Faith in the internet is fading among young Brits
https://www.theregister.com/2025/12/19/internet_bad_for_society/
Posted by coffeewalnut08
Faith in the internet is fading among young Brits
https://www.theregister.com/2025/12/19/internet_bad_for_society/
Posted by coffeewalnut08
31 Comments
“Despite their increasing negativity, young adults in the UK spend significantly more time online than older age groups, averaging six hours and 20 minutes a day on personal (rather than work) devices, up ten minutes over the prior 12 months and much higher than the four hours and 30 minutes for all adults.”
Could there possibly be a link between them? 🤔
Had this convo last night. Was a kid in 2008, YouTube was free, felt more real, less focused on making you scroll for ever. Xbox live was a thing, wasn’t mentally priced and monetised like it is now, school we’d organise zombie matches. There wasnt just endless ass and tits in comments or reels and I don’t think there was as many bots or ragebaiters. Truly it felt like a golden era. I really don’t want to say it was better in my day because then I’m becoming my dad buuuutttt.
Honestly I feel like we had a point in 2010-2015 where it was at just the right level. Nowadays I’d gladly cut the undersea cable, destructive as that might be.
For those of us who remember the birth of the internet and all the excitement, freedom, optimism and opportunity that came with those early days – all the thousands of niche interest sites, run by 1 guy somewhere in the world, out of pure love for the niche, which connected like-minded people from all walks of life, in all sorts of places, in a way that had never been possible before, It’s honestly so sad to see what has become of it: A worst-of-all-worlds, sanitised-but-toxic, corporate surveillance and money printing machine, full of automated interaction, misinformation, lies, nonsense, scams and mind-control experiments. People are right to avoid it and mistrust it now.
Surely an increase in the principle of ‘*not believing everything you read on the internet*’, is a good thing?
I think it’s everyone that’s losing faith in the internet. You cannot visit any sites these days without targeted ads, bot accounts or Ai content. Thanks to algorithms, you just see the same shit every day. You search something once, and it will appear every time you go online, unless you wipe everything clean.
And Ai is just going to get worse and more invasive, as it gets better and better, we just won’t be able to distinguish what’s real and what’s fake. There was a fake Ai generated MCU leak that I saw the other day, and I couldn’t tell if it was real or not. It took hundreds of people on the internet to pick out specific shadows that weren’t right, or items that wouldn’t have been in the country. We are getting past the point of 6 fingered celebs, or two left hands. It’s scary to think what kind of images will be out there soon.
I remember being so excited about the internet. I was one of the first in my school to have facebook and twitter on my phone.
It was fun, now it’s just miserable most of the time everywhere
It’s not the internet hat is an issue, it is people themselves. We are all assholes and the internet is an unfiltered social mirror.
The 2000s decade was peak Internet. I miss a lot of it. It’s not the same anymore.
I used to truly believe in the internet but more recently I find myself shifting my faith and initiating the correct rituals such as “prompting” at the alter of AI instead… forgive me internet for I have strayed!
Fading for this old person too. Got to see the internet become a thing, the web grow and I was thoroughly addicted from 1994 onwards. Thought it would be great, thought that communication would bring people together, thought that it would revolutionise and democratise the world.
If you asked me today if I feel it has been a net positive in my life and for society in general I would have to give it a lot of thought and I think I’d tend towards no. Once it hit ubiquity the problems became clear, some time in the mid noughties.
Since nearly all communications runs via the Internet today then presumably this refers more to the WWW or social media, rather than the underlying technology.
To be honest it’s all about how you use the internet.
I got started in 2000 when I had a 56k modem for dialup etc. I saw the internet go from simple web pages to what it is now.
We used to have messenger running all the time and it was easy to chat to friends. Would play games etc. but I also used it to learn stuff.
Now people just want to be on the internet and consume the same sites and services all the time and not go look at other stuff. Yea if you live on social media then it’s going to be bad for your mental health – but the key thing here is taking responsibility for what you use and watch and don’t just doom scroll all the time
The internet itself isn’t good or bad. But it says something about people when the way they choose to use it is sharing memes on facebook and watching conspiracy videos on YouTube. It’s the ultimate mirror and it shows you exactly what you want it to, people need to realise that.
This is a view of the internet from people who call it WiFi.
It should be fading in old brits too but they lack the critical thinking skills to realise that they are actively building their life views around clickbait and algorithms.
The internet is still a thing. Just have to go looking.
The big tech companies have been trying to build walls around everything. There’s other stuff out there.
Ever since the early days of the Internet, I’ve lamented the fact that it was turning the world into a grey, homogeneous monoculture. Easier spread of information and culture means that cultural boundaries will inevitably dissolve. And if all of our lives revolve around technology, then that means that we lose something of our humanity, as the old ways of doing things become obsolete. Easy access to information at one’s fingertips destroys innocence and blissful ignorance. So although I’ve made personal use of it (and what would be the point of failing to avail myself of the benefits of this technology , when I can’t bring back the world that has been left behind), I’ve been nothing but pessimistic about the ways in which the Internet will change our world and the way we live.
Because it’s being controlled to blind us from the chains that they shackle us by.
Hardly surprising everything is cyclical, the Internet and obsession with mobile phones is bound to have limitations.
2009-2015 was the golden age for the internet tbh. Shame todays kids can’t experience that.
Remember when you could search on YouTube and actually get when you’re looking for instead of irrelevant bs. Golden times
Faith in absolutely everything is fading for Brits.
And faith in God is rising. I wouldn’t have said that this would happen but then here we are
I’ve noticed something particularly insidious about how these platforms operate now, and I think it gets right to the heart of why faith in the internet is collapsing among younger users.
As an experiment, I changed my Instagram settings to say I’m a middle aged woman rather than a man in his late thirties. Despite this, and despite repeatedly scrolling away quickly or hitting “this post made me uncomfortable”, I still get an endless parade of sexualised content.
But what’s worse is the delivery method. A video will start with something I’m genuinely interested in: outdoor navigation, classic engineering, Greek cooking, woodwork (Dad stuff basically). Then halfway through or at the end, it pivots to the person getting her arse out or jiggling her tits and begging for OnlyFans subscriptions.
This isn’t algorithmic incompetence. The platform has deliberately learned to use my actual interests as trojan horses for content I’ve explicitly and repeatedly rejected. The Georgian architecture or the craft content isn’t what they want me to see, it’s just the spoonful of sugar to deliver what they do want me to see. They’re not serving me content based on my preferences, they’re using my preferences to manipulate me into consuming their preferred content.
Those “not interested” buttons and demographic settings aren’t meaningful controls, they’re theatre. They create an illusion of agency whilst the algorithm simply does what drives engagement metrics. If platforms won’t respect explicit demographic information and repeated content rejection, why would anyone believe their claims about privacy, moderation, or personalisation?
This is why young people are losing faith. It’s not just disappointment, it’s the daily experience of being lied to by systems that claim to respect your choices whilst proving they don’t actually care what you want. Eventually you stop trusting any content at all, because every video about historic buildings or traditional recipes might just be a bait and switch. The whole experience becomes poisoned.
Because it’s shit now.
Eveeywhere you go there are ads. Even google shows you ads on your search before the page you need now . Youtube is full of ads, newspaper websites are literally unreadable thanks to ads and jesus christ every website does the whole “do you accept cookies” every time , followed by a “subscribe to our news letter” pop up.
The same with social media too. It’s all suggested pages, ads and AI slop. I miss the old Facebook where all you seen were your friends status and the pages your followed posts .
Advertising and large business’s have ruined the internet
The internet hasn’t been good for like a decade. It is practically entirely 4 websites and ads now. It isn’t even recognisable as the same thing it was in the 2000s.
Studies like this are annoying as mostly what they mean is social media and not the Internet.
I suspect if the under 30’s had to go back to life with no online shopping, Google maps, gaming, instant messaging, internet banking etc they’d change their minds pretty quickly.
>Faith in the internet is fading
Isn’t that like people saying “Faith in paper is fading”
The internet is the medium…its down to the message…
just like traditional print or television…on the internet most stuff is fairly reliable…but there’s alot of bullsh*t…
its up to you to filter it, check sources, or cross-reference to get the facts…
You can’t blame the internet…merely the audiance!
Maybe since things are getting increasingly more bad for young people in general, and they therefore spend a lot more time online. I’m 22 and most of the friends I know spend 60% of their income on rent. Those in London spend literally every spare penny on rent.
If American corporations own anything it soon turns to shit
I have no friends who want to hear this, so I’ll just shout into the ether that is Reddit.
What I want is lots of little private p2p networks with our friends and family, who each have their own private p2p networks with their friends and family, where we can share music, pictures, self hosted blogs, and chat. All via self-hosted platforms, where the data doesn’t have to be aggregated and owned by a company. Where we own all our music and media, but can listen and watch something on our friends network. Like facebook or something, except hosted on our own home servers, connected to our friends servers.