[commodorejohn]

Yeah, I definitely miss the olden days. The commercialization of the Internet was always a nuisance, but it at least used to be nothing more than a pile of fly-by-night outfits shoving porn popups in your face, rather than megalithic corporate control of pretty damn near every major site or service, and there was far less infection of the culture with the corporate hive mindset; nowadays, the whole socialmonetizationmediafluencer parasite culture brain-virus has infected just about every creative outlet. And it was screamingly obvious to me from the get-go that "social media" was a gigantic scam, but the number of twisted emergent behaviors and social/political attack vectors it unleashed on humanity have proved to be far worse than I ever anticipated; there's some solace in the fact that the last few years have forced most of the rest of the world to at least start coming to terms with that, but we're a long way from being "out" of the resulting cultural hellhole.