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 think the opposite will be true. I hope we will spend more people talking to each other in real life, which actually makes me happy that dead internet is happening.
I dont know if you buy this theory of social media causing loneliness. I intuitively feel that way and the more I talk with friends on chat, or comment here the more lonely I feel. Meanwhile meeting my friends or strangers in real life gives me a memory boost and makes me smile.
The less everyone spends on Twitter arguing with bots, or here on HN arguing in the comments the happier we all are
My personal experience here is far tamer than many — as a straight white boy, for example, I didn't need to worry about getting beaten like the gay kids or followed around by the guards like the Mexican kids did when they went to the mall or library[2] — but I grew up in a conservative religious tradition and getting online where I had access to forums like the talk.origins Usenet group was key to realizing that the religion I was raised in was full of people I trusted who were telling me lies[3]. There was very little in the way of a technical community in the parts of California I grew up in but thanks to FidoNet and the early web, I was able to learn how to program well enough to get a hight score on the CS AP test despite going to school in two districts which didn't even offer the class, which mean that I was able to jump on board the web train as that started taking over the world.
1. Disabled, parent of a small child, kid in a suburb where you probably don't have anything within walking distance even there is a safe way to walk without getting run over, someone who lives in a rural or poor community without well-funded libraries or vibrant public spaces, etc.
2. One high school I went to was about 50% migrant farm workers. Seeing the difference in how those kids were treated was eye-opening – both the willingness to police them in ways which even the skater punks didn't get but also the tyranny of low expectations where it was just kind of assumed that they were going to be ground down by the system and should set their sights low.
3. Biology classes in school wasn't enough — the creationists are good at coming up with arguments to discount curriculum – but what really opened my eyes was seeing the full original source materials which were selectively quoted in the religious writing. It's possible to be innocently ignorant but there's really no good faith explanation for slicing-and-dicing a quote carefully to make it sound like some famous scientist meant the opposite of what they actually wrote.