Does it have something to do with the rise of smartphones and no one typing on real keyboards? (Maybe why blogs died.)
Is it a consequence of voting, which blogs didn’t have?
What happens to your thoughts? Do you turn them all in the form of a question? Do you tear them down into a Mastodon one-liner and hope a popular person notices it?
If Lemmy had more of ourselves in this way, maybe it would be a healthier place.
Being idle until the media put out an article on something for us to talk about gives them too much power over us.
There’s an actual_discussion community, which isn’t exactly lively. There’s a casualconversation community, and even that’s all in the form of a question.
This is a problem on the internet in general now. People used to have active conversations on the internet, and type multi-paragraph long replies to each other. Each new platform has shortened the attention span of people on the internet, spoon fed more nibble sized content to people, and reduced their reactions to the tap of a button. It’s really sad, because I love talking to people online, and it doesn’t really happen now. I think part of it is that we’re almost all using phone keyboards like you said, but a lot of it is probably due to the changing internet landscape. We’re not participants anymore. This isn’t our Internet. It belongs to the corporations, and we’re consumers.
TL;DR?!
Phone keyboards bad
Corporations bad
Old Internet gone
People lazy
Thanks. I originally meant that as a joke but thanks anyway 😅
I know you did, but it was fun to tldr it.
And to think in the 90s, there was the belief that the internet was going to free us from corporations (because the corporations were going to be too stupid for cyberspace or the information superhighway, etc.). I’m not sure whether that was young-person naivete or whether it ultimately came from dot-com marketers, but it was around.
The corporations of the time still haven’t really figured the internet out. But new corporations founded by slightly younger people who have a deep understanding of the internet, grabbed complete control over almost everything in the span of two decades.