Internet was better when it was a bunch of forums and personal web pages
this post was submitted on 08 Oct 2023
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Mildly Infuriating
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We can get it back, and the antitrust trials are a big part of actually doing it
Sure we can but will we? No.
Twitter has only lost ~10% of it's userbase after repeatedly abusing its own users. Reddit probably less. After everything we've learned about Meta, tens of millions of people signed up on day 1 to join their new service, Threads. Google Chrome still has like 80% market share.
Changing is honestly a trivial ask, but we won't, because no one cares.
It's not that no one cares, per se. We just live in a society where the majority of working adults are fucking exhausted. They have bills to pay, uncertain job security, seemingly constant climate crises/natural disasters in many geolocations (e.g. Canada and US West Coast wildfires, earthquakes, hurricanes, etc.), hyper polarized partisanship in many countries (yeah, it isn't unique to the US), and on and on. That Google, Microsoft, or Amazon own the internet is such a low priority to the much more immediate, life threatening/living security concerns of the majority of people.
I care, but I also understand why many people do not.
Man, I would love to run a Linux box and still be able to run the like 4 programs I use my computer for, but I don't have any interest in running an OS I have to build and make work. I got Redhat working once (feels like a million years ago) and I am just not that interested in my PC anymore. It's a tool. I want it to work without any fiddling on my part. It has exactly 5 programs it ever has to run. I touch it on the weekends. Windows it is.
This is me agreeing with you in every way.
Fwiw Linux is way easier today than it was a million years ago. Honestly I find it simpler to use than Windows.
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The internet was better when it was Usenet and Gopher.
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.
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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.
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Worse than what? Paying Atlantic for a subscription?
Whether we like the Atlantic or not, I feel like at some point if we want quality journalism we need to fund it.
I agree, but
They did it to themselves by starting out with free journalism everywhere on the net. And then it took them far too long to finally realize that ads alone weren't going to pay the bills. If they had stuck with the magazine rack style from the get go (pay for it + ads) it wouldn't be an issue.
If you give everything away for free for thirty years, Then make it worse, and then suddenly charge for it, you're going to have a hard time getting money.
You miss the bigger picture. The shit journalism and propaganda are still free - funded by … other means . That is why magazine have tried to be free in the internet.
You’re also operating with the wisdom of hindsight. No one knew how to handle internet publishing. We all learned together.
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I pretty much agree, but I really wish we could move away from ads being literally everywhere in our lives. I'd rather them just charge a little bit more and have a better experience. It's probably falling on deaf ears, though, because nobody ever wants to pay for anything on the internet.
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I can't stand when companies double dip. I won't pay if I still get ads.
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But do paywalls actually encourage people to pay? I would point out that NPR/PBS and The Guardian are at least partially funded by the people but still offer news for free and it seems to work.
NPR is funded by underwriters, donors, government grants, and licensing their content to affiliate stations. It’s actually really interesting to see how they’ve cobbled it together. So yeah it’s free for you and me but a lot of money is actually flowing back and forth.
Point being there are a lot of ways to fund things!
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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.
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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.
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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
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Yah don't see a small player coming around anytime soon. People don't realise how uterlu massive these tech companies are.
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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...
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Tell me no one actually needed to be told that. Please. For my sanity.
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Trust corporations to ruin something people enjoy.
Its time to 'AT&T' Alphabet/Google/YouTube.
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.
Well, it definitely gets the point across lol
I thought this was the joke
Good old atlantic coming to the correct conclusion for the wrong reasons.
I believe what you meant to write is "The internet IS worse"
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...)
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