Aero I don't know if I feel more productive, in fact I'd argue for the contrary. I feel a little broken, 4chan was my little piece of socialization during the day, my pleasure and entertainment that drove me forward to be productive and later take tiny breaks to read and post about the things I like. There's nothing in my life currently that quite matches the feeling of making webms for airing shows to post on threads either on request or because I liked a certain scene; or seeing my posts reposted months or even years later because people liked them enough to share again.
I've been studying programming (mainly Assembly) recently and my progress rate has taken a considerable drop because I don't have that much to motivate me anymore.
frijole del alta I also feel that way with vidya, for the last few years my interest in games has declined gradually until the point it is now, where the most I'll have is my interest piqued for a week or two on a game that I'll casually play for a while before quickly getting bored and never touching it again.
This applies not only to new games as a lot of people complain about, but also to games I remember really liking when I was younger. Maybe we do just grow up, maybe it's that we changed not in a good way and can't come to like things as easily anymore, and maybe it really is technology's fault.
futures~ made of~ virtual insanity~
tyl What's sad is there is (or was) an effort against this "centralization of the web" or "web2", but it's mostly been a failure or too weak to matter. The alternatives that were set-up to the current ecosystem didn't go anywhere (such as crypto and decentralized servers as a replacement to advertisement and data collection revenue and centralized cloud storage) and everyone else's idea of making federated clones of existing platforms and hoping it all works out somehow hasn't done all that much. And as you mentioned, even if these options had gone places, it's very likely governments would have fucked it up somehow because it's in their direct interest to have everything nice and centralized for them to control reliably.
These days I'm generally leaning toward Dark Nets as the final stand of the old internet, hosting a website on Tor is much the same as it was decades ago, whereas it has only gotten more complicated on the Clear Web, the anonymous culture also pushes everyone toward forums, blogs and imageboards, while also directly contradicting external control from corporations and governments as it happens in the modern internet. I expect one day if things get bad enough, there will be a small effort to migrate to Tor, i2p and others while "normal" people stay on their godamned instergram and tictac. Or maybe I'm delusional.
