I fuckin' signed in to YouTube with my existing account damn it
this post was submitted on 04 May 2025
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Privacy
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But at some point, there will be no skip button. You know it, I know it, we all know it. This is like the creepy uncle who starts out by giving you candy and playing football in the yard. Then he wants you to sit on his lap before candy or football, but you can jump off whenever, until the day, he won't let you. That is what these companies have been doing. I still remember the arm twisting they did when they took over youtube and we all liked youtube so much, we ended up giving in to it.
The end game for them is to own all your personal information and have total control over your online activity. Them giving you a skip button is a fake comfort. They probably already know where you live too.
For my part, I have just accepted that my basic bitch info is out there. Whatever I haven't shared myself, have been shared either by a phone book service in my country or by databrokers who have sold my info to random companies and scammers.
Anonymity online is an illusion unless you are a very tech savvy which most of us are not.
I was just thinking how much we've lost. Each generation grows up with this stuff being normalized by people saying "it's fine just skip it". But the early days of the internet was so much different compared to the people today.
It took them less than a decade to make us accept this new order online. From 2010 to 2015 more or less.
Personally, I miss when online communities were places where you shared things you found online. I miss when it was a place where you could personalize your profiles and where people still enjoyed reading blogs and things like that.
I miss when the internet was for people and not for corporations.
It was scary back then too, with pedos, hackers and so on, but it does hit differently when corporations are in control of how we interact with one another and they get to set the rules for what they can demand of you before connecting you with their platforms.
I do hope that someday this corporate chokehold on the internet will collapse and we will see a revival of true free and creative "social media" like it used to be. I miss the blogs and the forums and the art sharing sites that didn't suck ass like they do nowadays.
Totally agree on the pre-2010 internet being more human. Now not only the platforms are centralized, half of the blogs you find are now AI generated incoherent garbage.
There is still good stuff, but now you have to work really hard to find it among AI slop, Ads, paywalls etc.
I hope the fediverse can establish a new form of the old internet. Lemmy instances are now the self hosted phpBB forums of this decade. And even on the corporate platforms there are some thriving niche communities.
Maybe it was just that the pre-2010 internet was driven primarily by nerds of some form. With the smartphone it went fully mainstream, and that broke it. It got streamlined and commodified and monetized to turn any kind of "engagement" into profits, instead of, well, just being a place where many random quirky people are doing their thing and sharing cool stuff.
Remember when "Homepage" was still a concept? Now I guess for most people it's their Instagram profile, or something like that.
This is a very long comment when they definitely already know users addresses, lol