zlacker

>>bewal4+(OP)
A little bit tangent, and I'm definitely looking at it from rose colored glasses... but been playing with it for the 30 minutes, and most of the videos look so real? Like when you go on TikTok / Instagram nowadays, there are obviously unlimited amount of content. But there's this sense of everything being edited multiple times, people trying to create their own "brand", nothing looking real. It's a shame how we over-financialized everything and sucked out the fun. Or maybe I just got old.

Side note, I'll also recommend people to look up "X city in 1990s / 2000s" on YouTube. San Francisco, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Toronto, London and etc. have cool slice of life content from people who were very into camcorders.

>>tokioy+W4
I was on tiktok in 2019/2020 and for a brief period it was just ordinary users messing around and posting whatever they felt like. No tiktok shop, very few ads or thinkpieces, nobody was trying to build an audience. A lot weirder and a lot more fun

>>mprast+Ql
Commercialization and infiltration of advertising-dollars-seeking "influencers" ruins social media sites.

I miss the early days of the internet (and especially YouTube) so fucking much. I'm 28 now, and I've been online since 2009. I think 2009-2014 was the GOLDEN AGE of the internet for me, especially on YouTube.

>>abixb+Ap
I'm a couple of years older, and I generally agree with you. But even up until 2016 it was generally tolerable. There was a point in time when every single social media changed from "you and your friends" to "you and the world". Which opened the hellscape of influencer and branding world. I'm not sure what exactly accelerated it - Facebook/IG going algo-view first, TikTok starting to get traction even when it was just a dancing app, or the entire A/B science. Oh well...

>>tokioy+Rr
What happened right around 2016 was a combination of the internet being weaponized in the political space and the destruction of of revenue for legacy media because of Facebook and Google and other walled systems which ingested their IP and served it to their users. This effectively made people paranoid of data that didn't immediately fit into their world view because the concept of any shared truth was shattered and at the same time it felt like everything and everyone on the internet was targeted to misinform you.

The 'mainstream media' was never taken seriously by people savvy in the early tech spaces, so the loss of it didn't really hit us as particularly impactful. But that loss made it so that the 'mainstream' no longer had any 'ground truth' they could all fall back on that would be the arbiter of correct and incorrect information, and so truth became whatever felt most right to a person at the time.

This of course has more to do with the people and culture you most identify with, rather than any kind of objective comparison of data, so groups looked more inwards and became ossified in dogma and refused to look at any other perspective in good faith. And here we are.