Internet was better when it was a bunch of forums and personal web pages
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.
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 It definitely feels like over time the human element of the Internet has been replaced by a corporate one.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.
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
"Don't forget to hit the bell and smash that like and subscribe button!"
Worse than what? Paying Atlantic for a subscription?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Tell me no one actually needed to be told that. Please. For my sanity.
Its time to 'AT&T' Alphabet/Google/YouTube.
Trust corporations to ruin something people enjoy.
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
Good old atlantic coming to the correct conclusion for the wrong reasons.
I believe what you meant to write is "The internet IS worse"
I would get off google if I were you
I strangely feel very conflicted over Google. I have a Pixel phone which supports the security hardened GrapheneOS.
Were it not for Google allowing their phones to be so easily rooted, I'd probably be with Apple, who have their own egregious privacy invading practices.
Google also left rss feeds available on Youtube, which essentially allowed me to easily move my subscriptions to my rss feeder instead of outright subscribing. Then, thanks to Invidious, I just use an extension to reroute any time I visit that channel/video.
Grant you, Google could easily remove these features that strangely enough allow for easy migration away from their platform, and I can definitely see a future where they do just that.
It just is such a strange thing for a company to have these built in aspects to their products that literally allow you to migrate away from their platform.
To be clear, I'm not suggesting that this gives Google some sort of pass to do as they please. I haven't used Google search regularly in a very long time. I still use their email and calendar solely because my current job team uses it as one of their main scheduling tools, but would prefer if we used something like a NextCloud instance.
In short, I have done some things to get away from Google's suite of software and will continue to do so, but these strange loopholes, especially the interesting relationship Pixel/GrapheneOS has, make me wonder about how Google could still make certain products and remain a smaller, much more regulated, part of the Internet as a whole...
Well... you gotta hand it to them, that's a succinct summary.
Capitalism does not work well when companies are too big. No one can compete unless you are already very rich. That sucks.
If people are actually acknowledging this maybe we could do something about it.
Google should have been (should be?) nationalized. Or maybe stick it under the USPS. (If only people weren't constantly trying to kill the USPS...)
The FTC’s lawsuit against Amazon is actually insane. It’s like they have a cheat code for printing money. Google is definitely just as bad, worse even as they control much of the internet, right down to the architecture.
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