To avoid going on a several posts long rant:
People were already getting lazy with information, all that information at the tip of your finger, sure, but you need to look for it, figure what's real from what's not, what needs to be taken with a grain of salt, ect... , but now some popular person, or even Google (how convenient!), just tell you what you should think, and they have people defending them too, it's much easier to digest than having to think for yourself.
Tolerance was never gonna happen the way it was being spread, it was being enforced (and enforced by corporations too, that's a massive red flag), you can't force people to like each others, that's not how people work, they'll just hate each others in secret until something bad enough happen and it explodes openly.
And incidentally, covid came and this is exactly what happened, people got restless and angry, and it got out of hand and we're still in the fallout of it, people are being dicks as an outlet for now, hopefully it'll settle down over time, although newcomers to the internet are being taught that way of acting so, yeah, maybe I'm just being hopeful.
The internet have been severely damaged by social medias and corporate meddling, everyone got angrily serious, information is constantly being filtered, the line between our online persona and our real identity is getting muddier and muddier, and everything is becoming more restrictive by the day in the name of safety, it's becoming a nightmare.
It's hard to know what's gonna happen with the internet at this point, doesn't seem like many people even notices how bad it's getting anymore, they just accept it hoping it'll get better some day.
As for AI, the problem is that nobody was ready for it, so there was no restrictions put in place (and in fact legally in many countries it's still a huge mess several years later) for something that can spew thousands of "content" in matter of minutes, and as a result, it caused absurd amount of damage to the internet: art sites that didn't filter or forbid it are now a complete mess, social medias are flooded with fake content, stores are filled with scams, etc...
Comically it was basically the covid for the internet, terrible response time and inappropriate handling of something that could spread everywhere and, well, it spreads everywhere.
I miss the old internet sometimes.
DrCynical
damn... all of that being caused from callousness and money. What shame.