“Enslave” is a bit harsh, considering there are about 38-50 million people who are currently slaves https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_the_21st_century

We’re choosing to allow a lot of the things these companies are doing to us; but we could choose to walk away at the cost of some shiny things.

Its a bit strange because, before, a few of us were here and getting to know the internet and everything it had to offer.

Nowadays, everyone is on the internet but most of them are confined to the apps they use and what those apps show them.

So it seems people are being silently manipulated without ever knowing there are many more things out there, but even then, the will to explore new things might not suit them, and they prefer to “live in the matrix”.

Internet mass manipulation is getting ever more developed and used as a tool to achieve an agenda.

At the risk of sounding like exactly what you decry, I’m going to pick on your choice of language, hopefully it will seem like it’s for good enough reason. I largely sense a similar, regretful shift in the way the internet is experienced and have some mixed feelings about it, but I would be very cautious in using a term like ‘enslaved’. When you choose to fire up your own high-tech information device to access the publicly available internet and you don’t find the experience exhilarating or thrilling, or fulfilling, in comparison to some relatively rose-tinted view of the same experience had during your childhood can you honestly say that that is similar to enslavement?

However, semantics aside, yeh it’s kind of a shame some of the quirky rough around the edges character of the internet has changed a bit since it became more mainstream and since corporate participation has refined and figured out how to extract much more efficiently from it. That said, as is often said when this sentiment is expressed, the old style of web is still there, you just don’t see it. Nothing stops people from hand coding a website if they want to, but it’s unlikely to be the top of any given search result from Google, and we all use Google. Similarly, unlike decades past, there is just so much stuff on the web that these types of things will likely not be noticed. There’s kind of a paradoxical relationship with how much more in general is available online with how much less varied our consumption of it is. Pretty much every web experience through a browser is going to start with www.google.com, either through the page itself or a default search bar and after that for many it’s going to be facebook, or reddit or amazon. Out of billions of pages, it tends to come down to about 4 for most and then a smattering of other larger media presences accessed via the portal of one of those 4. It can seem like there’s nothing else there in such a case and though not really true, it kind of in practice is true because you’ll much less likely find someone’s home made hobbyist website through major portals than you might have when by virtue of little else being available, that’s what a search engine returned or word-of-mouth recommended.

How bad a thing this is, is nuanced. The web is vastly more useful than it ever was, although the forces at work that made it so seem to be engaging in cannabilising themselves and one another and crippling their own utility in the never ending quest for more profit. I miss some of the feel of the earlier web, although when I was coming of age and using it heavily in the early 2000s, it was very well established already so I don’t have quite the same basis of comparison as someone who might have used it throughout the 80s or 90s. I think I have detected something of a shift away from the ‘edgy’ persona adopted by most on forums, but then it’s hard to separate my usage and interests at the time from the general web itself. I think, for one thing, there still remained even in the early 2000s, a nicheness and ‘geek’ culture to those who spent time on forums that tended to skew the demographic towards teenage boys although I have no evidence for this, this has gone unless you seek it out. I personally haven’t really had too much of a problem with shunning and banning, in fact that type of thing tended to happen more in my earliest web experiences where there seemed to be more places that had issues with swearing, however I have seen a similar puritanical streak that results in this. However I’ve only really perceived that on major platforms as they’ve reached their stage of the life cycle where they can cash-in and must become investor and advertiser friendly. That arc, a more recent arc in my opinion does match what you’re saying but I view that more of a change in how those specific platforms rather than the web itself operate. So it’s harder now than maybe 5-10 years ago to speak your mind with little to no consequence or backlash on a major platform whose reach and influence amplifies that opinion to millions and millions of people. I think you have about the same capacity to speak your mind now as you ever did on the web, but lost the ability to use corporate machinery to do it and not also expect human beings to react to it and to even be silenced when doing so flies against the interests of the owners of the corporate machinery.

Maybe just stop posting racist homophobic shit?

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For me it kind of feels this way, because there’s only a handful of sites I visit regularly, and if one of those sites is unavailable, it feels like I don’t know what to do. In a sense, I am trapped in this new browsing habit that has made me get used to constant short form content that is exciting, and a lack of it is now crippling. At least replacing reddit with lemmy has helped me recover a little bit, because I find that I’m unable to stay on lemmy for hours at a time like I was on reddit.

You should try lemmy, it’s almost everything what you describe you are missing. Jokes aside, I think that what you refer is mainstream internet, which like music is usually shitty if it’s mainstream, to find the good stuff you have to take your time to dig deeper. Internet is an incredible tool and it’s being used both to enslave and to free people.

I miss the days when the internet was populated largely by nerds aiming to make a better world

The BBS and early Internet days were dominated by people who read non-fiction books. RTFM was a common saying in those days.

does anyone else feel enslaved?

“Everything in our background has prepared us to know and resist a prison when the gates begin to close around us . . . But what if there are no cries of anguish to be heard? Who is prepared to take arms against a sea of amusements? To whom do we complain, and when, and in what tone of voice, when serious discourse dissolves into giggles? What is the antidote to a culture’s being drained by laughter?”
Neil Postman
Amusing Ourselves to Death

I get what you mean, but I also feel like the fediverse has given many of us a return to some of the freedoms and feelings of the early internet.

I’m writing this from an instance I admin, an instance that exists, specifically to make a better world for queer and gender diverse folk. We prioritise minority safety over “federate with everyone”, but that freedom to exist without institutionalised transphobia being ignored like it is on most social media platforms, with the ability for us to exist and communicate without being dogpiled by haters, and to actively remove the bigots, that is a freedom I haven’t felt in a long time!

Nice hyperbole. No, I don’t feel enslaved. Give me a fucking break. Enslaved, really? Be the fucking change you want to see, if you are feeling “enslaved.”

The issue with the corporate internet is that running large websites cost money. The larger the community, the more costs it takes to run. The balance between moderation and a free-for-all is delicate. Fully open allows too much spam and trolling to still remain useful, too much and people start writing in code to bypass censors. You want to go back to seedy chatrooms with a couple dozen regulars, I’m sure you can still find a few places to scratch that itch.

Federation is a great concept, and we’ll see where it goes, but social media splintering from a Twitter/Meta/Reddit stranglehold to a more splintered collection of sites has both advantages and disadvantages. On one hand, when everyone is in one place, you get a lot of idiots. On the other, you have to go to multiple places to find everyone/everything you’re looking for. Seems a lot of people like the ease of one-stop-shopping, so that’s how we got here.

Nobody really indexes those types of sites anymore. I suppose a lot of those site operators are more than happy to remain separate from the big tech net.

Cory Doctorow may have you covered; he just posted recently about his next book, which sounds like it deals with what you’re talking about, and tries to find ways to fix it: https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic/110809535924735163

I’m interacting with more people in a day than most people have in historical lifetimes.

I have more bosses to track their preferences. It feels like there’s more people checking my career. They have more people to try to balance autonomy with direction.

There’s more politicians talking past their constituency than ever before.

It just seems like the goal to reduce the suffering around me will always be a drop in the ocean.

Here’s 3 interrelated things that happened, I guess:

1. Corporatization.
2. Centralization.
3. Moving away from privacy by default.

Essentially, a few companies have found a good way to make money on the Internet: gather your personal information, and use it to put advertisements in front of your eyeballs. Part of that is figuring out every little preference, trigger, and micro-identity you have so you can be fed increasingly targeted ads, and be cajoled into engaging more and more with these advertising platforms.

Are you a liberal recently single White gay man who owns a condo in a gentrified urban neighborhood in a major US city in the Pasific Northwest, who is between 25-35 and who cares deeply about social justice? Here’s some suggested products specifically tailored to you, along with some communities you can join that our algorithm has found keeps people with similar characteristics on the platform for longer periods of time. Is that increased engagement due to the discovery of a warm and welcoming community or an unending flow of rage bait? Doesn’t matter! If you become increasingly attached to your community, we’ll sell you things that appeal to you along those lines. If you become increasingly despondent and enraged, will sell you a solution for that too.

Regardless of your opinion. Don’t be afraid to stand up for what you think is right, even if it means disaproval or social pressure.

The Man in the Mirror
by Dale Wimbrow
When you get all you want and you struggle for self,
and the world makes you king for a day,
then go to the mirror and look at yourself
and see what that man has to say.

For it isn't your mother, your father or wife
whose judgment upon you must pass,
but the man, whose verdict counts most in your life
is the one staring back from the glass.

He's the fellow to please,
never mind all the rest.
For he's with you right to the end,
and you've passed your most difficult test
if the man in the glass is your friend.

You may be like Jack Horner and "chisel" a plum,
And think you're a wonderful guy,
But the man in the glass says you're only a bum
If you can't look him straight in the eye.

You can fool the whole world,
down the highway of years,
and take pats on the back as you pass.

But your final reward will be heartache and tears
if you've cheated the man in the glass.