Has the internet been a net positive or negative for humanity?

[Shadow1980]

The Internet in and of itself is fine. The old Internet was a fun place... mostly. It had its awful places, but those were mostly contained, and it's always had problems with things like trolls as well as toxicity in fandom spaces, but those spaces were smaller and easier to manage (e.g., message boards like this one). But things didn't really start to go to shit until the rise of algorithm-focused social media platforms combined with the widespread adoption of smartphones. Everything got overly centralized into a handful of platforms, said platforms were often poorly moderated (probably in part due to their size), lots of people ended up in these fringe bubbles that they were driven to by the algorithm, and most of them are run by narcissistic tech bros who turn a blind eye if not outright encourage their platforms to bring out the worst in people.

But from its early days on through to the current era, there's still great things that come out of the Internet. For example, indie animation is thriving. We got creators like Vivziepop and studios like Glitch putting out quality animation. Hazbin Hotel & Helluva Boss are and probably will forever be in my Top 5 cartoons ever, and I'd never want to give them up for a future where indie animation wasn't able to be easily distributed. Same for indie games. So many great titles that might have never seen the light of day if it wasn't for the Internet. I finished Hollow Knight a couple of weeks ago and now I'm working on Silksong, and those are some damn good games (if a bit difficult in spots). Also, Mega Man was able to get a revival thanks to MM9 doing well on XBL and PSN, and if you know me you know I'm a big Mega Man fan. And while I don't play online multiplayer games all that much anymore, I've built a reliable social circle on XBL over the past 20 years.