I hate it. The entire human species - any one of them who uses an internet connection - has been transformed into this docile, brainless consoomer. People now rely on an algorithm to tell them what music to listen to, what YouTube or TikTok video to watch, what TV series to start streaming this week, what to buy for groceries (Did you like that salted caramel ice cream last week? Well try this flavour this week! Would you like me to place an order?), what books to read, what to buy on Amazon even though they don't really need anything and so on.
So few people take effort to seek out something new and unheard of to them and take the time to discover it, then maybe finding more stuff from that. Nobody loads up SoulSeek or some other mp3 sharing program and some Discogs browser tabs and seeking out new music, they just have Spotify or some trash shuffle stuff for them that is similar to the same garbage they've had on shuffle for the last 6 months.
In 50 years nobody will know the joys of digging for new music at a store, scouring the shelves at a bookshop, downloading random pirated games to play, discovering a niche online community for something totally random you love. We'll have an entire generation of idiots that are perpetually online under this new internet now controlled by massive corporations. The wild west days so many of us grew up on are over. I feel like things like IRC, textboards and even forums are one of the last things remaining of the internet of the past. In time, they'll vanish and all we'll be stuck with is what some company sells us.