On Dispersals of Creativity
There is no shortage of "what happened to the internet of 10 to 15 years ago" talk. Since I was on it, I'll tell you what happened to it.
The very short of it is the internet became mature and wise enough to take on the establishment, and the establishment did not like it and is so therefore trying to run it. Historically speaking, this is the same as the "Great Awakening" of the 1800's which consequently became known later as the "burnt over region" as many spiritual types of experiences left everyone quite sour on the whole idea of anything being revealed by God.
Of course, the Civil War came not too long after these Great Disappointments, and then everyone else had something more traumatic to focus on. Once that occurred, the next step was reconstruction and the "Industrial Revolution" that produced a whole lot of things--one of which was the internet.
So, the internet has had a moment in time where it was able to be used to bring about actual change at a grassroots level, and then a rapid series of bullshit happened which effectually started to destroy the social networks that existed on it whether that be through AI or various agencies with widely differing agendas. COVID helped cement this since it was an epidemic that really didn't kill enough people to be anywhere near epidemic status. Instead, it seems to have been excuse for people to change things around while everybody else cowered about afraid they might get sick.
All of this then has produced a lot of "false dialog" that makes the internet suck in the way a cardboard cutout sucks of a horse when you need something to ride into the sunset upon. Everything is trying to be controlled or litigated or both, and once that pattern sets up people are always looking over their shoulder at what they might or might not post or create. This creates a climate of fear, and this in turn makes creativity and communities that thrive on creativity begin to implode. A lot of this is also being driven by marketing, as people want to try to derive income from whatever they do even if what they do is sell the information of other people to hungry marketing sharks.
This is the major pivot in the last 20 years or so on the internet, and this is why it sucks and why people are pining for some other internet. What they really mean is "I can't connect with people with some algorithm coming in and doing weird shit to the point I don't know who is real and who isn't".
So, if you want to have a community on the internet, you have to be hypothetically willing to police it or be sued for it. That is a shift since it used to be that the responsibility for crimes rested on those doing them, and not "everyone around the criminal who might have an impact on the criminal". In other words, if you throw the "society" in jail and the criminal is simply a product of "free speech" then if you get rid of all that then what is left is a safe-place for people to say--what exactly? Jack diddly shit. That's what. It's boring, trite, controlled, not creative, and more what a herd or robots might enjoy. Welcome to all those 70's sci-fi apocalypse movies everyone tried to warn society through entertainment about.
The alternative of course is not to to open up a saloon so cowboys and cowgirls can come up to the bar and start settling their differences at high noon. The alternative is free speech right up until someone starts saying something that is criminal in a serious kind of way. There is a world of difference between "You are so annoying and if you do that again I'm gonna kill you," and "I intend to kill the following person at 2:00 pm." One is a 'figure of speech' and the other is a "Hey, this is very, very specific and uh, yeah, concerning". The second one should make people call people whose job it is to keep an eye on people who might commit a crime. The first one though, is most likely a passing phrase that serves as hyperbole. We understand the difference by understanding something about the emotion of the people saying the words. It's harder to do this on the internet, but not impossible. What we shouldn't do in either case is make sure no one can say anything that might upset anyone, since what might upset anyone is variable and likely to change depending on a person's perceptions. Some perceptions are false. Some are true. If you are thinking someone is seriously telling you they intend to do something bad, then of course you should take the proper steps proportionate to the situation. Social psychology, though, has a few things to say on "bystander apathy" and might be worth brushing up on concerning human behavior toward ACTUAL serious problems!
In short, we got here by "straining at gnats" while "swallowing camels" to quote a Biblical turn of phrase. The gnats made everyone start to become the "this is a safe-environment police" which really should be left to "actual police" and not "moderators in a community" for the simple reason that police have "actual rules" they are supposed to use and moderators don't have anything other than whatever rules somebody else makes up.
In no small way, the same universities that birthed the internet ruined it with a lot of "progressive ideals" that are rubbish. This stomping on the 1st amendment has made the internet and a whole lot of other political matters volatile and silly and has resulted in a net movement of "Against" freedom of speech since universities are actually part of the status quo. No kids going to college means no need for tenured professors, or any professors at all. The only refuge these people have is to try to exert some other kind of control. They got the intellectual revolution, just not one that leaves them in charge.