Anyone else with me? If you’re not super young then you probably remember the days of the early internet.
Unrestricted, non-corporatized, no ads, no monetization, yet with limitless freedom for weird and random contents everywhere.
With everyone enacting the self-responsibility to parse content according to their own values and desires. To decide FOR YOURSELF what you think is true or not. Imagine that. Intelligent adults deciding for themselves what is true or false. What a strange thought in 2025.
Back then you could post just about anything on youtube (without breaking the law of course) and no one cared, least of all youtube itself. You could call people names, say offensive things, express out there opinions and no one tried to cancel or ban you. There was a like AND dislike button that everyone could see. Comment wars would rage and we got to see what the public REALLY thought about the issue or video at hand.
No “safe spaces”, except for the most obvious ones: Go to places you have learned to trust, and if all else fails… log the f** off. Seriously. Just turn off your computer or pull the interweb plug out. Cyber bullying? Disconnect. Hatefull or offensive content, or stuff you don’t agree with? Logout. Go do something else. Problem solved.
Really, think about how much has been lost in just the last 10 years. It was almost 10 years ago exactly that youtube started rolling out its seriously tyrannical censorship. Modern-day book burning and not just by youtube but also by Google, Amazon, Facebook, the list goes on.
And who among us really cares, even if we retain some memory of how things used to be different? I’ll wager a decent amount that none of you reading this even cares. Not one little bit. Why? Well you have a comfortable-enough life, you can’t be bothered by mere abstractions and dumb stuff getting banned off the internet.
Or maybe there are one or two of you still left here who remember, and who actually do care. Who don’t support the way the internet has evolved into a government spying and censorship tool for the purposes of social engineering and corporate profits. I suppose it was inevitable, or nearly so-- the owners of the big sites could have fought back more, resisted more, not sold out to ours and their own digital slavery. But they didn’t. Oh well.
ILP, at the very least, has a general respect for free speech and tends not to censor content users might disagree with or might be deemed offensive. That’s great. But how long will that last? How long did it last on other platforms? It’s gone almost everywhere else. I doubt it will last forever here either.