I agree all these things are bad, but they're not new, and they're definitely not "consequences of connection", but the consequences of corporate-owned media, ad-based revenue model, and political bitterness caused by rising inequality. We migrated to the net in the 90s because the same perfect storm had hopelessly warped TV, and we naively thought the net might be different.

All the pearl-clutching and hand-wringing over weird YT kids videos makes we wonder if any of these people ever saw kids TV? I well remember the terrifyingly weird psy-op tactics advertisers used to prime kids to use "pester power", both in the "programs" themselves (remember Transformers and Masters of the Universe toys and their "TV shows") as well as in the ad breaks between them.

The good news is, it's still much cheaper and easier to set up a webserver or any other kind of internet server for ourselves, individually or as a community, than it has ever been to set up a micro-radio ("pirate radio") or micro-TV ("pirate TV") broadcast. I helped set up some micro-radio stations in early 2000s, so I'm speaking from experience here. Plus, servers can do a much greater range of things, and any webserver has much greater potential reach than local radio or TV (cool as they are)

Imagine a federated platform like #PeerTube that replace #iTunes for distributing podcasts. It would have all the benefits of pirate radio (or #HackerPublicRadio); diverse voices, a plurality of sources, decentralized production and consumption, plus all the benefits of iTunes; any podcaster can potentially heard by anyone in a global audience, and without the downsides of a platform controlled by a single gatekeeper like Apple corporation.

@alcinnz Miro, you mean the long-abandoned Firefox fork formerly known as Democracy Player, the one that never got out of beta?