Rule of thumb:

• are you making fun or otherwise mocking someone?
• are you doing it for any "bad reason" whatsoever?
• are you doing something that is/was primarily done by others for "bad reasons", historically?
• are you doing something that other groups started doing as a replacement for something else that they were not allowed to (that you are)?

I'm half asleep so I may have forgotten something but if I didn't, then answering No to all of those should be the minimum thing you do.

About the claims that X and Starlink are separate entities and one shouldn't be affected by the other: it has since been revealed that it was Starlink who paid the salaries of X's employees.

Last presidential election here in Brazil some churches were asking their people to swap children with other couples so that those children could keep watch to ensure everybody is voting for the right candidate (children are the only ones allowed to join you in the voting booth).

I think they just did some camera trick to cut out most of the travel time and not make the movie longer.

Because the American left would be considered right wing in most of the world.

I bought the game but still played it in Yuzu instead.

I used to have an rpg on steam, with "fantasy" in the name. One day someone sent me an email asking if there was any way to remove all references to magic from the game so they could play it, as having witches and stuff was a big no for them, but they still wanted to try the game.

Hey, free shipping.

It'll only run on cloud. Their employer would probably block that too.

Years ago when this meme first came my way I tried to explain this and nobody agreed with me, it was driving me mad.

I've been using windows for nearly as long as it has existed and I used to always be happy with updates. Even windows vista, despite all its problem, still felt like an upgrade compared to xp.

Then windows 8 started changing things in a direction I was not happy with, but at the same time it also had improvements over win7. Windows 10 repeated that with plenty of bad things but still overshadowed by massive improvements in many areas.

At this point windows was at its peak in some areas, like stability (when was the last time you saw a BSOD without actual faulty hardware?) and usability. Multiple Desktops, WSL2, the new Terminal...so many great things added in win10 updates.

And then comes win11 and shits at everything. Removed a ton of core features that didn't need removing, broke a lot of compatibility with older stuff (something that Microsoft used to care deeply about) and adds... Nothing. It's been quite a while since win11 released and there's still nothing I can point at and say it does better than win10.

If you're going to do all sorts of stuff with my data you should at least try to make me happy with your product in exchange, not make me dread using it every time.

That's one part of how the internet dies, there are others. For example: soon the vast majority of the content on the internet will have been created by bots (AI or not). Or even by malicious folks pushing narratives.

TLDR: not only the internet is becoming more annoying to use it is also constantly becoming less useful with worse content replacing everything that was ever good

And the problem with content created by bots is that it is usually made to not look like that was the case. Sometimes that's not the problem like some random site with information about a video game can have all of its content generated automatically based on data extracted from that game. That is fine.

But other cases, specially with AI content, can be much worse. There was a recent example where some site with history content had generated some pages using an AI and that AI created a page about Scimitars which included information taken from Dungeons and Dragons, but presented then as historic facts.

And the main problem here is that the internet feeds on itself. Texts are copied from one site to another by non-AI bots. Some text created by AI in one site gets copied to multiple threads on reddit, hacker news, stack overflow, 4chan and all sorts of places. Places that are scanned by search engines and often picked as preferred search results by users.

Then Google these days try everything to make a larger profit from you. That includes "stealing" content from inside websites to display on top of the search results page - so that you never click away from the Google site. In order to do that more efficiently, they give preference to sites that allow this behavior over sites with actual better search results. Try googling "country in Africa with the letter K".

So in the end all your search results will soon be stuff that was written by AI. And remember: AI doesn't think. It won't ever do. AI is just a robot role-playing as human.

When you see a comedian doing a Stephen Hawking impression, you don't expect them to publish scientific papers, in fact you don't pay any attention to what they actually say, because you know it'll either be rubbish or just a repeat of something that Hawking had said before. AI is the same thing. It'll never be intelligent, it'll only get better at imitating humans, by looking at what humans say. And with their content taking over the internet, it'll soon be imitating itself.

And the only memory of the golden years of the internet, will maybe be Wikipedia. Have you donated to them yet? Think about how many times you've used it and remember it has never shown an ad other than their pleas for donation. Please consider giving them a few bucks when you've some to spare.