alot more cold and calculated, like its all done with a greater purpose in mind, whether monetarily, politically, or else. I feel like the way we make things so heavy-handedly has made things feel like a coarse brick wall, not like a tree of creativity exploding outward. (Thats how I imagine the old way of doing things would be if it was a physical thing)
• Also, I wonder if its actually a good thing to constantly worry about stuff all the time. Not merely worrying about stuff, but how it seeps into literally everything and is inescapable. You cant actually put your mind off of something because 5 seconds later that real chill thing ur watching drops a line about how the world is dying and a total fuck, and i really honestly hate that because i cant ever just relax and it sucks. i know i might sound like a loon but i feel like we shouldnt be doing this all the time because I cant constantly worry about stuff 24/7
• Also continuing on the last point, many of the things that people worry about today have happened in the past, during the "good ol days". Ive seen the same sort of things in an old yearbook from 1984. It took up 2 pages and it talked abt dictators rising to power and other events of the time. If things like this happened then and now, then why should people constantly worry 24/7.

I normally dont prefer long essay like stuff like this but i kinda feel like the internet would feel like a better place if we could let go of these sort of traumatic feelings that resonate all over cyberspace. I feel like if we could break down that barrier and let our minds just, roam or expand or graze freely or however it could be put, then maybe that would be the biggest thing in making the internet better. Im not telling people to stay on youtube and twitter of course, those places are exploitative and very terrible, I'm just saying if we did this like how i prescribe, then it could make all the difference. I just wish the internet felt, good again and it could feel like how it once was.
Hope u did enjoy reading this, cuz i actually felt pretty good writing down how exactly i feel for once without being confused.

[Cobra!]

This reminds me of a Vsauce video I watched years ago talking about nostalgia, and why we always see the past as better.

Looking back, there were things better back in the 90s and 2000s, but also things that are worse.
The best thing, at least concerning the internet, is that it was fully decentralised, and people weren’t using sites that put you at the mercy of a few companies who can call all the shots. We still have forums and other “older” forms of communication, and they’ve come back to the point you could survive without any social media or Discord, but the vast majority of internet users don’t do this. Unfortunately.

On the other hands, people were very immature online, and were intolerant of people with ASD or were any sexuality other than straight. I remember always being worried about what I say about myself online in fear of being made fun of, but it doesn’t feel like as much of a problem now. Though there are still communities on Reddit and uh, other sites, that desperately cling onto that mentality. They seem to be less prominent now, though, at least from my experience online.

A big thing nowadays for me that I love are the homebrew communities! People making new software for older consoles and operating systems, and as someone who likes to do the same, I’m happy the tools to do this are more accessible than ever! I always have my ear to the ground for new discoveries and news in this regard, and there are some sites I subscribe to on RSS that keep me in the loop!

• These days, nostalgia is the real big thing. today, most people online long for the days of windows xp and call windows 10 a privacy nightmare. however, this page describes the contrary. It also calls IE and XP a privacy nightmare just like we do with w10, for many of the same reasons too! But how can both be equally bad if obviously xp is the better choice? unless that is, our views of these things changed entirely.

Yes and no. I’ve noticed myself things I hated when they were new, but start to appreciate them when they get older, so I think it does play a role here, but also Windows 10 is objectively less private than Windows XP ever was, there are far more calls to the internet and especially Microsoft servers now, and it tracks you and collects data. You can turn it off, but it’s the fact it’s opt-out as most people won’t think to do that.

• I feel like the way people discuss and depict things has become not only more fin-de-siecle-esque, but also alot more cold and calculated, like its all done with a greater purpose in mind, whether monetarily, politically, or else. I feel like the way we make things so heavy-handedly has made things feel like a coarse brick wall, not like a tree of creativity exploding outward. (Thats how I imagine the old way of doing things would be if it was a physical thing)

I think what I said before also applies here to a degree. Yeah there were most definitely things made back in the day just for money, but it’s more common now as movies and games have become far more expensive not only to produce, but also market, so companies are trying to be as safe as humanly possible to ensure they will be profitable.
They even have consulting firms to make sure there is nothing offensive in their products.
They even do this with remasters, for example the Dead Rising remaster was censored to hell and back.

Some of the changes make sense (such as removing the incentive to take photos of women in certain ways), but others don’t. There is far less blood and any references to war has been removed, for some reason. There are dialogues changed where it’s clear they didn’t understand the context of the original and only saw the surface level stuff.

That said, there are also far more independent studios making games than ever, and many of them to my knowledge just make the games they want, though many of them only publish on Steam.
Music also has many artists, and thanks to sites like Bandcamp, selling albums has become easier than ever, and even make physical copies of!
Sadly I haven’t seen anything similar happening to movies.

• Also, I wonder if its actually a good thing to constantly worry about stuff all the time. Not merely worrying about stuff, but how it seeps into literally everything and is inescapable. You cant actually put your mind off of something because 5 seconds later that real chill thing ur watching drops a line about how the world is dying and a total fuck, and i really honestly hate that because i cant ever just relax and it sucks. i know i might sound like a loon but i feel like we shouldnt be doing this all the time because I cant constantly worry about stuff 24/7

I can tell you that worrying about things all the time is draining and most certainly not a good thing. I have a big collection of games, albums, movies, computer and consoles, etc. I constantly worry about storing and taking care of them correctly, and it stresses me out, even when I remind myself that how long it all lasts really depends on how well they were manufactured.
What I really should be doing is enjoying the stuff I have while I still can, and I’ve been making an effort to.

I’ve also left pretty much all of the political Discord servers I was in, and I noticed a huge difference in my overall mood.

I think both were a result of me worrying about things I ultimately had no control over. I’ve since been trying to only focus on things I can control, and it’s improved my mental health. I would highly recommend others do the same.

[WK_0]

Your guess is as good as mine, Diffy. I think people don't like being on fire all the time, but that's just my guess.

Okay but nah, seriously, I do get where you're coming from in all of this. Whenever the whole topic of social media and internet politics comes up it's no surprise all anyone in our spaces can talk about are all the bad things going on. Much like sex and violence, misery sells and spreads pretty well. It's real easy to forget about some of the nicer things still going on around us, like the fact that places like Neocities and Nekoweb even exist in the first place that provide a much needed, easy-entry outlet for folks to make their own sites and wean themselves off of the Big Kahunas that've taken over the webscape (actually I shouldn't even call them kahunas, they're more like the loud annoying fratboys of cyberspace).

But anti-social media talk aside, invoking fin de siècle does bring up a good point about the cyclic nature of social pessimism as big cultural shifts come and go. Changes are scary, especially when it's at a scale you as a singular person can't control, much less comprehend. Unfortunately a lot of folks are pretty bad at just chilling and not sweating the big stuff that's beyond them. But then again some can't when they're literally in the middle of getting the shit kicked out of them in all the very much real social and cultural upheaval. All this political stuff does actually have great effect on people's lives, after all. But let's say, for the sake of current topic at hand, no one in your specific social circle(s) that you know of is going through anything legitimately horrible and are just talking pessimistic about internet politics for the sake of it. And throwing in overly complex political terms to make it all sound smart. So waddaya do then? My advice would be to take a break from said circle and reconsider why you hang out with them if all they do is bring ya down over ultimately trivial things that might not even concern them. That honestly can't be doing you any good.

Basically put, you make some good points about how a lot of this collective negative talk in any web-based spaces we're in can be fueled by fear of the unknown and nostalgia. I'd even argue it's also the general work of the gossip genome active in the average human brain. It love love loooves to focus on anything negative. However, being a bit of a cyber-wanderer I've also seen that folks actually are feeling the brunt of all these weird changes going on in the past decade, so to me some of that fear is legit. Lots of independent creators losing grip of their much needed income all because of a few choice changes in the big platforms they use, for example. Still, your friend's not wrong in saying folks have been acting very differently since the 2020 pandemic lockdown. A lot's changed among folks since the latter half of the 2010s. I even personally saw some changes across the web as early as 2010, but that's just me going from my memory.

Point is, change is scary. People get scared easily as a whole and that's the one thing that never changes. Sometimes all they can really do is just talk it out in droves, while others with the necessary skills go towards making things to express their concerns. Now this ain't ignoring the fact that there are indeed folks who make things in a cold and calculative way that's just there to push a personal agenda (usually that agenda being to make money in any way possible), but some actually do express themselves in ways that might just be too coarse for ya'. Not every tree being grown has a smooth bark. Can't really help much on that, it's the nature of expression and that includes wanting to explore what's going on in the real world. I'd even argue that's actually a pretty healthy way to cope with the collective social trauma, making art that reflects that internal pain. But again, I get your frustration over wanting to just find something in media to escape all that. I tend to run into that problem too. 'S why I can't watch modern films anymore, most of them are just a little too much for me.

[JINSBEK]

Nostalgia filter aside (it's easier to be fond of a time when you weren't worried about how possible home ownership and parenting is for your generation), things were vastly different and more positive for online creatives in the years before. The most obvious example of this are the musicians who talk about how they need to receive millions of streams in order to make a living, whereas before, you could sell a few thousand albums thanks to MySpace and have your entire band be on a pretty solid base. YouTube demonetisation has been horrific for loads of indie publishers, and the amount of effort necessary in order to make and market a "successful" indie game is a lot steeper from the Newgrounds and Kongregate days. The stakes are a lot higher. Development cycles are longer and harder, and that's due in part to the frankly maddening amount of effort that has to be put into marketing even pre-production these days. You're not building a Twitch integration? Good luck putting in extra sustained lifetime work on all other social media channels now (do you have a dedicated TikTok manager? No? You're in for a bad time). Everyone has to hustle harder just to make ends meet, and maybe that's especially true for the Internet.

It's not just the passive users who are heavy-hearted about all this. So many people who grew up with the Internet, and made it their profession, are pretty burnt out.

[Capybara]

For me it's 100% not a nostalgia issue or something post-2016. I've used the internet for roughly 21 years and it's a huge part of my life. Even as someone who was a "latecomer" to the online world, watching how things changed yet the worst aspects stayed the same is extremely upsetting. I had a bad time on "the old internet" as a kid who wasn't well socialized, but from adulthood onward I watched how it became more corporate and consumerist, communities are more tribalistic, and I can't even "log off" to stop dealing with it because now everyone has the internet. Even then, from lurking online I've seen gen Xers say the same thing about the internet as early as 2001-2008, it's just tumbling downward. Sure, there are some hope spots like the amount of free webhosts and interest in trying more "old school" communications like emails and IRC. But when the internet has replaced a lot of people's socialization outlets due to third spaces disappearing (at least for me), it's hard to not be angry and want to talk about it.

• Also, I wonder if its actually a good thing to constantly worry about stuff all the time. Not merely worrying about stuff, but how it seeps into literally everything and is inescapable. You cant actually put your mind off of something because 5 seconds later that real chill thing ur watching drops a line about how the world is dying and a total fuck, and i really honestly hate that because i cant ever just relax and it sucks. i know i might sound like a loon but i feel like we shouldnt be doing this all the time because I cant constantly worry about stuff 24/7
• Also continuing on the last point, many of the things that people worry about today have happened in the past, during the "good ol days". Ive seen the same sort of things in an old yearbook from 1984. It took up 2 pages and it talked abt dictators rising to power and other events of the time. If things like this happened then and now, then why should people constantly worry 24/7.

I do agree with this a lot. I've had a political consciousness since I was a tween and while it's good to stay informed, being aware of every bad thing in the world kind of compounds to your own misery. It's not that I don't care, I do, but when good-natured caring people are exposed to all this at once and don't have much power to stop it, it gets depressing fast.

Nostalgia filter aside (it's easier to be fond of a time when you weren't worried about how possible home ownership and parenting is for your generation), things were vastly different and more positive for online creatives in the years before. The most obvious example of this are the musicians who talk about how they need to receive millions of streams in order to make a living, whereas before, you could sell a few thousand albums thanks to MySpace and have your entire band be on a pretty solid base. YouTube demonetisation has been horrific for loads of indie publishers, and the amount of effort necessary in order to make and market a "successful" indie game is a lot steeper from the Newgrounds and Kongregate days. The stakes are a lot higher. Development cycles are longer and harder, and that's due in part to the frankly maddening amount of effort that has to be put into marketing even pre-production these days. You're not building a Twitch integration? Good luck putting in extra sustained lifetime work on all other social media channels now (do you have a dedicated TikTok manager? No? You're in for a bad time). Everyone has to hustle harder just to make ends meet, and maybe that's especially true for the Internet.

It's not just the passive users who are heavy-hearted about all this. So many people who grew up with the Internet, and made it their profession, are pretty burnt out.

This also correct.

[DiffydaDude]

@JINSBEK
Ok, I have a bit of a theory
I realized this after watching this really good series called Shadowstone Park. In the epilogue, the bird says something like "nothing being wrong feels wrong" and he says how he still feels like something bad will happen even though its all over. And I thought "woah, thats how i feel" and i think a lot of other people would feel the same way.
I think that the way people are interacting with the internet right now is a trauma response to the 2020 pandemic. How we all love nostalgia so much, how we love to make out the new generations as brainrotten children, how people love to scroll on shorts so much and also complain about it too. I think its us trying to heal that trauma by taking it out on other things.