Honestly, I just use the internet less. I’m never going to pay. I can’t be bothered with the loopholes anymore. If it bugs me to pay or subscribe, I leave. I’m fine with them not wanting me as a user, and I hope they’re fine with me not wanting them as a supplier. They don’t have anything that I actually need that badly.
Oddly enough I probably use the internet more than ever. It’s just not that internet.
Weirdly, the only parts of the Internet that I’m really liking these days are Hacker News, Lemmy and the one part that I do pay for, which is Kagi Ultimate. It is very refreshing not to be the product and I do occasionally need to use a search engine for something.
I’m so done with “browsing” YouTube. I also hardly ever click the links anymore when people post them here, and that is because of the ads.
There are some good channels that I occasionally checkout whenever I’m really bored, and I absolutely don’t mind them getting the ad revenue like any other free tv show, but it’s nothing that I can’t do without.
In my opinion, good YT channels who make quality content ought to apply for other mean of distribution that doesn’t scare away viewers. Let’s say that f.i. Numberphile, Veritasium or Primitive Technology were on Netflix or even Disney+, I’d prefer to watch it there. That’s how bad YouTube is.
If YouTube managed to get part of the all-in deals that I have on the other “real” streaming services, then they’d get some fraction of whatever my cellphone carrier pays to those. Right now I just don’t want to bother with it.
If youtube was a reasonable price I’d pay it. But being google, they not only charge a ridiculous price, but even if you pay that, they’ll STILL sell your data on top.
Furthermore, it being a public company no profit will ever be enough. It doesn’t matter if I paid 30$ a month, the next quarter the 30 billion profit won’t be enough because it didn’t grow from the previous quarter…
And if you buy any hardware from Google, count on it being discontinued and unsupported within a year. Anyone who continues to buy shit from Google is either deluded or a fool, or both.
I got a Pixel 5a refurbished because it’s supported by LineageOS. Like a week after buying it I dropped it, cracking the screen. Got on iFixit, ordered a replacement screen, and once it got here spent an evening installing it. No regrets. But I am a fool, so that tracks.
My next phone will be a Fairphone now that they work with US carriers, though.
I’m actually glad for it. It made me switch to Linux, discover Mullvad Browser and their VPN combo, get a GrapheneOS phone, find an amazing Freetube YT desktop client, and dabble with Home Assistant and PIHole. Plus I migrated to Protonmail and Kagi as my search, and Lemmy instead of reddit is also an amazing change, the discussions I’ve seen so far feel better and more in depth, and I’m enjoying my time here so far. The lack of endless content is also great, to help with implementing Digital Minimalism.
So, while I hate any large corporation and their greed with more and more passion, it has lead me to a nice privacy journey, for which I’m glad.
I almost did the same, just my phone is not a pixel, so i had to resort to some other custom ROM. And I still just use good ol’ firefox with proton VPN most of the time.
P.S. I also blocked our TV from accessing the internet as well. Ex. Codeberg is a GitHub replacement, and on mobile Grayjay/LibreTube works great for youtube.
Looked into Kagi. Seems interesting. Personally, I use either Brave search or Searx. There’s was post over at Linux@lemmy.ml about open source alternatives to ChatGPT and I might look into those. But I definitely keep Kagi in mind. By the way, How good is Kagi for,um… “sailing the high seas”?
The browser in my computer at work doesn’t have an ad blocker. I haven’t installed one because I most of the time I’m using it to access our intranet. But when I do happen to use the internet, damn are there so many ads! They literally block the content I’m trying to read, and come back even when I try to close it.
All that to say, due to enshittification I will forever keep my ad blocker on my personal computer.
It’s wild using a browser without a blocker. I’ve had one since they first started appearing so the internet I know is very different to reality. On the rare occassion I use a browser that allows ads, it feels like shit’s broken. It’s so hard to get anything done and a chore to read or view content.
Can’t imagine what the web is like outside of ublock origin…
The few websites I see on pcs by clients are essentially state backed so they don’t have ads as well.
It’s almost as though the overbearing Yahoo/Ask! toolbars that used to plague everyone’s Internet Explorer back in the day have mutated and infected the internet at large. Now most websites feel like one useless, giant malware-riddled toolbar.
What I don’t get is how most places, people get mad at us for not being able to read an article due to the paywall. I mean, I’m not going to subscribe to 50 shitty news sites just so I can read someone’s damn random shit.
This is my biggest gripe with lemmy. A MASSIVE amount of links I try to follow is just paywalls or so damn bloated with garbage it isn’t worth the effort
I don’t agree completely - there are a lot of things that are possible without JavaScript, which are improved either due to better UX or improved safety through JS.
Easy examples for better UX is anything to do with forms and multi-step processes. Getting validation errors while typing is massively better than getting them on submit, and it’s easy to store temporary edit states locally to prevent data re-entry. This especially goes for offline-first applications.
IMO more importantly, local JS is always preferable to server-side logic when possible, since it means your data never leaves your browser. Imagine a JSON formatter that processes data server-side - you can never be sure what they are doing with your data! Compared to that local JS is incredibly portable (every platform has a browser) and isn’t reliant on anything else. I build my utility apps both in the usual bundler way, and as single files - meaning I can offer my app as a single HTML file you can download and use however you want.
Of course the security benefits aren’t perfect - it’s always possible data is still sent somewhere. I really hope that one day we’ll get an API that allows a website to limit further network connections to specific URLs. This would give users of such applications real peace of mind.
When all I want to do is read content, no JS is needed. That has been a solved problem for decades. UX is problematic because now you have these huge PC screens and comparatively tiny mobile screens to account for. Most developers go for mobile first and completely ignore the rest, so you have loads of sites that are needlessly displayed like slow powerpoint presentations, autoscrolling to the next anchor because that’s “good UX” somehow.
Form validation with JS goes back decades and no one in their right minds relies entirely on frontend validation. It’s great because it can be immediate, but it’s easier to sidestep either by accident or on purpose. Since a lot of forms nowadays are “autogenerated” from their respective UI libraries, they come with a lot of unnecessary cruft.
meaning I can offer my app as a single HTML file you can download and use however you want
I sure hope that doesn’t need a “local server” of any sort to work. It’s one of the things that baffles me the most, javascript that only works with a npm server to connect to. I also hope it’s not bundled as an electron app, what’s the point of having an entire chrome browser bundled just to run a single page?
When all I want to do is read content, no JS is needed.
I didn’t say otherwise.
UX is problematic because now you have these huge PC screens and comparatively tiny mobile screens to account for. Most developers go for mobile first and completely ignore the rest, so you have loads of sites that are needlessly displayed like slow powerpoint presentations, autoscrolling to the next anchor because that’s “good UX” somehow.
Okay? I’m not sure what you’re arguing against. Some websites have bad UX, and that means the technology used to implement that bad UX is in itself bad?
Form validation with JS goes back decades and no one in their right minds relies entirely on frontend validation.
I didn’t say anyone should rely entirely on frontend validation.
It’s great because it can be immediate, but it’s easier to sidestep either by accident or on purpose. Since a lot of forms nowadays are “autogenerated” from their respective UI libraries, they come with a lot of unnecessary cruft.
Again, what exactly are you arguing for or against? You said “don’t use JavaScript when you don’t need it”. You don’t need frontend validation, it’s a nice to have, but it would be incredibly stupid to say “this form is way better without frontend validation”.
I sure hope that doesn’t need a “local server” of any sort to work. It’s one of the things that baffles me the most, javascript that only works with a npm server to connect to. I also hope it’s not bundled as an electron app, what’s the point of having an entire chrome browser bundled just to run a single page?
No, the single HTML file I’m talking about doesn’t require a server or Electron or anything besides a browser. What are you on about?
You either seem to be willfully misunderstanding me, or you’re projecting a bunch of random webdev grievances onto me. Why?
I just started a personal blog as my small contribution to combat Dead Internet Theory. I’m not going to link it here because I don’t want to doxx myself
Yea, the creation of sites like neocities is such a fun return to oldweb and the joys of relearning html and creating a static site. And tools like Jekyll for generating and maintaining your own blog are great
Capitalism does this to itself due to the profit motive. Where once is innovation and brand new disruption becomes petty iteration as this new frontier slowly but surely becomes a well-oiled profit machine. The upside is that FOSS makes replacing this profit-generating soul-sucking bloatware with better alternatives very easy.
Replacing the existing infrastructure of Capitalism by building up parallel structures is a valid means of weakening Capital itself.
No.1 Apparently not present on uBlock Origin, which makes it not a problem for me (though it’s shite that they are doing it anyway). I don’t use YouTube that often anyways.
No.2 You are not loosing a lot - it’s most likely some crappy video about a guy slipping on a banana peel or some shit like this - 99.9% you are not missing on much :D
See as much as I dislike the company, I can see how it would make sense from a business and logic point of view. They are paying for the servers and, to some extent and form, for the content, and by using any ad blocking content you sabotage their earnings from this platform. I’m surprised they are not blocking browsers with said plugins, but that would cause a major uproar. But then again, not much competition around…
fr, i didn’t use for the longest time because a 5 seconds ad before every video and some on the side never bothered me much, it was when it started being 2 UNSKIPABBLE ADS BEFORE EVERY VIDEO, PLUS MID ROLL ADS that I couldn’t deal with it anymore
Sure, the money has to come from somewhere, but, no ad server has ever managed to fully eradicate malware from the ads they serve and some sites have so much of the page covered in ads that the site simply isn’t navigable without an ad blocker. The first is on the ad server companies, but the second one is just stupid. I will simply never trust ad servers anymore after having seen computers destroyed by ad-delivered malware, including one of my own. Even if the websites themselves go back to a more restrained and reasonable number of ads, I will never turn my ad blocker off for simple safety reasons.
Haha, so true. I really really miss the “old” interwebz. Imagine the content of back-then with the hardware of today. The dream of yesteryear would come true. A blazingly fast net. Just html with a bit of JS (when really needed). Not 10 frameworks (each used for one function), dozens of mb of graphics, a gazillion of cookies and tracker-scripts and… Jeez.
Today i need so much stuff to fight the other stuff, it’s stuffmageddon.
Oh and if you’re also European you can also fight (for free!) the silly cookie-war.
Not 10 frameworks (each used for one function), dozens of mb of graphics,
Have you seen the old internet?! It would have been even more gifs, music players, and oh the flash websites! Haha I know that’s really not your point but this jumped out at me and made me chuckle.
Point taken. The gifs were rising strongly, and music on websites was worse than a rusty nail in my dingdong. But still. One plugin today would’ve just got ridden of those and it would still load faster 😁
4chan back before the Nazi takeover was like the wild west. My favorite part was “Lithursday,” when we would share images with embedded PDFs of copyrighted content, including rare books, anarchist materials, and military manuals. I often wonder if those unusually large .jpgs are still floating around the internet waiting to be unlocked. I also saw legitimate acts of activism and terrorism unfolding live, without the interpretation and propaganda of the state.
The real problem with YouTube is the censorship, both of creators and commenters, when they aren’t saying anything offensive or problematic but simply referencing different companies, corporations, governments, countries or industries.
I’m in favor of censorship in some cases - which is why it really takes an insane amount of ridiculous nonsensical censorship that actually hinders constructive online communication for me to be saying there’s a problem with censorship. I thought I’d never say there was a censorship problem, but there really is now, although it seems mostly restricted to YouTube. Elon Musk’s Twitter has some stupid censorship too, though. It takes away accountability when things can’t even be criticised anymore, and misinformation/disinformation is allowed but can’t be corrected, for example.
I agree that enshittification is a, well, shitty term, but I know obly it to describe the problem at hand.
Alternstives I think of are walled gardens, collapse of the internet as we know it, lockdown of social media sites, etc. - none of them all that simple and miss the point enshittification has.
Decay is a natural process however that just happens if you don’t stop it. I still think ‘enshittification’ fits it best because it implies a bit of intentionality on the part of the shittifiers.
The term is sticky (ewww) and I think we are stuck with it.
And those are unfortunately 90% dead as compared to 10 years ago.
Back then I could easily find multiple chatrooms for any fandom all incredibly active. Now I’m lucky to find a singular one that isn’t dead. Fandoms mostly moved on to the big monolithic sites like reddit where interactions and conversation are incredibly artificial
As far as I know the OED is a very specific dictionary that’s way beyond what most people need and mostly for people dealing with language in their work. www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com would be the more personal variant from what I’ve heard.
It’s sensible that maintaining a current up to date dictionary is worthy of compensation, but I think the tragedy is that such endeavors as “maintaining current information on human language” aren’t just publicly funded, so here they are panhandling for “Dictionary plus” lol.
The OED has been like this for at least 15 years (possibly longer but that’s when I first encountered it). So I wouldn’t consider this an appropriate example of the enshittification that’s been taking place of late.
The OED goes very in-depth into etymology in the way other English dictionaries do not. It’s the size of an encyclopedia. This is the print version of the second edition, which has been supplemented several times since:
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