this post was submitted on 15 Sep 2023

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Technology

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Internet developments have gone from exciting to dreadful. (lemmy.ml)

submitted 2 years ago by Anticorp@lemmy.ml to c/technology@lemmy.ml

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Idk if this is the right community for this conversation, but it's been on my mind and I want to share it with someone.

In the 00's every new thing we heard about the internet was exciting. There were new protocols, new ways to communicate, new ways to share files, new ways to find each other. Every time we heard anything new about the internet, it was always progress.

That lasted into the early teens and then things started changing. Things started stagnating. Now we're well into the phase where every new piece of news we hear is negative. New legislations, new privacy intrusions, new restrictions, new technologies to lock content away and keep us from sharing, or seeing the content we were looking for. New ways to force ads.

At one point the Internet was my most favorite thing in the world. Now I don't know if I even like it anymore. I certainly don't look forward to hearing news about it. It's sad, man. We've lost a lot. The mega corps took the internet from us, changed it from a million small sites that people created because they had big ideas, or were passionate about small ones, and turned it into a few enormous sites with no new ideas, no passion, just an insatiable desire for money.

We're at the end of an era, and unlike the last 20 years of progress, I don't think most of us will like what the next era brings.

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[–] sooper_dooper_roofer@hexbear.net 18 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

Things that are hard to believe still exist:

Linux
VLC media player
Pirate Bay (torrents/filesharing in general)
hard drives
email
google earth

Being a somewhat tech illiterate millennial (only knows how to navigate windows and passed a data structures class) it feels like any of these things could be eventually taken out next (probably not Linux just because it'd be the hardest)

I wouldn't at all be surprised if they found a way to monetize hard drives into a subscription based storage service

Mostly I don't understand much, but I know that I witnessed the internet turn from a fast clickable diverse wonderland to a place dominated by 6 websites which take up 4GB RAM to run, followed by the further decline of youtube (started going for ADHD related results in 2011), google (search results started sucking in 2019) and reddit (mods started getting banhappy in 2020)

[–] 9up999@lemmy.ml 17 points 2 years ago (15 children)

Internet was ruined with the rise of smartphones. Every dumb Karen and her friends started to post on the internet. With PC it was somewhat barrier for idiots. Pre social media times were the best. Nowadays idiots rule the internet.

[–] Poggervania@kbin.social 13 points 2 years ago

I would argue it was ruined once social media companies found out how to monetize data. Facebook and MySpace were huuuuuge back before smartphones existed, and using a PC was actually not that huge of a hurdle for surfing the web. It was when companies went “oh shit, we can sell user data to market ads” that they all scrambled to make things easier to use and adopt.

[–] Tankiedesantski@hexbear.net 13 points 2 years ago

To be fair, you have to have a very high IQ to understand ~~Rick and Morty~~ the Internet...

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[–] Duckef@lemmy.ml 16 points 2 years ago

Currently use the internet for Steam, Lemmy and streaming I cut down from Gigabit to 12mbps because I just don't use it any more.

[–] BelieveRevolt@hexbear.net 15 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

It's not just the Internet, it's all technology. In the 90s, there was sort of excitement over anything new coming to the market. Now it's ”oh good, new tech for our overlords to somehow screw us with”. Doesn't help that back then there were a hell of a lot more true technological progress, just look at what a PC was like in 1990 compared to 1999.

[–] FortifiedAttack@hexbear.net 13 points 2 years ago

Well, at least in terms of information security a lot of progress was made, you just don't tend to hear anything about that. I'd say the 2010s was the time where all that was being put into place, actually.

That exciting early 2000s Internet was unbelievably shitty. Nearly every widely-used protocol was easily exploitable or had massive flaws, hardly any encryption being in place, bad password practices and very little security-awareness among users, very widespread malware, etc.

There's definitely a lot of answers that are looking for a question out there, with lots of corporate greed in play, but I don't think it's quite as grim as you make it out to be.

[–] reksas@sopuli.xyz 10 points 2 years ago (8 children)

Popularity and by extension, money, will corrupt and ruin everything.

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[–] some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org 10 points 2 years ago (4 children)

I remember getting really angry at Facebook for all their shit about eight years ago. It used to be that when I met someone and they learned my profession, they said it was "cool." I was angry that FB would turn the public against us. Fuck them. They started this downward trend.

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