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 -
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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