Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.
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PaperclipPerfector
15d ago
(text post)
1327 thread views
Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.
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Are there any fun websites left?
I visit tantrailluminated, themottel, hackernews, /g and not much else. I want to get some real recommendations for decent websites that are not stuck in the internet peasant class, aka dependent completely on big tech. Themotte has lost some users; jumping away was a great decision in hindsight. Nothing is worth sovereignty. Below is some more text wording this out, totally optional.
I wrote a poorly worded post recently since I have become more concerned with the excessive concentration of internet firms and the ever-increasing data they harvest. 15 years ago, I could go on cracked and read articles, visit IGN forums, and everything else had a dedicated forum with its own rules. You did not have constant texts, hell the telemetry data was amateurish given what we have now, Newgrounds was not totally dead, YouTube was not another arm for corporate media. Retvrn to 90s nostalgia is not my aim, we live with an ever-worsening society in ways that this place has gotten worse.
The pervasiveness is hard to grasp until you actually try quitting. I quit the internet for a week, and I did that by removing it from my phone. For starters, I could not get a can anywhere, which is terrible since there is no parking here in most areas. My payments suffered as most people here take online transactions, which a dumb phone cannot support. Calls were terrible, and since we do not live in a pre-text world, I could not call people without texting them first. Everywhere I went needed me to use an email to sign up. Nearly all interactions guys my age have with girls is texting, so instead of actually having sex or feeling any amount of spark you do upon meeting someone physically, the peak for most is exchanging nudes. Its startling how every single app intrudes into everything in life and wants to keep going.
The worst thing was that the internet chatter being removed from my life made me find it hard to meet or connect with people. Most discussions are functionally gossip by the technical definition, a discussion about a third person or event or thing not in the room with us. I only stopped because the payments and the taxi thing made it nearly impossible, now that I write this, I might actually do the experiment again, but this time without forgetting my atm pin. Anyway, I am trying to state that the eternal September we find ourselves in is worse than we thought it was. Everything is homogenised, somehow has corporate interests and is usually noise. It's not noise, the way me writing this is noise, but in filler that leaves you empty. Every time I write things here, this comment, for instance, where I will retry my offline experiment, adds to life. The internet 20 years ago was still largely a place where you wasted time, but today it's a place where you are being actively poisoned.
Everyone I meet is a screen addict, everyone. I am yet to meet someone beyond a few who are not on the screen 24/7. Good websites are not all-consuming noise. My favorite, Tantra Illuminated, is a place for active consumption; you can't just turn it on and consume passively. I wrote all this out to point out there is a cultural shift where more and more of our world quite literally is online, and it's increasing whilst still churning out worse things. The ideal site, hence, is not over-consuming and not for passive consumption. I use this search engine wiby.me on the recommendation of Luke Smith, you find way less information, but it's not as dead as what you see on seo optimised search engines. Its gotten to the point where not only are there fewer good sites, they are harder to find and have worse things posted. I will clean this post up soon, apologies if its too verbose. My time online has made me aware of the malaise I inhabit and see in others around me, online or otherwise.
The guy who runs KiwiFarms wrote an interesting piece about digital self-sufficiency. The site itself is not to everyone's taste (lots of 4chan-style shitposting and racism) but he has had to deal with an insane amount of pressure from big tech just to run a glorified gossip website. It illustrates just how hard it is to run a website nowadays when you're blacklisted by Cloudflare, search engines, payment processors, and even T1 ISPs.
https://madattheinternet.com/2021/07/08/where-the-sidewalk-ends-the-death-of-the-internet/
This incident was because of some trans streamer wasn't it, because he didn't like being called out for making bath tub hrt.
I have been a regular at kiwifarms, unfortunately, God, I have wasted my life.
The trans streamer incident was in 2022, one year after Null's article in 2021. I believe the 2021 article comes after a video game emulator developer named Byuu killed himself in June of that year. His death was weaponized by Hector Martin and blamed on the farms, despite ample evidence to the contrary, which resulted in Dreamhost dropping the site in 2021. Later in 2022, Byuu's death was one of the things referenced during Keffals' #DropKiwifarms to successfully pressure Cloudflare into dropping them too.
I've written 10 threads there and I find the site is useful in knowing what NOT to do if you ever find yourself in trouble.
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