I have a theory that the whole mainstream internet is entirely fake. If you use any search engine, any request shows only useless mainstream sites owned by the elite. There are many genuine sites owned by normal people that never get shown. I have spent many hours before finding a site that is not owned by the elite. Unaware people don't know that normal sites exist. If all search engines are owned by the elite, average people will never find anything genuine but bullshit sites.
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Cold_Guinea_Pig ago
The high time of the internet was the early to mid 2000s. You could spend a whole evening literally 'surfing'the internet, especially the images. I used to put in one word randomly and then got millions of images. Everything. The images then led to websites, the websites then had a list of similar ones. It was fun and never got boring. Now it is all centralised. People visit two or three big sites like reddit, twitter, FB etc and rely on posts from others. I often proclaim after about one hour that 'I read the internet', meaning I've been to my few websites and read it all. This woke me up to the fact that we are relying too much on a handful of sites that can do what they want with us. And to make matters worse, we keep them alive through content we produce for them. So I have started to go back to the basics recently. Meaning I have tried to find dedicated sites with content I like rather than being spoonfed by reddit. I went back to 'funny' image sites and UFO sites and alternative news sites and actually worked on my entertainment by putting words that interest me into DuckDuckGo and see what it comes up with. Those that I liked, I saved and I will go back to.
However the web has changed. Instead of getting millions of images, I'll get 70!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Fucking hell, even on DDG, rather than google, they restrict the amount of images and show you a few 'selected' ones. I also agree with OP that smaller, interesting websites are completely obliterated. It really isn't what it was any more. The best times are over, kids who never knew how it was think it is only 'proper' when it is published on the big few.
I had enough of doing the work as content provider for nothing so that the big ones can get bigger. Even posting this is against my new found morals but I also think it should be shared.
I have already given up reddit for a week, as a starter and when I came back I fell for it again. I guess it's like any addiction, you wean yourself off slowly. But I crave the hours of fun I used to have.