I’ve come to the same terms.
other day I decided to open reddit.com and noticed that almost every other (re)post was from a bot. even the top comments were from bots.
since then I’ve added reddit to my growing blocklist.
I now spend more time on feeder, an RSS reader app.
I haven’t been to reddit much since the api fiasco. If it’s not too much trouble can you point me to some obvious bots so i can get a feel for what that looks like?
Lets be real - This isn’t going to change on it’s own. The only way for it to change is if everyone collectively took a stand against it. Which simply just won’t happen. The most reasonable thing to do is to focus your energy on collectives that actively reject such practices. Oh hey, you’re already in one: Lemmy, good job. As long as we work together to create a small corner of the internet that remains true to what the internet should be, we can grow it and create a better internet in the long term.
Back in the day, the GOP was completely controlled by Big Business. A guy named Jerry Falwell saw how Richard Nixon’s Southern Strategy had gotten him elected and jumped in. He organized his people at the grassroots level. If there was a local Republican club that got 20 people at the average meeting, Jerry’s church group would show up with fifty. At the start, they were getting dog catchers and county clerks in, but eventually their power grew.
And you know what would fix it? Building your own website that doesn’t do those things and making the people around you engage with it instead of you capitulating to them, but why put effort into anything when you can sit around and complain about it and do nothing about it?
Maybe it’s time we all go back to living like it’s the 80s. Watch OTA broadcast TV and read more books and call people on the phone instead of text them. And use computers to do taxes and word process and play simple games.
And whenever you want to search for information about something the result page gets flooded with AI generated garbage pages with misleading titles and that provide bullshit information.
Top result Top ten results are always things like:
"You are right to question these days indeed, ‘why is the Internet enshittified and Ai is stupid’? Certainly, the world would like to know and you are not alone in wondering why is the internet enshittifed and Ai is stupid.
Today we will be looking at 17 ways the enshittified why is Ai stupid and internet.
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:
I’m not internet god, but I have a possible first step forward with a protocol and working implementation ;
Decentralized websites, encrypted and takedown safe. Free, FOSS and based on reciprocal sharing. Nothing very complicated, you need to forward a port and run a program.
I’m just a geek though, not a manager or marketing person so I’d love some people checking it out.
So true. I’d like to add that also because of ads, social media and other websites are full of nonsense clickbait content, and every part of the user experience is designed to keep you scrolling through said content. Even with an adblocker, it’s like wading through a swamp to find anything actually worth looking for. (Of course, there are still websites with no ads, and even the ones with ads aren’t always horrible. But generally, shit sucks.)
I believe you’re referring to “the algorithm”. Which is usually just code for “a bunch of people that view and engage with the content you have viewed/engaged with also viewed/engaged with this”
I understand what they’re doing and I understand why, but sometimes, I just want a reverse chronological feed of my friends activities, so I can keep up to date with their most recent life events.
No such problems, I don’t use pages which need an account to see the content, or I skip the account Popup, YT without ads and trackers, with extensions or front-ends, fast page loading because blocking all this crap. But yes, free internet is becoming more and more distant since large corporations dominate it with their conditions, if they continue like this, soon you will only be browsing the internet with your ID and credit card and the webcam on.
For me the internet is still just about bearable but only because of the following…
Firefox + unlock origin for web browsing.
RedReader for Reddit when I occasionally need to go there.
Lemmy for the best Reddit alternative.
Revanced and NewPipe for YouTube.
Recently moved from Google podcasts to Podcast Republic after Google moved podcasts to you tube music.
Never had Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, TikTok, Instagram.
Email is still functional and necessary so have to stick with that.
It feels like I’m swimming against a strong tide just to maintain a good experience, in no other industry do the major players want to cripple your goods and services if you don’t bend over and accept their increasingly poor goods and services 🤷🏻♂️
It’s mostly people who refuse to stop using these services who ruin it for those who don’t. I think the solution is to make slick, idiot-proof and easy alternatives with sexy UIs so even the most insta, TikTok, YouTube addicted person wants to switch over. There’s no solution to monetization or ads which doesn’t fuck the experience of the alternative solution. Creating, instilling and appealing to an ideology will also help conversions.
That said, if you like someone’s content, then there’s nothing inherently wrong with you hoping for that person to be paid for it. Forcing ads is such a disgusting move, but any reasonable person wouldn’t mind paying to not to watch ads—there’s a cost to infrastructure maintenance that needs to be met, so it’s understandable. But I’d rather pay to a non-profit or utility.
In general, everyone should oppose big tech monopolies, and ask their politicians to legislate against them. Monopolies are the biggest threats to democracy.
It’s not a solution, but as a mitigation, I’m trying to push the idea of an internet right of way into the public consciousness. Here’s the thesis statement from my write-up:
I propose that if a company wants to grow by allowing open access to its services to the public, then that access should create a legal right of way. Any features that were open to users cannot then be closed off so long as the company remains operational. We need an Internet Rights of Way Act, which enforces digital footpaths. Companies shouldn’t be allowed to create little paths into their sites, only to delete them, forcing guests to pay if they wish to maintain access to the networks that they built, the posts that they wrote, or whatever else it is that they were doing there.
As I explain in the link, rights of way already exist for the physical world, so it’s easily explained to even the less technically inclined, and give us a useful legal framework for how they should work.
I agree but I think it needs to be slightly more practical. Sometimes a line of business just dries up and it would damage the company to try and keep that service going. It wouldn’t make sense to force a company into bankruptcy to keep one line going that few people use anymore.
Earlier today, though, I was thinking about sunsetting guarantees. Companies can and should decommission things when it makes business sense, but the user generated content it has gathered shouldn’t just disappear, and they shouldn’t be allowed to destroy the user experience of things people have bought.
So I would propose rules like:
If a service is being decomissioned or an entry point to that service being shut down, the content available on that service must be made available as a bulk export. Personal data, such as account data, messages, etc should be made available to users individually, while publicly accessible content should be made available publicly.
If a public service is being taken down completely, source code should be made available publicly.
If the service for a device which was physically purchased by consumers is being taken down, an update must be provided to allow users to use a local or alternative backend service. The source code for the service must be released publicly.
If features are being removed from a service which backed a physically purchased device, an update must be offered which allows users to point to a local or alternative service for either all functionality or, at minimum, the removed functionality. Looking at you, Google, keep removing features…
Yeah, as always, the devil is in the details. For now I think that we need a simple and clear articulation of the main idea. In the exceedingly unlikely event that it ever gets traction, I look forward to hammering out the many nuances.
Add comment