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.
I mean, it’s unavoidable. Everyone draws their own line in the sand based on what they think is “right” and “wrong”, using whatever best tools and ideas are available to them, picked from the avalanche of options.
The line will not stay put from generation to generation, that’s not a reasonable thing to ask for. If we go back 50 years when tv was king, it’s not like all the tv shows were equally good, or stayed good.
So, it’s kinda just on us to seek out and pick the right things to support, and be prepared in case those change too. It’s kinda the whole reason I’m personally here on the Fediverse. I mean, back in the stone age our ancestors had to do the same things, its not like their environments always just stayed perfect. If something changes and you don’t want to starve to death, you gotta just do something. Can’t just wish it away.
I’ve heard something to the effect that approximately 80% of all internet traffic passes through Facebook and Google. Unfortunately I can’t find anything to substantiate that claim but it’s sounds plausible.
I remember the early internet. It was a wild place but at least it was fair and balanced. Now every click on every page is designed to serve the for profit attention economy. Kinda sucks in comparison.
Youtube itself, even in a completely blank Chrome browser, runs like i have 20 downloads running and simultaneously stream 4 animes its a absolute disgrace to humanity.
Really? My main reason for still trying to use adblockers instead of NewPipe or another frontend is that every one I’ve tried is slooooow. Is there a setting I should change or something???
Alternative interfaces like NewPipe, FreeTube, etc. work fine for what they are, but I prefer using a web browser because I actually like Youtube keeping track of my watch history and its recommendation algorithm works (reasonably) well for me.
All the alternative interfaces have privacy from Google as a primary design goal, so they want you to import your subscriptions and let them keep track of what you watched locally, but the consequence and downside of that is that it doesn’t synchronize across devices (e.g. FreeTube on my Linux desktop and NewPipe on my phone). At least not without a bunch of extra effort on my part manually importing and exporting, anyway.
The slow erosion of my enjoyment of YouTube inspired me to get Plex set up and start rewatching some classic shows I love. It’s been a great experience. No ads, no wait times, just entertainment.
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.
Ha! Recently went to breakfast with a couple of new neighbors (partners).
They were asking me what apps I enjoyed and I told them that I WAS enjoying Apollo. Told them I left Reddit. They sort looked at me. They later said they both worked at home. Their job was creating ad space for the web. One of them gave me the enshitification face. Sigh.
Recently went to breakfast with a couple of new neighbors (partners). They were asking me what apps I enjoyed and I told them that I WAS enjoying Apollo.
Lol at first I interpreted this as the waiter asking you what appetizers you wanted
It’s like they’re trying to show you a party that’s going on in some private location, but you don’t get in, because you don’t have an account. Well then, they say, if the account is free and you still don’t make it, it’s not our fault. So they close you out.
You telling them to “just copy and paste the content” is like telling them to send you a photo/video of the party. It’s not the same as being there.
Yep, whenever people text me an Instagram or TikTok URL, I just scroll past it. I don’t even bother to find out what it’s supposed to be about, it’s completely inconsequential to me.
Thing is, most people don’t want to pay for services that to them seemed to be free since forever. And this creates collective social pressure to follow suit. Nothing a big company offers is ever free. You’re just paying in alternate currency.
It’s gross though. Say you started to pay, they would still force ads into their product because they’re greedy and demanding more money. We’re seeing this with streaming sites now.
The funny thing is with youtube, for example, I am a premium user. I deactivated all tracking of my habits on there. Now I am greeted, as a homepage, with nothing else than a call to action to reactivate said tracking. As a paying customer I see less (as in none at all) content on the homepage than an anonymous user would. I am subbed to 170+ channels. Yet they tell me they cannot come up with suggestions unless they can track my every step on their platform. sus. And when saying funny I mean extremely aggravating.
Web 2.0 desperately clinging to life. FOSS self hosted web is the future. Internet speeds are fast enough on home networks that self hosting is perfectly viable for essentially everything, and for the few things that can’t be self hosted by just anyone, FOSS alternatives and work arounds to existing paid services exist.
Internet is becoming harder to monopolize, and increasing amounts of power and control are being handed back to the working class online. FOSS has become a movement that has grown exponentially over the last few years.
Their next recourse will be attempting to make jail time a thing for piracy. Both for hosting it and downloading it.
That would require every government worldwide to be on board. Then you’ll have a couple holdouts, and they’ll take in the dough from everyone wanting to host their content there. While there is a mile-long wishlist from the powers that be, they’re still going to chase what’s profitable.
Have you ever pirated something? If so, have you ever been sent to jail for it?
I’m not talking about hosting companies. Yes, I am aware that prosecution exists for them and has been a thing a long time. I’m saying they’re going to start pushing for end users to face jail time as well. It’s the only real recourse they have.
It’s not so simple. I’ve been trying to go the foss self-hosted way, as well as help p2p projects, and I got stuck because I’m behind a cgnat, unable to forward ports, and my shitty isp has no ipv6. I can’t afford vpns at the moment, so I got stuck. Besides, all that needed a lot of tech skills most people won’t have. This is a serious barrier of entry for a lot of people.
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.
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