No Stupid Questions
No such thing. Ask away!
!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.
All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.
Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.
If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.
Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.
If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here. This includes using AI responses and summaries.
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The good internet still exists, and is pretty damn good even now. The problem is social media and a handful of bad-but-popular sites.
I tell people this every so often, but in terms of percentage of the world population, there are far more people on the good internet than there were back then. The problem is, with the advent of smartphones, social media use exploded, and Facebook and Twitter became gigantic, far exceeding the size of the good web. Your aunts and uncles with little net savvy and a bucket of bad opinions swamped Facebook, and never really changed. The popular tech media, which tends to follow the biggest crowds to the exclusion of all else, began treating Facebook as if it were THE internet. It's the tyranny of crowds.
Once it became evident that you could be successful by doing it, everyone started chasing the favor of those largely clueless users. Google began to prioritize a handful of websites like Reddit, Stack Exchange, Wikipedia and their own Youtube, and largely gave up the fight against SEO abusers like Fandom. Sites that had been considered internet utilities decided to cash in.
There are still fun web games being made, if you know where to look for them (some places to look: Vole.wtf, Neal.fun, Ferry Halim's long-running Orisinal and hey Newgrounds is still around). There are great free web hosts still, like Neocities and Nekoweb. (Although note, I just learned that Angelfire shut down in April.) A version of the old good Google still exists through the Web search option, a.k.a. udm14, but now there's multiple other search engines that aren't so bad. There is the Fediverse, of course. And if you look around you might find out about these awesome things called tildes, free Linux machines you can apply for a shell account on just to mess around, often with internal chat, bulletin boards, web space, community games and even weirder things like Gopher and Gemini (not Google Gemini) sites.
All these things exist. You just gotta know where to find them, amidst all the suck out there. They CAN be hard to find, but that's one reason why I linked to some of them above. Seek out sources of links! Metafilter, the venerable community weblog, is one of them. A few other places to look: Andy Baio's Waxy, Rusty Foster's Today In Tabs and even Mozilla's own Ten Tabs. You can also find a good RSS reader to keep up with many websites at once.
It takes work to find things now, it is true, it takes the realization that you can't be passive about finding the good things out there. But, truly, it's always been like that. The good days of Google were an aberration. The natural order of the internet is, the great stuff has never been, and will never be mainstream.