Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
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Notes -
Anything like this that still exists on the internet has to be protected from "the web at large". These sorts of things worked in the past due to the filtering of all internet users for for smarter, more tech savvy, PC owners. Anything today that gains a reputation as someplace quality discussions might be taking place will be face a number of dangers from people and groups who would have been filtered out in the old system: bots, paid shills, culture war crusaders, and people who interact with the internet entirely through their smart phone. This has forced the older, higher quality users onto largely private Discord servers, Onion sites, or fora that otherwise apply a filtering mechanism locally, either through vigorous manual enforcement, like this place, invitation only membership, paid accounts, or other equally effective systems. While I don't think its been explicitly investigated or analyzed, I think its largely the case now that the dangers that the new cohorts of internet users present to thoughtful discussion spaces significantly outweigh the potential losses of smaller numbers of new quality contributors.
You may have had a point if @roche were talking about the internet as it existed in 1993 or so, but somehow I doubt that is the case. In the early days, there were hippies who thought that the ease of communication with like-minded strangers would usher in a new era of peace and understanding, as traditional barriers would come down. The nerds who ran the thing and comprised the bulk of the user base nodded along in agreement. A few years later the internet reached 20% of households and any ideas that this would be the case had vanished almost completely. The early adopters were all hippies and nerds and were basing their predictions on the idea that the general public was largely similar to them. As soon as the internet was being used by 14-year-olds to start flame wars on why Nailz sucked, the idea that the internet was an unalloyed positive force in social interaction went out the window. The "web at large" has been around for 25 years now.
This is why I guard against the idea that things have purely gotten worse over time, because from another standpoint 2009 or thereabouts was already well after the death of the 'net. So it helps a lot to define in clear terms what exactly you think the modern net is lacking, and in my case I'd say it's "learning and discovery". As a disclaimer, a young person is naturally going to have way more to absorb from their surroundings than an adult, so the kind of knowledge that impressed 15 year old me is now totally rote and mundane, and any space with that stuff will also seem really banal and empty. /caveats
What feels most different now is the lack of paths towards "secondary" or deeper knowledge. Once you discover something exists, that's usually it. The internet really used to be designed like a rabbit hole, where if anything caught your eye you could just go on a deep dive and find out progressively more about it until you exhausted the subject. Nowadays you can definitely still go down rabbit holes on Twitter, Insta, and Tiktok, but it's harder to learn things this way. I wonder if anyone gets exactly what I mean.
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