Has the internet changed society for the better or for the worse?

It has made some people smarter and more capable, but in general it has only made things worse. For example people spend far too much time worrying about things that are completely unrelated to them and their lives.

It's improved my own life greatly. But it's made things as a whole so shitty. People have the sum of human knowledge at their fingertips and choose to be stupid. They turned this incredible tool into something that simply amplifies their stupidity.

You know, I used to believe in free speech. I don't anymore. Now that companies like Facebook and Google have made this a reality and I've seen it for what it is I don't think it's a good thing.

Anyway that box is already open. Not getting closed any time soon unless there's a complete societal collapse.

The internet is the greatest collection of human knowledge to ever exist. The past thousands of years of discovery all neatly accessible to nearly everyone on the planet.

Only a truly worthless species could have fucked up such a thing this badly.

it's literally made everyone autistic

We are still in the growing pains of becoming literal meme gods

Personally It's made me slightly better as I have more stuff to do while being a shut-in.

Overall, it's a bad thing now but that's mainly because normies have infested the internet and turned it into something that they now want to regulate and stuff. I've heard talk about having social media accounts becoming a mandatory thing and I wouldn't say it could be real but it wouldn't surprise me if it was.

It's funny though because even 10 years ago it was a strict no-no to put picture of your face and name on the internet, and now that shit is encouraged for fuck sake.

>>37514979
That's not a good thing at all.

Internet has both improved and destroyed humanity, it showed us how easily led sheep we are but I'm pretty much happy not getting involved with their fake crocodile tears bullshit. I love how resourceful it is for discovering new things but the amount of retarded normies that plague it really bring it down.

>>37515891
you misunderstand
its like neo from the matrix
fully understanding memetics is like seeing and understanding the code

internet = better
social media = worse

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It's made it better, you god damn idiots. How are you fuckers so fucking stupid? I knew the ridiculous responses you disgusting, braindead pieces of shit would spew out before I opened this. Ignorant motherfuckers.

>>37514678
that's a hard quesiton I mean it's made data easier to obtain but that's also the problem. People think they need the information for everything just instantly and whatever they read first they think it's the truth. Curious people have gotten smarter, most people have gotten dumber just using facebook all the time and bullshit like that. I think we are kind in a grey area I think right now where we the internet hasn't leveled out. We do have lots of porn though. And if I wanted I can see my aunts pack of cats anytime I would want, all of the and a checkup of how they look every day. And porn.

>>37515950
Better for you maybe. It's made it infinitely better for me. I would still be a virgin if it wasn't for the Internet. But it's made society as a whole shitty. It's never lived up to it's early promise either.

>>37516413
How's it made society worse
You do realize that people were a bunch of rude, coldhearted, miserable assholes back in the 80s and 90s as well, right, that didn't just start in the 21st century

>>37516004
Also I can listen to almost any song I want any time I want. The other day I downloaded songs from soulseek on my phone on the bus using my LTE connection. 2002 me that just learned about soulseek would think that's fucking incredible! 700k/s on a mobile phone while I'm stuck going 180 at the most? But in 2017 it's just another day.

That's one thing that kinda sucks. This stuff will never be exciting and new again. I remember my amazement when I first learned about Napster and also when I first used it. Before I was listening to 30 second clips on cdnow.com and being impressed by it. But Napster had full songs in good quality not that tinny real audio shit.

I remember when I first started downloading movies too. I sat in front of my shitty dell CRT watching them all day long. It was fucking awesome. Now I can stream anything I want any time I want and watch it in 1080p on my 43 inch HDTV. But I rarely do. It's not exciting anymore. It probably won't be again. The closest thing I got to excitement was when I rigged up ways to stream channels from people's satellite receivers I found on shodan. I watched some channel from Singapore that shows subtitled anime all day with untouched HD video and it was fucking cool.

People feel more free to hold ridiculous opinions because online echo chambers are a thing now.

the internet is the most expansive shopping mall to ever exist

it's garbage

>>37516489
Yeah but those people were contained to their little spaces. I knew people from Alabama were backwards sister fucking hicks. But they only interacted with people like themselves so it didn't matter much to me. Now all the shitty people can network and spread their shitty ideas everywhere.

>>37514678
Over all I'd say better. Fuck social media though that shit is cancer. Internet should enforce anonymity.

Most people are retarded now but it's fun when you're alone

>>37516489
The internet is what directly lead to the modern roastie promiscuity before they actually had to put effort into fucking everything around them, now they have apps dedicated to it

>>37516537
yeah my jr high self on a dial up connection playing Runescape and whacking off to pictures
of Natalie Portman that I have to wait a minute to load would be amazed now a days. Like my mind would be blown just to see games and then to tell me that it's online and those are other people I'd walk out thinking the person is lying. I remember that moment too that I first found napster and kazaa. Finding little gems here and there and aewsome games and talking about them at school and having friends who didn't have dial up yet look sad, and that one dickhead who had DSL .... well just fuck him

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>>37514678
For the worse, by far. Any benefits about the modern Internet were already present more than 10 years ago, and it's weighed down by so much more bullshit now that it's like a living nightmare.
I want early 2000s Flash-era Internet back. I think even dial-up Internet would be better at this point.

>>37516537

You bring up a good point. I love how fast and convenient connections are for getting movies or anime, try being an anime fan back in the early 00s and it wasn't that generous of a selection available, now we've got thousands upon thousands of material

Old IRC channels ..... ahhhh so much nostalgia talking to people all over the world and being amazed by that concept, nowadays it's so simple

>>37516773
There was actually. The fansub groups were doing incredible work. You had to know how to find that stuff though. IRC was the way to go. That applies to everything really. I started on Napster, WinMX, KaZaA, etc but I learned how the game works and I got sucked into the IRC world of downloading full albums, SVCD movies that I would burn (split onto 2cds) and watch on my DVD player, anime, games, software, and everything else you could think of. By 2004 I started my own mp3 group that was releasing vinyl rips and I had access to like 10 FTP sites with all the pirated shit you could dream of and I was just 14 years old. I was downloading so much porn, xbox games, music, and DVDR movies in the time before the torrent shit really took off. Back then you had to be somebody special to have that kind of access. Now anybody can get anything.

>>37514678

The internet has made society far better than the past but has completely destroyed the individual and relationships between individuals.

Old internet was a good place in general, and primarily a tool for most rather than a habitat

Post-2007 internet can fuck off

>>37517061
I don't think you were actually there. We most definitely made it our habitat. It was just more primitive and wild. In school normies and weirdos alike all had AIM. Internet communities were formed around IRC and message boards. Shit like reddit and Facebook just further commercialized what already existed

>>37514704
Kind of like what video games, television, radio, newspapers, and books did before that.

I hate how everything is about politics now, feels so forced you can't pretty much escape it, even when the war on terror stuff was going on I didn't really see it a lot online now just because Trump makes some comment SJWs take out of context we're being fatigued.

>>37514678
Has anyone else been driven personally insane by the internet combined with a lack of outside social interactions?

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>>37514678
You'd think it'd make people smarter since objective truth is only a few clicks away, but Trump still got elected...

Not the internet, but social media.

>>37514678
It's made things worse and things will only continue to get worse and worse now that AI is targeting propaganda at individuals based on tailor made psychological profiles.

>>37514678
It provided another escape route for people to ignore the real problems of our society so yeah I say it has changed things for the worse but the real problem isn't the internet itself it was the internet being changed from an anonymous to a public space with the advent of facebook, twitter, and now instagram

>>37514678
For the better until the normies showed up.

>>37517888
You raise a good point
and I feel this way in an original manner

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There was a real sense of camaraderie on the old internet. I met several girlfriends online. It wasn't like today where there's instagram swelling girls' egos and hordes of creeps scaring off all the decent girls.

One thing that strikes me was how decentralized everything was. You had ICQ, AIM, MSN Messenger, and IRC for chatting. Tons of Livejournal clones to chose from. Normies were corralled on MySpace. Now Google/Facebook completely run the show.

Good things about the modern internet:
>Wikipedia. No more flipping through an encyclopedia or someone's Geocities page if I forgot what year the Battle of Teutoburg Forest took place or something.
>YouTube. Completely destroyed mainstream news and you can find any music you want in an instant.
>Broadband enables rampant piracy. I have hundreds of Osprey books and episodes of animu downloaded.

>>37517888
>objective truth is only a few clicks away
Truth is harder to find than ever.