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Internet was better when it was a bunch of forums and personal web pages
We can get it back, and the antitrust trials are a big part of actually doing it
Sure we can but will we? No.
Twitter has only lost ~10% of it’s userbase after repeatedly abusing its own users. Reddit probably less. After everything we’ve learned about Meta, tens of millions of people signed up on day 1 to join their new service, Threads. Google Chrome still has like 80% market share.
Changing is honestly a trivial ask, but we won’t, because no one cares.
It’s not that no one cares, per se. We just live in a society where the majority of working adults are fucking exhausted. They have bills to pay, uncertain job security, seemingly constant climate crises/natural disasters in many geolocations (e.g. Canada and US West Coast wildfires, earthquakes, hurricanes, etc.), hyper polarized partisanship in many countries (yeah, it isn’t unique to the US), and on and on. That Google, Microsoft, or Amazon own the internet is such a low priority to the much more immediate, life threatening/living security concerns of the majority of people.
I care, but I also understand why many people do not.
Man, I would love to run a Linux box and still be able to run the like 4 programs I use my computer for, but I don’t have any interest in running an OS I have to build and make work. I got Redhat working once (feels like a million years ago) and I am just not that interested in my PC anymore. It’s a tool. I want it to work without any fiddling on my part. It has exactly 5 programs it ever has to run. I touch it on the weekends. Windows it is.
This is me agreeing with you in every way.
Fwiw Linux is way easier today than it was a million years ago. Honestly I find it simpler to use than Windows.
It might be, but it still adds steps that I no longer have the patience for.
Try it, Linux Mint just works put of the box, easy as hell. Even has GUIs for everything.
Linux today is plug and play in almost all areas. Off the top of my head the ones that have problems are creativity (no Adobe and also wacky color management, though it’s getting a complete rework with Wayland setting it on par with macOS) and engineering (next to no support from big CADs).
VR and my guilty pleasure games that still use ridiculous anti-cheat are holding me back for now :(
Oh yeah, VR is currently a pain point too. Anti-cheat is an odd position tho, so I’d recommend checking out
every so often.
I have played through Skyrim and No Man’s Sky in Linux VR. Valve has done a great job keeping up the development of Linux Steam VR, especially considering how low its market share is. It’s part of their nuclear option against Microsoft and Windows or something.
Many/most anti cheats are on Linux now too.
In fact just yesterday I installed EAC so that I could play New World, and all I did was to install it straight from Steam before also installing the game from Steam.
LOL that makes zero sense. It takes 5 minutes to switch to a different browser or service. If they were tired or didn’t have time, they wouldn’t be spending it on Twitter and Reddit.
It’s not really the time. It’s more about the mental effort it takes to find out what to switch to.
Sure, it’s easy to install Firefox or sign up for Lemmy once you know that it’s there, but most people just have a sense that things suck with no idea of what they can do to fix it.
Finding out what to do to have a better experience takes a non-trivial amount of mental energy that scrolling reddit and instagram do not require.
The constant hustle, multiple jobs, or jobs with a high mental load, rising prices and stagnant wages all work together to create a lot of decision fatigue and stress. It often takes something major to get people out of that and get them active at changing things.
This just sounds like a bunch of non-sense, making up excuses for people making poor decisions. Like you can’t blame every bad decision on “wahhhh life is hard!”
No, it’s not excuses, it’s just reality. It’s hard. Does that mean people shouldn’t try to do better and make things better? Of course not. Being better and doing better is hard, and we should do it anyway. That kind of personal growth is central to the human experience, or it ought to be.
The thing is, just because people aren’t doing better in the area that you understand and care about doesn’t mean that they aren’t in other areas that you may not know about.
For example, someone who is stressed out and overburdened with work may be using all of their available energy to be a better parent and make sure that their child is raised in a healthy and emotionally stable home. If that doesn’t leave room for people to support FOSS and privacy friendly browsers that’s ok.
Just be the best human you can be every day and don’t beat yourself (or others) up for not being perfect.
It takes 0 minutes of my limited spare time to use what already works. How someone chooses to use their corporate allotted time off is none of your fucking business anyway. Your username checks out for real.
It takes 0 minutes of my limited spare time to use what already works.
Uhhhh nope, it takes way less time than it does to simply continue using it. All the time you’re using could be spent finding and switching to something else. It literally only takes a few minutes. Way more than people are actually spending on these other platforms. And if they’re spending time on these platforms, they can’t possibly avoid learning about competing platforms.
How someone chooses to use their corporate allotted time off is none of your fucking business anyway.
How an individual chooses to use their time is none of my concern. How millions of people choose to use their time directly impacts everyone else, myself included, so yes it abso-fucking-lutely is my business.
we can stop assuming people are dumb and accept that as you said people don’t care nearly enough to stop using it
You realize all of that old shit is still possible today right? Static plain html still works. It loads quicker than ever. The only thing preventing it is the creators of the content. The masses on social media were never going to create that so having Twitter around doesn’t change the possibilities. Get cracking.
The Fediverse is there, now.
I use Lemmy and Mastodon, on a daily basis.
I interpreted “we” as the general public. And yes, that was kind of my point. ActivityPub exists. NOSTR exists. Probably a dozen other decentralized social media protocols and services. And yet no one leaves the garbage-ass, bot-riddled, insanely-popular social platforms.
then why are you even here?
Sorry I don’t understand the question?
why bother to respond to the comment if all you have to say is “all is lost”?
…why bother to respond to my comment? Why does anyone write comments? We’re all here for discussion.
Nothing about what you wrote was a discussion, you stated for a fact that we would not do anything about it
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/rimtaSgGz_4?si=fQc-lIFzT-0hoeNv
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
No we can’t. It’s been consolidated. Sure some of us might get a little piece of freedom but the web is going to stay consolidated unless something major happens…
then give up and go away, or watch the video and reflect on your comment
The internet was better when it was Usenet and Gopher.
The internet was better when it was a pair of tin cans and a string.
Oh sure, like that was an improvement over cave painting.
There have been examples that are effectively primitive shitposts found carved into walls in Pompeii. People never really change.
Forget shitposts, there were legitimate flame wars in Pompeii graffiti:
Successus textor amat coponiaes ancilla(m) nomine Hiredem quae quidem illum non curat sed ille rogat illa com(m)iseretur scribit rivalis vale
Translates to:
Successus the weaver is in love with the slave of the Innkeeper, whose name is Iris. She doesn’t care about him at all, but he asks that she take pity on him. A rival wrote this
A response to this translates to:[6]
You’re so jealous you’re bursting. Don’t tear down someone more handsome― a guy who could beat you up and who is good-looking.
I definitely preferred oral history.
Cave paintings are overrated. Hand shadow puppets on the cave walls were always more dynamic.
Wi-Fi back then was using carrier pigeons.
Honestly, the internet was at its best when it was the fever dream of stoned, sexually frustrated grad students at Berkley. Infinite potential - it could’ve been anything. Could’ve. But wouldn’t. The real thing, after it became fully saturated in everyday American life, was always going to be some mediocre, watered down corporate cesspool of lowest common denominator, hyper-sanitized garbage. Because that’s what people like. They like safe, familiar, predictable, and uncomplicated. Well, most people.
Yup. It definitely feels like over time the human element of the Internet has been replaced by a corporate one. The most blatant example I can think of is youtube. Nowadays it’s so obvious rigged in the favour of already established media and a select few content creators.
Yeah I’m feeling less like a participant, and more like a consumer on the “greater internet” (five big), compared to the early days when corporate presence was minimal, and not remotely slick or subtle. It was like dorky and obvious, and didn’t seem remotely like a threat.
Feeling like a consumer is a great way to put it. It especially feels more and more like it when trying to do even the most mundane tasks. Like if you own a product but need to ask a question on Google about it, first you have to scroll past the links to pages trying to sell you the product you typed in, then you might get some reddit links, 2-3 from a smaller forum, and then more links trying to sell you the product. It will say there’s thousands of results, but it’s just the same 6 links to purchase the product over and over again. So now even basic web searches are mainly for buying stuff.
Search is broken. It’s been getting worse year over year and Google / Bing and all the various offshoots that are JUST GOOGLE AND BING (this isn’t a fucking secret, people. You can slap whatever algo you want over Google / bing and it’s still fucking Google and bing. And a jolly go duck duck fucK yourself to the lot of them).
I pay $10/month for kagi. Its worth it.
I’ve been using SearX for about a week, and so far it’s pretty decent.
Link to kagi? Or are you going to make us Google it?
Sounds interesting. I’ll check it out. BTW I like how unhinged your comment is - you sound like a fun person who I wish I knew IRL
I can’t tell if you forgot to add a “/s” to the end of your comment or not.
I was being genuine. I appreciate their passion
And then now that Alphabet owns YouTube, the first couple results are always monetized videos… It’s brutal.
Anywhere there is money there are charlatans
I miss the day when you could search YouTube for something like “JFK skyclub” and actually get video of the Skyclub at JFK. Today you’ll get 15-minute videos that are 90% a guy talking about his thoughts on JFK, or Skyclub, or airlines, or whatever. If you’re really lucky, some of them may feature a few seconds of actual footage of Skyclub.
It’s not just Skyclub or travel videos. If I search for “repair mr coffee” I want to see a howto, not someone’s SEO-optimized long winded lecture about whatever coffeemakers they’re selling.
So the weird thing is you can still do this but only if YouTube thinks you’re the right audience for it. My grandfather looks up all kinds of old things on YouTube and almost always get exactly what he wants on the first hit. However if I do it it ends up more like your example. Interesting and annoying at the same time
Sounds like it would actually make sense to have a handful of different accounts, each account optimized (through search/watch history or something) for a specific type of content you want to search for.
Otherwise, 3rd-party search engines are often better than YouTubes own search for finding obscure/rare/unpopular/unlisted/demonetized videos.
“Don’t forget to hit the bell and smash that like and subscribe button!”
Yes but it is also way bigger then it was. The amount of data that YouTube has now is just insane. I wonder when they’ll start culling old videos.
I think they already began removing old, inactive channels some time ago…
But we act like youtube is something more then just a place to post videos. We can build a new youtube tomorrow if people weren’t so invested in it. If you have some content on YouTube you just can’t live without fine but for everything else lets migrate… sorry, got a little preachy.
Edit: I get all you think everything’s impossible. I get it, I’m not going to be the one to make new youtube but obviously if it were to happen you are not the ones I would pitch to.
Yeah, that’s completely untrue… The reason we can’t just create a new youtube is the same reason there aren’t more ISPs. The infrastructure cost is too high.
You can’t just build a site that allows video uploads and playback, throw it on a Pi and release it to the world. You need scalability, and that costs money.
Maybe the end solution is a distributed system, but that’s not something you can easily sell to the average Joe that doesn’t give a shit about the “how” or “why” with Youtube, and simply wants to watch videos.
I’m not saying that Google isn’t the scum of the earth, but there is currently no feasible way to recreate what they’ve made/bought without an absolutely stupid amount of money.
YouTube itself is bound to implode because of the cost of all that infrastructure… sheesh. I recently reduced my YT time to the bare minimum, after being screwed out of premium (light), and found out about Peertube. It’s pretty bare bones, but viral videos can use P2P to offload the main server, which I thought was smart and fair. So, federated YouTube can be done I think. It won’t be easy though, or cheap.
If that’s what you really think, that’s fine.
It’s objective fact.
We can build a new youtube tomorrow
Unfortunately not. The cost would be astronomical. Youtube bled money like a stuck pig for a long time, and their monetization has turned out predictably awful, every time.
Don’t get me wrong, the competition would be great, or at least having the option of something… less Youtube. There’s a reason you don’t see a lot of alternatives around, though, and certainly nothing at the same kind of scale.
I get your heart’s in the right place. But good luck finding investors to pay for the massive infrastructure costs to back your YouTube alternative (read competitor) without a plan to extract money from someone. Not even to break even, but to turn a profit.
It would be nice if there was public money to create these alternatives - that was m way you wouldn’t have to worry about profit, just whether your solution is meeting the public need.
That said I’m with you. I try to avoid YouTube whenever I can. Wish more people would do the same
I don’t know how much it costs to run or how ads fully function on the service, but we do have Odysee. I have yet to have seen a single ad from my collection in the app outside of creators whose vid that’s also up on yt having a sponsored segment.
Edit:
Just booted up the app for the first time in a while and they have some minor things. Noticed a little bar at the top with a list of channels and scrolled down to find a featured section.
Worse than what? Paying Atlantic for a subscription?
Whether we like the Atlantic or not, I feel like at some point if we want quality journalism we need to fund it.
I agree, but
They did it to themselves by starting out with free journalism everywhere on the net. And then it took them far too long to finally realize that ads alone weren’t going to pay the bills. If they had stuck with the magazine rack style from the get go (pay for it + ads) it wouldn’t be an issue.
If you give everything away for free for thirty years, Then make it worse, and then suddenly charge for it, you’re going to have a hard time getting money.
You miss the bigger picture. The shit journalism and propaganda are still free - funded by … other means . That is why magazine have tried to be free in the internet.
You’re also operating with the wisdom of hindsight. No one knew how to handle internet publishing. We all learned together.
I’m just saying what happened. History is inherently hindsight.
I pretty much agree, but I really wish we could move away from ads being literally everywhere in our lives. I’d rather them just charge a little bit more and have a better experience. It’s probably falling on deaf ears, though, because nobody ever wants to pay for anything on the internet.
nobody ever wants to pay for anything on the internet
To your point, maybe if what we got in return were worth a shit, people would be more willing to pay. But it gets shittier and shittier, more and more inundated with ads, worse journalism with more clickbait and AI, all for prices that go up every year to multiple times per year.
It was more reasonable when you could go to the store and pay for one newspaper or one issue of a magazine. Then if you really liked it you could subscribe. Now there’s no other option but to subscribe. Not everyone wants to be paying a bunch of separate subscription fees per month just to get decent news, and not everyone wants one hundred percent of a news outlets content. But we’re charged for it regardless. Fuck no, no one wants to pay for that.
Maybe if it were one of the only things that required a subscription. Like it used to be. But now, almost every single thing we use comes with a subscription charge and there’s usually no other way to pay for it. It’s all or nothing. And it gets totally exhausting, aggravating, and ridiculously expensive, especially when they force you to pay for a bunch of shit you don’t need, or they charge you cancellation fees on top of an extra month, or raise the monthly price without telling you, or tack on extra charges for shit that should just come with it in the first place, etc etc.
My point is, no one should defend the subscription model. If an outlet does good journalism, they’ll have donors. PBS Newshour, NPR, Democracy Now, they’re some of the best souces and they’re all nonprofit. And, what do you know, none of them have actual ads.
And shoutout to local libraries to loaning current magazine issues online. I get a Libby notification every time the New Yorker comes out. And I’m sure they’re losing a ton of money because I don’t personally pay for a subscription /s
You make good points. I do think maybe if we never went down this road of everything being ad supported, then it wouldn’t be this bad. It is the world we live in now, though, and I doubt there is any going back to what could have been
I think the real problem is enshittification. Ads are gross and annoying, but ads are sold through ad networks. The networks started by enticing sites, who built their revenue model around it.
And with news in particular, guess which ad networks both sold ads and drove most of their traffic? Facebook and Google. And then they used this power to come up with the embedded standard that let’s them show articles without using the site, and threatened them with cutting off the user stream entirely if they fought back…
Then toss in ISPs and later csps killing off local hosting, and hosting a website is no longer something you just do with your old computer in the basement…
I think it’s time to make a more decentralized Internet not run for corporate profit. It’s not going to save news sites, but the main Internet seems doomed from where we are…
I can’t stand when companies double dip. I won’t pay if I still get ads.
What if it comes with one of those cologne insert peel back samples?
Then I must’ve stolen the wrong magazine by mistake.
Doesn’t matter how it happened, only that it is happening and everyone is disinterested in saving quality journalism.
The fact that yellow journalism is free and quality journalism is hidden behind a paywall, and the fact that many internet people are indignant about both journalism in general and paying for it while also guzzling down exclusively headlines and third hand information in comment sections through a firehose, are what will be studied in future decades about why there was suddenly a strange and convoluted anti-intellectual movement in this era.
But do paywalls actually encourage people to pay? I would point out that NPR/PBS and The Guardian are at least partially funded by the people but still offer news for free and it seems to work.
NPR is funded by underwriters, donors, government grants, and licensing their content to affiliate stations. It’s actually really interesting to see how they’ve cobbled it together. So yeah it’s free for you and me but a lot of money is actually flowing back and forth.
Point being there are a lot of ways to fund things!
My point is they don’t have to rely on paywalls. And I don’t know about The Guardian, but NPR isn’t trying to make a profit, which is probably part of it. Anyway, I use it for a lot of my news. It’s not wholly impartial, but it tries a lot harder than most American news outlets.
I’m just saying there are a lot of ways to make it work!
Regulation would be a better way to improve the quality of journalism, IMO.
I think that would be opening a pretty nasty can of worms. I don’t trust any ruling power to decide what “quality” means for the press.
Not really opening up anything. For instance, BBC news is regulated and a lot more reliable and factual than anything in the US. And the US had minimal regulations which were removed in the late 80s and others removed in the 90s. That’s why the quality of journalism in the corporate-controlled world has crumbled in my lifetime.
Or another way to put it: the ruling party DOES regulate the news in America, but the ruling party is the wealthy folks who own the news. There is almost no worse system than “funding” the news to get quality.
Fair point. I don’t mean to suggest that authors don’t deserve to be paid for their work. And while the article discusses Google and Amazon’s attempts to manipulate online behavior to drive up their profits, I remember a time when paywalls were a rare exception rather than the rule while reading articles online.
That’s because there was a time when everyone had print subscriptions that were healthy, and the internet just gave them extra money for ads. When you start losing subscribers because everyone is looking at your shit online for free, you learn you need to charge for it.
Is anyone actually paying for it though?
Don’t get me wrong, actual journalists deserve a great wage. I just haven’t seen much of it worth paying for in recent years. Real journalists get locked up and it looks like the rest took that threat very seriously. I’m not going to pay money to read corporate puff pieces and controlled opposition.
The Atlantic is a pretty reputable source. And I think there’s a difference between subscribing to news for news reporting like the New York Times, The Guardian, etc, vs subscribing to magazine like the Atlantic, New Yorker, or New Republic that will give you more political commentary and analysis. Both have a role to play and both need subscribers. I subscribe to the Atlantic on and off (I’ve kind of rotated between the atlantic, new republic, and the nation over time). Primary subscriptions for my household are the New York Times and New Yorker. Then I have my annual membership/donations for NPR and PBS. Gotta support the news and good political commentary. It’s holiday season soon. Subscriptions make good holiday gifts.
The Atlantic often does long, in-depth stories and has proven to be a very reliable source. Their journalists have proven themselves in getting some great sources. Just in the last couple of weeks admissions by John Kelley and Gen Milley have proven stories The Atlantic broke 2 years ago with anonymous sources were accurate and credible.
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Yt is complaining about adblocker not being allowed. Waiting for disable unless you whitelist
Worse than it had been previously.
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Oh the irony
It’s called enshittification.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Dead on.
Simple, capitalism found a new promised land. The next space to fill up. And manifest destiny within.
Unfortunately but fortunately as well, it’s an infinite space. Early money has built large infrastructure within it. It’s been built over time and now is so massive it’s hard to comprehend in the real world. It’s nearly impossible to compete with them other than them tearing themselves down, but the space is still nearly infinitely large and competitors can still rise in the fringe and who knows after decades maybe rise to the same kinda massive company
So now we must limit the infinite. Cull all of it to the finite they can control. The virtual world is real, the metaverse is already upon us, and unfortunately it’s already starting to look like the late capitalism asphalt shopping plazas.
So it’s worse cause it’s built for the investors and being limited for them too. It’s why people beg for the next BIG thing, so that they can find new land or new ways to control this 4th space.
so that they can find new land or new ways to control this 4th space. Pretty sure that Meta was meant to be the next big market space.
I think Zuckerberg was expecting all of us to sit in a chair with VR headsets on all day and buy buy buy.
I personally feel like it’s a total invasion of my privacy because it learns “me” and then tries to influence my every move a lot more intimately than cookies in a browser does.
100% absolute control over your life to sell you as much as possible… And people consider that a utopia and not a problem
It also shows how detached some of these billionaires really are. A VR system is not yet affordable for the majority of Americans, and the technology has much more development to do before it’s as widespread as video game consoles, never mind PCs.
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Yah don’t see a small player coming around anytime soon. People don’t realise how uterlu massive these tech companies are.
Yeah no. Not a chance we see valid competitors until cracks really start forming in the services these monopolies can offer. It’s gotta get worse before there can be competition and so they can t just buy them and aquire it to break immediately. I mean we can see some monopolies having their fun ruined look at Twitter; but Facebook, Amazon and Google have money in reserve and an ad system (or AWS) that pays all the bills still.
But yeah people don’t comprehend that these massive online companies are all the Nestle of their space and people can’t even comprehend what being the Nestle of Nestle is, and the power they wield.
The virtual world is real, the metaverse is already upon us, and unfortunately it’s already starting to look like the late capitalism asphalt shopping plazas.
Poetry
Take me back to the days of FFVII’s Aerith Theme midi playing in the background of someone’s Geocities site dedicated to Chrono Trigger. The non-consumer driven Web…
Or give me the joy of discovering a webforum dedicated to some niche community you were interested in, and making actual, real-life friends with the people you met there. Can’t say that I’ve made a connection like that since, oh, Burning Crusade-era WoW at the latest.
I was totally addicted to wow and it definitely hurt my social development, but damn if those aren’t great memories
From Vanilla through Wrath I played with a core group of college buddies and we collected more friends as we moved between guilds on our server. Out of that extended group resulted two marriages and a half-dozen or so real-life friendships with people from all over the country and from all walks of life. I struggle to imagine anything like that happening on the Internet as we know it now. Social media seems engineered to promote only passing and often hostile interaction with people outside of your core group, and games have engineered away all of forced social interaction of community servers, clan/party/guild formation in favor of fast and frictionless matchmaking that pairs you up with randoms that you may never see again after one game. The early Internet promised to connect you with people from all over the world, but we’ve collectively decided instead that we just want easy, tokenized interactions with people who we never have to get to know.
OMG, the kids will soon start to make fun of us ranting about “the good ol days”
That was nice but early reddit days, before subreddits, were the best days of the Internet.
Its time to ‘AT&T’ Alphabet/Google/YouTube.
Trust corporations to ruin something people enjoy.
Tell me no one actually needed to be told that. Please. For my sanity.
Hold on let me Google it…
Sorry, just seven pages of ads about vacuums because I bought one six months ago and links that all go to the same regurgitated article that only vaguely mentions it 🙃
Please tell me no one thinks that evidence < anecdotes? Please, for my sanity…
The sad state of knowledge & logic aside:
There is SIGNIFICANT value to proving something we all think is true. This means action can be taken, it can be cited in argument, and is actually credible as opposed to a “feeling” that’s it’s worse.
Sure, we “know” it’s worse. I’ve experienced search results getting worse and worse for what seems like nearly 10 years now. But I have no proof of this, as such it’s an anecdote.
Funny, but this isn’t the best example. The Atlantic has been a subscription magazine for coming on 200 years now. It’s also one of the few places you can get non click bait articles without ads.
12ft.io is your friend
Or disabling js. Most of you use ublock origin. Ublock has a setting to disable JavaScript and you can whitelist sites you want js
Disabling js does not bypass these article limits, idk why this is being upvoted.
On some websites it does. For example, it’s worked for me on newyorktimes
True, but that’s yet another step every time I want to read an article. Personally i just use ublock origin and add this custom filter list.
And yeah, you can also turn off JS to accomplish a lot while browsing the internet.
They’re not asking to get around it, they’re pointing out shitty practices that are common now.
People don’t want to pay, but they also don’t want to see ads. How does everyone think these companies are going to afford to operate?
Ad revenue. Doesn’t matter if people don’t like to see them lol
Well, it definitely gets the point across lol
I thought this was the joke
Good old atlantic coming to the correct conclusion for the wrong reasons.
