has anyone else started realizing just how censored the mainstream internet is?

[Gender: Xenomorph]

Yup, and it's especially nasty when you notice just how much the previous wave of consolidation (reddit and Facebook) is now funneling into just Discord as some sort of metasite Borg blob. I've lost count of how many lingering traditional forums, subreddits, Facebook groups (ugh), Twitter accounts, and even Steam forums are all now mostly ghost towns, with not much left but a "go to our Discord!" redirect. Hell, even Github issue trackers are getting offloaded -- there are a number of machine learning projects I follow that have moved almost all their communication to Discord. Piss off the often-psychotic (literally) Discord jannies and get banned, and you've just gotten kicked from what seems like half the English-language user-driven web, even professional communication channels. Do not like.

Their 'off platform behavior' rule is absolutely disgusting.

This is a really annoying trend that started with Twitch, where the platforms think they can police people's off platform behavior because they're the only one.

 

[DiscoRodeo]

Its been noticeable for years, since the end of the 2000s to be honest.

I really do miss when the internet was more lawless. When I started to care was less when things had to do with politics (thats still something I think people should take a stand on) and more when Google started to block/delist streaming, torrenting, and illegal download sites.

Consider this. Whereas currently, if you wanted to read manga or watch anime, all you would need to do would be to go to google and just search for whatever you wanted and this goes off without a hitch- it used to be the same with pirating or watching movies and other tv shows.

I can remember in the late 2000s just going to google and searching "Watch 007 online" and literally getting hits for movies that were still in theatres at the top of my feed.

I can understand google taking out this sort of content (films still in theatres), but then it started deplatforming more and more streaming sites, and I just got sick of it entirely.

Call it a not as idealistic, but when google started impacting my ability to easily search for piratable content, thats when I stopped using its search engine. I still get my content, but if I ever want to search its via a different engine, or a site I know well.

 

[AnimeGirlConnoisseur]

Bro, you do know who you are talking to, right? This is like walking into Mecca and asking "Hey, has anyone ever read this book called the Quran? I think their is some pretty neat stuff in there."

 

[ToroidalBoat]

One way evil wants to control the "little people" is by "memory holing" stuff from the past that contradicts The Narrative™.

That's a good reason to preserve history.

 

[Sperghetti]

Thing is... I can't really pinpoint the end game here. Is it ad revenue? It can't be that simple. Information control for the sake of information control makes no sense either. They don't push the globohomo to push a righteous agenda, that's television drama bullshit. A lot of NGOs get money from anonymous trillionaires to push globohomo, so there's a lot of money to go around.

I’ve said it here before, but my pet conspiracy theory is that Silicone Valley is little more than the enforcement arm of the mainstream media anymore.

Journalism is one of those industries where its members seem to exhibit a great deal of hubris. A lot of them seem to truly believe that they’re doing some kind of noble work, bringing Truth™ to the unwashed masses.

If there’s one thing the internet did, it’s threaten the MSM’s monopoly on information. For the first time, average people gained the ability to broadcast themselves to others anywhere in the world. That’s what people found so idealistic and promising about the internet in the early days, but in practice, that runs counter to the journalism industry’s view of themselves as sole harbingers of Truth™. Their audience was starting to trust podcasters and bloggers and even each other over the news on TV. Horrors!

Of course, we can’t just get rid of the internet and go back everyone having to get their news from TV and papers. People know they can broadcast to the world, and they aren’t going to deal with having that taken away for reasons. So instead, they just make the giant, corporately-owned discussion platforms the majority of them use bend to their will.

The censorship follows the same pattern every time: The MSM comes out with some narrative around some event, people inevitably take to the internet to voice disagreement with it, and then suddenly the articles start popping up about how Facebook/Twitter/whatever is a hotbed of “dangerous misinformation” and “conspiracy theorists” and they’re doing nothing to stop it. I think these articles pretty much the Bat Signal for these platforms to start swinging the banhammer and getting rid of anyone who dares openly disagree with that original MSM narrative.

One thing that's good to keep in mind is that pretty much all broadcast media in the US is owned by around 6 companies at this point, and most of the internet isn’t much different, with the vast majority of people using scant few websites and platforms that have even fewer owners. I don’t think it’s off-base to assume that the people who are higher up in these organizations are probably quite friendly with each other, and I'm sure another poster will be along shortly with some info about how somebody high up at Time Warner is married to somebody high up at Twitter.

 

[ToroidalBoat]

If there’s one thing the internet did, it’s threaten the MSM’s monopoly on information. For the first time, average people gained the ability to broadcast themselves to others anywhere in the world. That’s what people found so idealistic and promising about the internet in the early days, but in practice, that runs counter to the journalism industry’s view of themselves as sole harbingers of Truth™.

I've said it before, but corporations cleary miss the days when they had almost exclusive control over mass media, and could localize foreign stuff so pretty much no one would know there were any changes made. The only way one of the "little people" could potentially reach a large audience without corporate influence was through public access TV that almost no one watched anyway, or stuff like distributing flyers. And even then, it was hard or impossible to reach an audience beyond locally.

And like I said, it used to be a "big honor" if one of the "lowly little people" got to appear on TV. "I was on TV" was a thing one could say to impress back then.

Now that anyone can contradict The Narrative™ to a large and widespread audience, not to mention remind people of what the media wants to "memory hole", there's been a push to make the internet a centralized, sanitized, corporate thing. With "community guidelines" banning "misinformation" and "offensive" speech. It's kind of like back when printing was invented, and the elites panicked at the way information they didn't like could spread, so they enacted laws to restrict printing.*

*(which led to modern copyright laws BTW)

 

[comfysocks]

I have a bunch of social media and google shit blocked. I tried ordering a pizza the other day but apparently I have something blocked that broke the site. I made a stromboli instead.

I read a boomer conspiracy site that claimed that DDG was censoring the site. Most the site was naming the Jews. Apparently it upset the DDG ceos who are Jews. Funny they're being called neo-Nazis now.

 

[Osmosis Jones]

You're literally on one of the 5 websites on the internet that isn't censored.
A significant portion of the people who come here, do that to say the things they can't say anywhere else.
I'm willing to bet money that a lot of us have been banned from somewhere for just trying to have a conversation.
Of course we realize.

Not gonna lie, having somewhere to talk openly with like-minded people has done good for me in the real world. I'm fairly mild in my opinions by most metrics, and I still see a lot of abuse for even very respectfully sharing my unacceptable views.

It's ironic that a place on the internet that is largely accused of being a haven for bullies and scum is actually one of the best places to be accepted or at least not absolutely ridiculed for having an extreme view in any form. There isn't much of a hivemind attitude here, nor is it an echo chamber for any particular view. Specific threads can become echo chambers, but most of the site remains mostly neutral to political opinions as a whole (excluding the Thunderdome).

Places like Reddit scare me the way they are now. Without a doubt Reddit has become completely mainstream and most people use it in some form if they spend any meaningful time browsing the internet. The bizarre and terrifying thing is the opinions and views on the site have only continued to lean harder and harder into specific accepted opinions and narratives which you'd realistically expect to happen less and less as the userbase grew and diversified. It creates an illusion that real people have incredibly extreme leftist views in reality when truly it's just the Reddit botnet/hivemind. There was an old Reddit joke/meme about how you are the only user on the site, every other comment and post is just bots. Seems true nowadays, doesn't it? Places like Reddit come off as a psyop with how pigeon-holed the opinions are, but it's really a small group of moderators controlling a large portion of the popular communities along with spez's ultra communist agendas.

 

[BelUwUga]

View attachment 3018161

Tin Foil Hat Epiphany: they weren't simply taking AI like Tay out back to get Ole Yeller'd. It was to hide weaponization of it. While creating an actually conversational AI is a challenge, given the input and "training environment" they encountered, making a contrarian/troll is a far more practical goal. You no longer need to pay your shill armies and keep them up to date on a narrative, you simply point it towards a forum and destroy all productive conversation altogether. Add in the general dumbing down of people and you end up with metaphorical NPCs emulating bot-voted literal NPCs.
Edit:

The other thing I've noticed is search engines are getting worse at just finding useful information in general (often irrelevant FAGMAN links, autogenerated reposts, and sites totally bloated with javascript come up). Random forums and useful little HTML blogs are hard to come by. It's why I find Null's efforts here admirable.

I am going to pretty shamelessly plug https://weboasis.app/ as a fantastic search resource. Not only does it integrate several of the more-based search engines, it also indexes hundreds of niche resources/search engines. If anything it's a better place to start than Google. Frequently I'll find a site listed there that catalogs exactly what I am looking for.