I do not know what each of you reading this does in the evenings. I, for instance, suffer from computer games, entertainment sites, sometimes social networks or TV shows that I watch on YouTube, sometimes I play the guitar… like everyone, depending on the mood.
The country is in a mess and there is less and less time for fun. You simply do not want to spend it on entertainment, but sometimes you want to rest and take your mind off things. There is a desire to work and create, to build something or fix it for the future. Maybe it is the age.
People used to have a tradition of reading the evening or morning paper. Now many of us stare into phone or tablet screens looking for news or interesting articles. I was a regular on entertainment sites like fishki.net, pikabu.ru, webpark.ru. You have to admit, Ukraine was always part of the Runet. Ninety-nine percent of Ukrainian users, together with Russians, Belarusians, Moldovans and Georgians, were users of one big network. We all played the same games and read the same entertainment sites. We had long since stopped visiting each other’s countries as actively as in Soviet times, but we were still one internet space. Serious money was made from that, by the way.
With the war starting, I think all of that collapsed, along with the friendship between our peoples. I do not want to get into political arguments now about who is to blame. There will never be such conversations on this blog. But why did the management of all the entertainment portals listed above not bother to think about closing the hot threads where people insult and abuse each other? Why do they not close the articles that stir up hatred and are propaganda? I have only two possible answers. Either those sites are subject to propaganda media, controlled by government bodies or under pressure. Or the inept management of those portals is now losing the audience from the other Runet countries, turning the old Runet into today’s Georgianet, Ukrnet, Belarusnet and so on. They are helping to split our countries online as well.
That is exactly how I met most of my friends with shared interests: playing together or talking on sites like these. But what now? What do you do when all that is left in the comments on those sites is hostility and nonsense. Maybe I have got old? Maybe those places should be left to schoolchildren? Where do you look for new interesting people and make new friends? Who do you play with now?
To show you clearly what I am talking about, please have a look at these screenshots I took. So, fishki.net:
An article? Hardly about what will change in your life. It is more of a demotivator, trying to create a sense of missing something special and familiar, something you will lack if you leave the country. Criticism of abroad. More propaganda. Who wrote it? Why? Draw your own conclusions.
The comments: under an article like that, the usual argument. Some say they left and they are doing well, others, the ones at home, say that everything except Mother Russia is rotting. Some comments are very funny, especially for someone who has been abroad or lives there, like me.
Utter nonsense! How many old films from Italy, France or England have you watched? Which actors do you know? Well, however many you watched, they watched five times fewer of ours. Firstly, we were closed off from the world in Soviet times. Secondly, war films, neither American nor Soviet, were shown anywhere in Europe. American ones, more likely. More propaganda about the good old days of the USSR.
Moving on, Webpark.ru
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I will not go on. The fact is obvious: most Runet sites have ruined themselves with propaganda. Instead of bringing people together, or at least distracting them from a tense situation, such sites have become the place where deliberate ideas are planted in people’s heads. Renouncing the whole world. Hatred of other nations. Feeding the target audience their own opinion.
I will miss the times when scrolling through one of those sites gave me pleasure and relaxation.
It is probably time to build something of our own. As a friend of mine said: “Until you start doing for yourselves what you need, you will have neither a nation nor a country. Stop complaining and start working on yourselves.”