Are smartphones (and "apps") destroying the internet?

No.

No. For one, smartphones are just pieces of metal and plastic, they aren’t ruining anything. And Apps are just computer programs with no innate intelligence. They are pipes, vessels, to deliver content.

If you have a gripe, it should be that the content being delivered is bad, dishonest, erroneous, misleading, or whatever.

So talk to the people making the content- not the delivery mechanism.

No.

I think the two things that are destroying the Internet are greed and negativity.

It’s impossible to avoid ads these days, and oftentimes you don’t even know when the next ad will pop up. Ads are also getting trickier and pettier too.. What’s worse, now that anyone can connect to the Internet, anyone can sell anything they want. I get bombarded not only by corporates but also some random people who want to sell their latest detox medicine.

And people on the Internet seem to be getting more and more negative each day. There will always be someone hating something for stupid reasons, and they will always have to drag other people along with them. It’s getting harder to voice your opinion without fearing your real name and address getting publicised by some angry people with enough tech knowledge.

The Internet used to be a place where people connected with each other and laughed at the occasional trolls and oddities. Now all I see is either someone trying to sell me something, or someone telling me I’m a devil for saying I dislike the latest song.

Good question. Not only destroying the internet but a large part of people’s lives People are not living. They are in fact “documenting”. Funny how many witness crimes,documenting them without intervening. I see many of them NOW being charged as accessory to the fact. ‘Bout time!

No time to answer in detail right now but partly yes. I see the terrible new web page design formats as being the way they are largely because they want to “fit” or look good on a phone, and be as devoid of function as many phone experiences are. “Swipe” an entire screen to the next “screen”... and none of the screens have much content or functionality at all.

Definitely web page experiences in general have become more and more terrible. I have a good article about it I’ll post later.

The article I mentioned is titled, ” The modern web is becoming an unusable, user-hostile wasteland ”.

It’s my fault – I stopped posting nudes.

But besides that, I agree with what others have said about content and user interactions being the main problem. The hardware and technology are only vehicles for the good or bad actions that people take.