Start
Recently I’ve been realizing how the internet has become a big monopoly, people don’t navigate across different websites to find cool stuff but rather go to the same few sites (YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit…) and consume the internet through their lens.
The good side
I am aware that that has some advantages and it seems a reasonable place we’d end up given enough time, it removes the effort of having to find those sites in the first place, for videos there is YouTube, for friends posts there’s Instagram, for discussions on topics there is Reddit… It also works the other way around, if you want your content to be seen it’s much easier to do so on a platform that already has people on it instead of creating your own, that can help small businesses make themselves known, it has created “content creator” careers with people that live of of that now, and I’m sure anyone could come up with more positive points.
The not-so-good side
But as always, this comes with some bad, first, most of the internet has shifted to be “algorithm friendly” and whose sole purpose is to get more views. Every modern website has some sort of system to determine what to show you next, first notice the word “show you”, you are not searching for something, but rather consuming what’s being fed to you, even on cases like YouTube where you have to click on a video to watch it you clicked on it because it was shown to you in the first place, people rarely watch a video by searching what they want to watch, but rather they view what’s on either their Home/Recommended/ForYou sections, and that’s the best case scenario, things like TikTok, Instagram, Twitter you just mindlessly scroll over hundreds of posts that are being set up for you, worst thing is most of the time you can’t even recall a fraction of what you just saw once you are done with it.
Does that happen with anything else you enjoy in your life?
Have you ever watched a movie, played a game, went out with some friends, and have not been able to recall 90% of it?
How come that happens with social media!?
Mind the emphasis on “you enjoy”, if its a boring movie you might not pay attention and not recall all of it, if you are in school on a subject you don’t like you won’t remember as much…
But, you like watching social media, do you?
At first people would agree, that’s why you use it all the time! But does that not contradict with every other activity that you enjoy?
That’s only social media, not all of the internet, right?
Wrong.
Most of the web works on the same fashion now, news sites always have clickbait titles to get you in, and once you enter, you get bombarded with recommended articles. Even cooking tutorial sites like cooking ones try to trap you as much as they can with nonsense stories and filling hiding the true content for which you are in the site to begin with, online shops, app stores, and basically everything follows the same “feeding you content” and “trapping you in” rules.
Why they want to keep you in
Ads, ads and ads (and selling your data, tracking you across devices, making a profile from all you do online…) and more ads.
So are you against companies making money online?
Do you want everything for free?
No, first there are multiple ways for companies to make money online that don’t include tracking you and selling your data. Also, in real life, ads don’t target you specifically, the ads on a country might not be the same as in another, but it still is a general ad, its not been served to you after studying the best way to influence you specifically by listening - through - your - phone’s - microphone and many more sketchy tactics.
Companies want to own you.
The businesses model has shifted, online companies providing you with a service you need and you giving them money in exchange does not ocurr on the big platforms people use (yes, there are online courses you pay for, some paid news letters, and those are great! Unless they also use any of the scummy tactics mentioned previously), but rather, they try to monopolize a format (like YouTube with videos, and Instagram with Posts) and then play with your brain to keep you hooked, they are literally feeding from your attention, they keep you in a trance-like state for hours at a time and rewrite your brain into comming back for more.
The image is just a meme, but if someone who had no idea about the internet read all this wouldn’t they imagine something somewhat similar?
Moving forward
I’ve already taken some steps away from all of this, although ofcourse I can only act for myself, I deleted Instagram long long ago, I never had a TikTok, I stopped using reddit in 2023 and in June 2024 I finally quit Twitter, my last splinter is YouTube and I’m pretty sure I won’t stop using completeley, but I still took some action:
- I use YouTube without an account to eliminate any sort of algorithm based on my history.
- I’ll keep track of subscribed channels on a RSS feed.
- I’ll use either fullscreen or theater mode to minimize the recommendations I get while watching a video.
I’ve also been playing with a bookmarking script I made to save the links, so that might be usefull too not just for YouTube.
I’ll still have the recommendations at the end of a video but because I don’t have an account recommendations will only be based off of this one video I’ve just watched so it’ll be a good way to find new content I might like but it won’t be enough for it to create a profile on me and feed me random content, is it just as bad? You could argue it is, I might change this page in the future if my stands on this change, but for the time being, this is it :D
PD: No way anyone reads this ever but whatever ¯\(ツ)/¯
I’ve been heavily inspired by Luke Smith, Mental Outlaw and Eric Murphy.