by Zarski843
It feels like the internet ten years ago felt like an endless horizon of whatever information you were interested in. Any search engine would spit out so many results that it would ge overwhelming considering anything beyond the first five pages. I remember maybe ten years ago I could type anything into Google, whether it was something that has the potential for a bias, a casual forum for a DIY project, or just useless information on some hobby, and receive more results than I knew what to do with. The amount of o’s that were in Google felt endless, I would sometimes click 50 pages out just to see what’s there. Now, no matter what you search for, it feels like there is a fraction of the results that there were before. Even useless information on a hobby feels really curated, and maybe half of the results just lead you back to Reddit. If you search for something with the potential for a bias (COVID, Trump, Biden, anything political), it feels like almost all of the results say the same thing and there aren’t anywhere near as many options.
Even the interactions on Reddit feel pretty limited. ChatGPT has been around for a long time, but its recent rise in popularity really makes me wonder if there is a small percentage of the people that exist online that aren’t real. Some of the interactions with others on Reddit feel so scripted and rigid. Then you look at other similar posts, and they get almost the same stiff responses. It’s hard to describe, but even while lurking, some of the conversations just seem unnatural in their flow and thought process. Almost as if the internet is a stage and the actors are just bots. Over the past couple of years I have caught (and continue to catch) my Reddit upvoting and downvoting random things that I never reacted to, and they’re always in favor of the general consensus, whether I agree or not. I never catch it making the same mistakes going against the general consensus.
You would think with decades passing of exposure to the internet, the content would just continue to compound and expand. But things just feel really small lately. Like you are signing into a small curated chunk of information that all leads to the same conclusion. Again it’s tough to describe, but it feels like the “size” of the internet has reduced in the last 5-10 years.