Around 2005-2010 was Peak Internet. I was able to use Google search to find non-mainstream conspiracy theories and get information.

Those websites are GONE now. Either the website no longer exists, or I can't find them in any search engine no matter how much I try.

The big change happened in 2016 with Trump's win. That made big tech decide to prioritize censorship.

A lot of sites just flat-out don't show up in Google search anymore. You can search for an exact post title and you won't find it (but can find it in other search engines). They have a manually curated ban list, along with an algorithmic ban list.

The other big thing that happened is the "feed". Remember RSS? That gives you a list of all the websites you follow, with a list of posts in order. That was how Twitter and Facebook worked originally. Your homepage was everything people you followed posted, in reverse chronological order.

That was replaced with the "feed", where it's now "what the algorithm thinks you want to see". It also lets them stuff in advertising. You're running a business and you want your followers to see your posts? That costs $$$ now.

Facebook also did some experiments where they realized they could affect people's emotions by controlling what showed up in their feed.

The "feed" opened up the possibility for mass brainwashing, done in a subtle way. The power to decide what posts are ranked and deranked is the power to control what people think. It also can measure and optimize for things like "engagement", which keeps people on the site.

That's why it feels like every response is an AI. When someone responds to a post, the only ones you see are the ones some AI decide you get to see, whether the post was AI generated or not.

They do need some people making real posts. If you train an AI on the output of other AIs, it just degenerates into a mess pretty fast. It's the same reason that making a photocopy of a photocopy just fails if you do it several times.

For the normies, Big Tech is the Internet. If it isn't on Google/Facebook/Twitter/Reddit/etc, it doesn't exist. People need to go back to the old ways, where instead of using "social media", you get your own domain and website.