We are in a social media app created exclusively to avoid the nowadays internet. That's how is going on.

They never said it deteriorated so much that we're back to square one. Would you still refuse if you were instead offered the internet of 5 years ago? I don't think I would.

To me it definitely has gotten much worse, though everyone’s internet experience is radically different. 20 years is too far back, definitely not. But 5 or 10 years? Absolutely.

I don’t have accounts on and completely ignore all social media other than this, and have all my ads blocked everywhere. I don’t use streaming services, so no exposure to ads there either. That all makes my web experience (and I’m sure most other Lemmy folks) arguably way cleaner and content-focused than the vast majority of people who just use the mainstream internet as it is.

And yet it’s pretty difficult to find out basic things, and I think that’s a very recent development. It has always been nontrivial to figure out what’s true and what’s not and sometimes you had to dig a bit. SEO did a great job of poisoning things before LLMs. But now? I feel like 99% of what I find is unconvincing and just bad, and the sheer volume of rehashed bullshit makes it super hard to find something useful, let alone something real and truthful.