Idk if this is the right community for this conversation, but it’s been on my mind and I want to share it with someone.
In the 00’s every new thing we heard about the internet was exciting. There were new protocols, new ways to communicate, new ways to share files, new ways to find each other. Every time we heard anything new about the internet, it was always progress.
That lasted into the early teens and then things started changing. Things started stagnating. Now we’re well into the phase where every new piece of news we hear is negative. New legislations, new privacy intrusions, new restrictions, new technologies to lock content away and keep us from sharing, or seeing the content we were looking for. New ways to force ads.
At one point the Internet was my most favorite thing in the world. Now I don’t know if I even like it anymore. I certainly don’t look forward to hearing news about it. It’s sad, man. We’ve lost a lot. The mega corps took the internet from us, changed it from a million small sites that people created because they had big ideas, or were passionate about small ones, and turned it into a few enormous sites with no new ideas, no passion, just an insatiable desire for money.
We’re at the end of an era, and unlike the last 20 years of progress, I don’t think most of us will like what the next era brings.
Well. Those corporations took their money and threw it in. Basically fusions of different services. Besides that you have a lot of clickbaits and cheap stuff like dropshops and so on.
You gotta be very picky on what services you use. Lemmy f.e. is amazing for me. It does not feel like someone wants to get money off me.
The internet basically became what the analog world was before and it’s anything else than amazing.
Edit: in short terms: Capitalism took the internet from the people.
Edit: in short terms: Capitalism took the internet from the people.
Well said. The Internet was certainly a lot more fun before anyone figured out how to make money on it. But it’s insane that these companies make more money now than even the largest giants did when I was a kid, and it’s still not enough for them. I’m just flabbergasted by their insatiable desire. They could keep a good product and still pull insane profits, but they’re willing to burn it all down for another percentage point on their quarterly return. I guess that’s a change to the world in general now too. There used to be a common wisdom that if you built a great product, and made your customers happy, you’d be successful. The prevailing attitude now is that the success that comes from that isn’t enough anymore. You need to make the worst product that you’re still able to sell, and then make sure you sell it to the same people multiple times. It’s gross.
It’s the cancer that capitalism truly is. If you’re not growing, you’re failing and enshittification is an inevitable late stage consequence of capitalism.
It’s just pump and dump.
enshittification is an inevitable late stage consequence
Maybe, but I don’t think it is. Enshittification is a direct result of our tax policy that encourages cashing out, only looks at the short term, and requires constant growth.
There was a time when companies built a reputation and held onto it for a hundred years. We could go back to that.
Tax the rich.
Agreed. We need to revert to meaningful tax brackets and apply some new ones to prevent billionaires.
Yup. Wikipedia is a good example for an instance that solely exists to support people.
There are plenty sites of this. Take a look at some websites that are teaching you skills without asking for money and so on.
That’s how I remember the internet. Sharing knowledge. Of course bigger sites need to make ends meet somehow and that fine with me. But as you already said - more more more.
I’d say that the old Internet is still there. It’s just sharing space with the much bigger, much more mainstream, capitalist juggernaut now, with limited overlap.
Other than online shopping, my Internet use hasn’t changed all that much since 2008, other than having to add a bunch of anti-tracking stuff to my web browser.
Yeah. I just know that forums aren’t a thing any more. Old fashioned browser games are rare.
Otherwise a lot of valuable news sites became clickbait ad bloated monsters. Only a few are still good.
But yeah… it gets easily overshadowed
What they do is the essence of capitalism. More growth. More profits. Enough, or the same as last year, is not sufficient. It must be more, the numbers must go up. And any publicly traded company is legally bound to pursue gains for its shareholders, they actually cannot stop. What makes a corporation is the same thing that makes them hellbent on yet another fraction of a percentage in profits.
The whole system is utterly ridiculous and fundamentally incompatible with reality, once you actually think about these things. A system demanding infinite growth in a finite world.
You need to make the worst product that you’re still able to sell, and then make sure you sell it to the same people multiple times.
This is a lovely summary of modern capitalism. The carnival barkers would have you still believe that excellence rises to the top, but it doesn’t. What wins is the appearance of excellence, as a facade for the least effort possible, like you said.
Share markets created this perverse incentive that rewards businesses for appearing successful even if they produce fuck all. I’m thinking of Jack Welch era GE or today’s preeminent carbon credit trading firm, Tesla Motors.
It reminds me of the feedback loop engulfing the major LLMs as they consume more and more of their own content and start outputting lower and lower quality: the original goal of rewarding the best is long lost, replaced by making line go up at all costs.
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Yeah, for all of Lemmy’s shortcomings, it’s the best thing to happen to my internet in the last year.
A decently thriving online community of thousands of active users, not run by an entity or corporate board intent on sucking every last cent from people? Hell yeah!
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Yeah I’m with you. Just look at reddit. Enshitification has gone too far and it’s leading to decentralization. Here we are, after all.
I’m sure the streaming services are next. The nice thing about software tech is it is easy for folks to develop alternatives
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In 2004 I was a radical young man protesting for bikes and against the Iraq War. At one of the meetups another kid who had been at the RNC protest in New York showed us this software someone had hacked together overnight to broadcast SMS messages. Basically you could send an SMS to a VOIP phone number and it would echo the SMS to everyone subscribed. They were using it to communicate in the crowd at the protest and avoid police kettles. It was pretty cool but I admit I didn’t really see it as being more broadly useful.
Later that night the group went for drinks and I was talking with one of the older radicals and he was telling me that the internet was too good and too powerful and they were going to shut it down. I thought that was absurd. How could they get rid of the internet!? He said they would figure out a way to shut it down, there’s just no way they could leave it out there, it’s too dangerous for them to do so.
Now I look at the thing we call “the internet” in 2023 and it looks nothing like that internet. The current internet is completely corralled, controlled and monetized. He was totally right. While they never “flipped the switch” on it they used salami tactics little by little until there was nothing left.
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There didn’t even need to be a deliberate cartel for this to happen either.
Amazon realized it could make money and grow the company by offering cloud services and now AWS runs something like 30% of the internet.
Google turned their leading search algorithms into an extensive tracking and advertising platform that integrates with most of the internet.
Apple decided that people don’t need to be allowed to tinker with and repair their own devices so that hardware can be locked into a four-year cycle of planned obsolescence.
A whole bunch of profit-maximizing firms did the hard job of controlling everything for the governments.
I only really watch foss stuff, which should be exciting, but I get tired as it’s always much of the same news:
- a new private messenger (like we don’t have 500 of those already)
- a new app/program/distro that does the same thing as 10 other ones
- a “simple” app/program that doesn’t do much of anything, just like 10 other ones of the same kind, will get 3 updates and then die
- something for the terminal for terminal nerds that could really use a gui but shutup you dirty normie
- a library that sounds cool but nobody except maybe some corporation will ever use it
- announcement of a complete rewrite, which means we’ll never hear of the project again
So I’m not exactly thrilled about anything either, tho for every different reasons
announcement of a complete rewrite, which means we’ll never hear of the project again
A complete rewrite/redesign actually happens but with half of the original app’s features missing
Rewrites have failed so often that I wonder why people still think they make any sense.
It’s easy to look at source code and see that it’s got complicated. It’s harder to work out when it’s complicated because it needs to do something complicated like model something from the real world that’s complicated, or when it’s complicated because it’s accumulated loads of old crap. If you start experimenting with a rewrite, typically it’ll look like it mostly works before you’ve added most of the necessary complexity, and that can trick people into thinking that it wasn’t actually necessary.
Yeah, but what I meant more is that in almost every case, refactoring is the way to go.
Ugh, flashbacks to KDE 4…
and GNOME 3 too
I’ve been looking into continuing or updating old programs that don’t have maintainers in the FSF/GNU list, but the mailing lists and archaic webpages don’t help much.
I’m still learning, but I’m tired of not seeing enough good FOSS alternatives or only discontinued ones.
yes, it’s much needed now as many projects needs contributions and you can create a website and list all of the contributions that is required to make it a real foss alternative
You can thank capitalism for this, back at the dawn of the internet it was largely just regular people running sites and building organic networks. Then the internet started getting commercialized, and the tech started turning increasingly user hostile and exploitative.
Corporations complain about how IOT was supposed to be the next big thing but it went bust. Meanwhile they are the ones who tried to use it intrude on everyones lives. Which is why no one wants it.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
some goofball did a whole song about it
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
a classic
In the meanwhile, EU legislation has gone from being so boring you would prefer to watch the grass grow to making headlines that make you smile.
Ironically, farmers, the people most interested and invested into watching grass grow, has benefited greatly from EU agriculture subsidiaries in the past.
What about the people who watch paint dry? Surely the EU has their back covered too.
Nah, that’s what the paint is for…
The enshitification of all things is so frustrating. You witness perfectly useful technology being destroyed in the pursuit of like 5 dollars. I don’t answer the phone unless I’ve told someone to call me because it’s always a robot, my email inbox is full of garbage I didn’t ask for so I don’t check in much, now they’ve got robots texting me scams. I can’t even pay for petrol in peace, because they make a nickel having a tiny television try to sell me an energy drink. And nothing is done because heaven forefend that anything should come in the way of an extra .02% increase in some asshole’s quarterly report.
I was pumping gas a couple of weeks ago and that stupid TV came on and started playing ads at full blast. I stopped pumping, went inside, and pulled a Karen. I asked for the manager and then told him that I want someone to know that I’m never coming back to that station because it’s forcing ads on me when I’m already paying for a product. Then I left and will never go back. I know they don’t give a shit about one person, but if more people took these stands then we could stop having so much shit shoved down our throats.
I can’t in good conscience make a worker’s day worse because of something they don’t control, but I understand the sentiment. I agree though that collective action is probably our best shot at seeing change.
I wasn’t rude about it. I doubt it had any measurable impact on their day at all.
Yea, as long as you aren’t rude to the employee at all, you are good in my book.
If I was going to complain, I would start with something like, “Hey I know this isn’t your fault and you just work here, but can you tell your boss…” Not only will that let the employee know that it’s nothing personal, but the employee is more likely to bring it up to management.
I’ve been using Linux for decades and I don’t use the big tech sites much. I get excited about a new release of Gnome or KDE or some cool command line utility…
Because you are right, the web is taken over and they want to turn it into cable TV subscriptions for sites and verified internet accounts etc.
The goals of the security agencies and the goals of the big tech ad agencies go hand in hand. None of them care about the users, and both of them just wants the user data, as much as possible.
I think using tech like Lemmy and Matrix gets us away from all of that shit, and it’s good enough these days for anyone to use without too much trouble.
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+1 for FOSS, but it’s not easy to do. It’s sort of like going vegan. It’s great at first, but then you try to go out to eat and it’s hard, family gatherings become difficult and political, people start to push meat or question your motives. You still feel good about it because you’re doing it “for the animals” or whatever, but you’re no longer in the mainstream. While your coworkers all go out to that new steak joint, you’re left behind with your bag of broccoli.
To elaborate, look at Lemmy. You can get FOSS apps for your phone to browse Lemmy, but now try to coordinate some event, like your local soccer club using only FOSS. Plenty of folks are content to blindly consume what Zuck or Goog wants them to see and use.
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What is FOSS?
Free and Open-Source Software
In case this wasn’t asked sarcastically - Free and Open Source Software.
Free Open Source Software.
Edit: there is also FLOSS which adds the French “Libre” to include “free as in speech”.
Or in the case of leaked source Code it’s also Forced Open Source Software.
The mega corps took the internet from us, changed it from a million small sites that people created because they had big ideas, or were passionate about small ones, and turned it into a few enormous sites with no new ideas, no passion, just an insatiable desire for money.
I read it as: ‘They embraced, extended and extinguished what you held dear’.
Exactly.
Welcome to capitalism
Now go home?
The death of this guy has to do with some of it, he worked on some pretty cool stuff and was an all-around pretty awesome dude working for the betterment of the world.
you mean the murder of this guy
miss him every day
I totally agree with you here. Now it feels like bots (AI) making content for bots (crawlers) and the only thing we a getting programmed to use is Google, where your question is answered without the need to even visit the website it took the data from.
It’s just boring and I’m a website developer 🤷♂️
Google has been trying very hard, for a very long time, to be the only destination on the internet. They want all the traffic. They started with site summaries at the top of the search page, then they moved to AMP, where they’re in charge of serving the content that others create, now they even show Reddit chains on their home page, and who knows what they have planned next. By serving content that other people created they get to serve their ads and keep 100% of the revenue, rather than sharing a pittance with some small AdSense publisher. They announced to the world that their values had changed when they changed their motto from Don’t Be Evil, and they’re certainly ignoring it now.
Even before it changed its motto, the idea of a company saying “don’t do evil” is on the same level as a cat saying “don’t scratch furniture”.
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The way I see it Steve Jobs marked a turning point with those Apple events. The corporate platitude bullshit with the “you told us and we listened” jargon. Before technology was mainly hobbyist nerds making stuff out of the love of technology. There was a two way relationship where the developers trusted the users and the users trusted the developers be acting in good faith. Now it’s lifeless and jaded beneath a veneer of forced corporate smiles. Over the years everyone adopted the turtleneck speak in one way or another.
It’s an insult to our intelligence to push anti-patterns. All while expecting us to engage like sheep in the mandatory capitalist pep rally. ‘We made 20% efficiency to your oppressive experience. Now cheer! I said CHEER damn it’.
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if it wasn’t him, it would have been someone else. this is just what capitalism does - monetize every single aspect of anything people enjoy.
Eh… He was a great marketer, but he didn’t usher in our current tech dystopia. I blame social media.
I blame Google. When the same company owns the most popular search engine, most widely-used browser, most popular email service, one of the largest video sharing platforms, and the largest online advertiser, that’s called a monopoly.
Our current tech dystopia has many facets and factors that went into creating it.
Jobs’ quest to simplify computing (great), unfortunately came along with a maniacal god complex and demand for control that led to Apple creating a monopolistic vertically integrated walled garden that stifles innovation and avoids competition. It’s the model that Google has increasingly pursued and is a part of why tech innovation has stalled out these days.
Now it’s up to you to take a shot at creating the next exciting thing. Aim high and give all you can to succeed.
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Choose and make the winners. Exciting stuff on the internet is not exclusive. On lemmy, everybody wins.
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Making money is not a goal on lemmy, so why should there be more rewards than entertainment?
If you want to make money, you have to look elsewhere. Crypto was an idea, but as we know, not sustainable.
If you don’t find something, build it. Think like Bill Gates: build a platform where everybody can earn something. Don’t keep everything for yourself.
Edit: Don’t think like Bill Gates. Just consider the idea of not squeezing out all profits for yourself, which, ironically, I have first read as a quote of him.
Think like Bill Gates:
So you’re telling me I should get into eugenics and strive to blame all the world’s problems on the people outside the imperial core breeding too much?
No, he’s telling you to get into some really fucked up pedo shit with
you should think like Bill Gates and play 9/11 in minecraft
Millions must never remember
Think like Bill Gates: use monopoly power to drive all your competitors out of business then write your own antitrust settlement where you pinkie swear to be a good boy for five whole years.
The key part is that Bill Gates made the conscious decision to leave profits on the table for others. I haven’t heard that advice from anybody else.
That said, there are many more evil things like breaking the platform promise and taking over app categories. But there is no need to copy those ideas.
Bruh you just told people to think like a billionaire pedophile eugenics guy and you really need to address that before we talk about anything else.
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The idea that Bill Gates left money on the table for others with Microsoft isn’t just wrong, it’s so exactly the opposite of reality that it boggles the mind. Did he leave money on the table for other DOSes with windows 95? For other office suites with MSOffice? For Netscape with bundled IE?
Where did you get such a comprehensively false idea from?
That’s just a lie you are a liar
Edit: or a credulous fool
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A homeless person is without the mental structure to build something lasting, or else they would not be homeless or would identify differently, e.g. as a traveler.
You’re a truly disgusting ghoul
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A homeless person is without the mental structure to build something lasting
Please kindly go fuck yourself. Like seriously please go outside and walk into traffic, you worthless disgusting piece of shit.
A homeless person is without the mental structure to build something lasting, or else they would not be homeless or would identify differently, e.g. as a traveler.
Bill Gates stan to mask off fascist any% speedrun (8 hours, 3 minutes and 33 seconds)
Exactly. I think lemmy is flawed, but it’s a lot more exciting than the status quo, so I try to help out. Right to repair isn’t Internet specific, but it’ll likely have an ripple effect as people decide to take back ownership of their devices and data. Cryptocurrency is a ponzy scheme, but the idea of a decentralized service as important as a currency is exciting, especially for the ripple effect it’s likely to cause (e.g. we could use similar tech to decentralize lemmy).
There’s a lot of exciting stuff if you know where to look.
Do you think it was invented as a Ponzi scheme, or has that just become the perception based off the massive initial growth in value? I think that the goal was always for the eventual stabilization of the currency, which of course means that mining becomes less and less profitable. It needs to eventually hit a point where mining produces no new coins for the currency to hit stability. But then idk why anyone would run the servers required for verification. At that point the verification becomes massively power intensive. So maybe it was always a Ponzi scheme? I’m no crypto expert, so I don’t really know.
It was corrupted in much the same way the stock market was corrupted. That whole thing is mostly speculative gambling now, when it was supposed to about profit sharing with companies that were either sound investments currently with steady profits or up-and-coming companies that had potential. Now it’s just casino gambling betting on prices that are completely divorced from reality that expects infinite growth of made up value.
Go read a bit of Satoshi’s white paper on Bitcoin. It was created in response to the banking industry as a way for individuals to securely own digital currency without a centralized institution.
I have. I know the stated goal. The question is do you think that was the actual intent, or was it always intended as an elaborate ponzi scheme? I think it has more or less lived up to its stated goal, but as a currency. People think it’s a Ponzi scheme because it’s treated as an investment. From that perspective I can see why they think that and I wonder if they think that’s what it was originally created for.
If it was a Ponzi scheme from the get go he would have cashed out his billions by now.
No, it just didn’t get traction for actual transactions fast enough and it just became a target for speculation. That’s a positive feedback loop where volatility discourages use as a currency while encouraging speculation.
I think what we need is to establish an independent digital currency first, and then decentralize it. For example, GNU Taler, and then build out the infrastructure and a cryptocurrency could then be phased in. Once the mass market uses digital payments outside the banking network regularly, they’ll be ready to adopt something like BitCoin for international use.
A big part of it is that people are so unbelievably cynical now. They’ll rush over one another to point out and then circlejerk over the most negative aspects of every new development, while ignoring every positive.
The old internet would have flipped out over ChatGPT, much less Midjourney, and generated thousands of hilarious stories and images and websites that made ridiculous random comic books or fake government websites for absurd departments or whatever. They would have been delighted with it…and as an afterthought it may have occurred to them that there might be downsides.
Today, people get furious about the fact that AI exists, that it was trained on existing material, that it might affect people’s lives. Long articles are written on the terrible effects AI is going to have on politics or media. Post an AI-generated image in anything other than an AI-art forum, and you’ll be absolutely lambasted. Suggest that there may just be a few updates and watch the downvotes and angry replies flood in.
Part of that is just experience. We’ve lived though a few ‘revolutions’ for which the net effect was…arguably not so great. Part of it is that the age of the average Internet-savvy user is like 35-40 now, not 22, so they’re bringing a level of fear and skepticism that wasn’t there before.
And partly there just seems to be a sort of social malaise and negativity that wasn’t there before. People in 2005 were happy and excited for the future. Now everybody just seems fearful, angry, and burned out.
I think ever since I came here, it was with the same message: the time for postmodern cynicism where nothing ever matters is over, it’s time to embrace a new sincerity, a return to a more human Internet we imagined from yester-year, while still acknowledging the the advancement and progress that happened during the Web 2.0 era.
And I think the Fediverse, decentralized social media to something more akin to the various independent forums and blogs that still has all the advantages of centralization, is the start of something beautiful.
lol
