I started out loving the net because of the feelings of connection and partly because of the honesty and discussions stemming from at least pseudo anonymity, both silly stuff and egghead discussions on history and tech - but i always felt a "human presence" and community out there behind the screens.
Now anonymity is dying and the value of discussions will plummet because you'll be just be arguing, learning or getting inspired from a selection of corporate PR bots, state sponsored psyopping or "idiot with an assistant" that will try to twist your mind or steal your time 24/7.
Christ this is going to be so incredibly boring, paranoid and lonely for everyone in a few years time!
I'm honestly having an existential crisis, the internets is already filled with too much noise and people are already lonely enough.
Back to local community and family i guess, it was amazing while it lasted..
I wonder if we've reached a singularity point where you cannot be sure you are engaging with a human anymore and it's going to be instrumental in the demise of the net. First, it was the big corporations that created a soulless place, then it was the naive, reckless technologists that killed the little of humanity that remained. Thanks to them, we will soon have to present real IDs to access some websites.
I am in the peak of my career as a software engineer at 35, as many Millenials I've grown during the best years of it, and now I'm considering a life away from what was once a bustling bazaar of human discourse, now it's a void of text, images, rage and little soul.
If the "Dead Internet" is just a conspiracy theory, we're running towards it at breakneck speed.