When I was growing up the internet was a place to be liberated from the world say what you want to say, be whoever you want and form genuine communities with shared interests. Now the internet feels like a tool to enslave the mind with identity echo chambers and any deviation leads you to being banned and blocked shunned and silenced within a void that is inescapable. Novel unique websites coded manually by hobbyists running servers for free in the commons allowing people access to the free flow of information under the banner of “information should be free” has largely gone away with corpratisation. I miss the days when the internet was populated largely by nerds aiming to make a better world not this controlled censored hell hole of profiteering.
Its a bit strange because, before, a few of us were here and getting to know the internet and everything it had to offer.
Nowadays, everyone is on the internet but most of them are confined to the apps they use and what those apps show them.
So it seems people are being silently manipulated without ever knowing there are many more things out there, but even then, the will to explore new things might not suit them, and they prefer to “live in the matrix”.
Internet mass manipulation is getting ever more developed and used as a tool to achieve an agenda.
You just described AOL in the 90s.
This, they just described what it was like being on the internet and not being on AOL but seeing them all happy in their You’ve Got Mail walled garden.