this post was submitted on 11 Sep 2025
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I wonder if the internet culture of sharing has died off somewhat. Old guy here. Are people are so used to consuming they forget about sharing? Or maybe it's just the type of person who uses the internet today is inherently more consumer then early adopters?
In my day a big appeal of the internet was to share things. But now it is to consume things.
When people share they often receive highly negative feedback. Peraps a misspeling or an incorect punctuation And when that outweighs the good responses, either numerically or severity speaking, then it has an effect to curb the desire to post.
Also why bother working hard when someone else will just respond to what you wrote with "I know you are but what am I" or "that's what your mom told me last night", and receive 10x more likes than the content that required actual effort.
It is the same reason that such drivel has taken over television and movies, and fast food places abound around the world - people sell what others will buy, even independently of involvement of actual money and rather of attention.
A fantastic article describing this phenomena: https://medium.com/@max.p.schlienger/the-cargo-cult-of-the-ennui-engine-890c541cebcb. TLDR it's a race to the bottom. Lemmy was supposed to be different, but there were too many structural issues and now people are either leaving or or going more to quiet consumption mode. PieFed offers me more hope to help fix things, if people want to put in the effort required, because now at least the burden of making changes has been greatly lessened with its ability to make code changes more quickly (since it is written in Python rather than Rust).
That is a fantastic article, thank you. I don't know if there is a way around the ennui engine, not without massive systemic changes; seems like it's part of human nature. It seems pretty rational too, from an animal-brain point of view ... to take a sure win right now instead of a maybe-win later.
It's unfortunate that this feeds so many people's anger cycle. I wonder if that's cultural.
Unfortunately I think the rage aspect is likewise biological, it being one of the most basal of all human desires. It often pops up as someone pursues pleasure and having satisfied those desires, next turns to the even more basal ones below that (e.g. video). Which makes sense evolutionarily bc those apes that do it are more likely to survive than e.g. complete pacifists.
That said, algorithms that specifically tap into that aspect of our animalistic desires feed forward that cycle, encouraging an ever-increasing amount, just like echo chambers decrease the allowable diversity of opinions (yes even here: just try saying that you like Windows and watch what happens, or that you enjoy driving a car, or eating meat, or in certain corners of Lemmy that you don't support Russia, China, or North Korea hard enough), and both of those combine to form the modern social media experience.
So, as with anything having a biological basis, I doubt that it will ever truly go away entirely, yet I do believe that it can be managed.