Not sure if trolling. Was talking about this specific kind of spam being visible there.

Eh. "The Internet is getting worse!" sounds alot like "New cars suck!", "Politicans keep lying!" and "Everything was better back then!" - some sayings like "The young behave awful!" go back to long before the beginnings of civilisation (probably).

So I wouldn't worry much. Once humans lose interest in something, they move on and the old huts, devices and whatnot slowly erode away. Guess why we are now talking on a federated network - because those big companies started rotting away and the smell slowly starts driving people away.

Just my opinion though. It's still fun to see things crumble.

Perspective: My SO didn't really care at first why I didn't want to use the built-in TV speakers, but rather install some higher-end speakers and a DAC to drive them. After a while, she went to visit a friend and came back to celebrate our setup.

Value: Do you need a super-big, expensive TV or a smaller, higher PPI TV that you can sit closer to? What you really want is clarity, brightness, color, and smooth video. If people could never afford such a display and only had crappy TVs with bad video sources and only some smartphones as an alternative, the smartphone beats everything they know, of course. But if they could never afford high quality video sources and displays, how could they appreciate those things?

IMHO better than average is enough for everyday life. There's more to life than spending money and not experiencing life to the fullest. That means I focused on a nicer Bluetooth headset, some better than average speakers for both TV and PC, ... so I simply approach the point of diminishing returns on the quality scale, knowing full well I could do much better. But it's not worth the effort to me if it slowly turns into either a game of high spending or a full-blown refurbishing hobby. Same with my car: I buy them used at about 4~6 years old and sell them at 8~10 years old, spending the least amount of money while driving mostly luxury cars with lots and lots of extras.

I did Gentoo Stage 1 (which was very similiar to what you plan to do) in 2005 with a shitty laptop. 24 hours until I had a working shell compiled. A whole week until I had a graphical desktop working properly. Stupid me didn't have enough and did it again in 2013 with better hardware within just 36 hours to the desktop.

If you seek a challenge that leaves you with angelic patience once you've overcome the never ending rages you'll encounter to push through to the end against all odds, lots of errors, bad documentation, dependencies from hell AND keeping it running, which will inevitably raise your patience muscles strength again and again, then yes, do it. Just accept that at some point, something will break inside you.