• Viking_Hippie@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    17 days ago

    The internet wasn’t a mistake. It’s one of the best ideas ever.

    As with most other parts of life, the mistake was letting corporations take over everything with little to nothing restraining their obsessive hoarding and compulsive attempts to control every aspect of human existence.

    • pedz@lemmy.ca
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      16 days ago

      Oh boy. I remember back at the end of the 90ies, being annoyed at friends making websites on popular things only to insert pay per click banners, in the hope of making money out of the internet.

      Corporations have a lot of responsibilities in making thr internet shitty, but people’s greed helps them a lot.

      Still today, I have coworkers dreaming of finding some genius idea to become popular Youtubers and live from that. They don’t realize it means living from ads and encouraging this system.

      Everyone wants to exploit the internet for money. Even when it was new.

      • Imacat@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        17 days ago

        It was ads. All the social media algorithms do what they do to maximize ad engagement because that’s their primary source of income.

        • FlyingCircus@lemmy.world
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          17 days ago

          Capitalism commodifies everything. The enshittification of the internet was inevitable under a capitalist system.

        • sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          17 days ago

          Ads were there from the beginning of the… broad public internet.

          I remember having to load them up over a 56k modem, and then shortly thereafter learning how to block javascript… in the mid/late 90s.

          But yes, roughly by about 2010 - 12, the entire internet had just become… SEO, AdServing engines, everything is an ad platform on the surface, but actually highly, highly specific and refined ways of data profiling people for all kinds of purposes, selling that data to anyone.

          I don’t know exactly where you could or should draw the line on … at what point it tipped from reasonable to horrific.

          • wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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            16 days ago

            I feel like the original Google AdWords, where they were only text based ads in their own boxes separate from the page content and clearly labeled as ads, weren’t too egregious.

            But there were already obnoxious ads around by then.

  • TomMasz@piefed.social
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    17 days ago

    I don’t know any entomologists, so I have to assume this is correct. On the other hand, I know for a fact that the internet was a mistake.