Thank you for the kind words.
It's funny though, I was just reading about the Dead Internet Theory the other day and saw comments where people were reminiscing about the late 90's/early 2000's where it was mainly tech-savvy people online, not everyone's parents and grandparents. It was when the internet was shiny and new so there was tons of explore. Remember webrings? You could just go down this rabbit hole of personal homepages and forums, and make tons of online friends, some you would end up meeting in real life.
Forums are what really made things interesting because they're built as communities, which social media is definitely not. Even Discord is not even close because it's not formatted like a forum is, it's more or less a giant chat.
But of course like anything nowadays, money came into play and everything has to be monetized no matter what. Everyone wants to make money online now, especially corporations so this is where we're at now. So if that means that people and companies flood the internet with bots posting fake reviews, and people posting AI images and songs, that's what they'll do because they want to monetize it.
The spam has gotten so bad that a while ago I had to lock down the signups here. Now when someone signs up I have to manually approve them. You wouldn't believe how many spam accounts sign up here daily. It's really annoying and time consuming too.
I just wish everyone today would realize there are still forums around, not many, but they're there and they're special. There used to be a forum for any type of topic you were into but now it's so common for everyone to just search Reddit or YouTube for answers and not bother actually socializing with anyone online.