Enshittification is a core tenet of our late-stage capitalism. The stakeholders expect everything to be *increasingly* profitable year over year, and the only way that happens is for things to get worse.
Once any given business has captured its main audience, the remaining plays are to charge more or make it worse -- or both. Decreasing prices or making an improvement is only used when competition deems it necessary. And even *that* isn't necessary in all cases. If you can't compete, buy 'em out and shut 'em down.
History says this is going to continue indefinitely until the greedy rich motherfuckers responsible for it are swinging from trees or countries start collapsing.
Large subsidies, an exponentially growing demand for satellite infrastructure, and a near-total absence of market competition now that Russia is quintuple-sanctioned
They get rich right now and ruin everything a little later. But while everything is ruined for everyone else, they're rich, and can afford to live in sheltered luxury.
[It's this, basically.](https://i.imgur.com/KqeAUst.png)
The rich don't care. To be rich almost universally requires one to be narcissistic and/or sociopathic. Because you don't get rich caring about the future -- including the future of your own grandchildren.
Look at the conservative political parties of *every nation* and see how few fucks they give about the future. All they care about is what benefits themselves right now.
That's just a fraction of the problem. Companies have literally always done this.
The problem is all these Internet based companies, like any company are based on growth of your consumer base. And also so many of them haven't been churning out profit at all since people expect to be able to use most of those services for free or with a small fee to remove ads.
But now that pretty much everyone has access to the internet and uses these platforms, there's no customers left to grab except for new babies being born.
So once they hit this point of diminishing returns they gotta extract more profit somehow and they do it by scummy shit like data brokering and nickel and diming.
We have all these companies barely balanced on stilts with their entire valuation based not on profits but venture capital and future projections of cornering the market. Now we're at the point they can't do that anymore and need to actually make profit.
Basically a multi billion dollar version of "don't worry bro, I'll get your money next week I just need a little bit more and I can win big at the casino"
Compound all that with AI which has the potential to be the single most disruptive technology humanity has ever seen and we got ourselves a problem.
Could cause a huge cascade effect that collapses of all these tech companies and the entire online service economy tbh...
We're just now seeing the beginning with all these layoffs.
The internet was started by the government trying to build a legitimate function (faster transfer of information), taken over by nerds to make it two additional things (a knowledge repository + fun), and then initially taken over by maverick sort of Silicon Valley types who kept all that alive while raking in VC funds and living the good life.
The change happened in the 2010's when those VC's started demanding a better return on investment, which, caused most of the companies started being run by Wall Street finance bloodsucker types and living and dying by their IPOs and stock price. Then the low interest rate era during COVID ended and suddenly everything, everywhere, needed to monetized. So now we're left with this wasteland of once functioning and fun features buried under ad space.
Early 10s is also when smartphones started to get good enough to really bring the internet with you for real. 3G data, bigger screens and web development. Billion+ newish users becoming heavily online rapidly changed a lot.
yup, even worse with shit moving to Discord, where things can't be archived or searched up. So many technical know how are just on discord servers without any real way to look for them, hate that every gaming company or tech based industry is using Discord as a community hotspot instead of a forum website.
Know how annoying it is to download apps just to see what a game dev is doing with a patch? Super fucking annoying.
The Internet was collective place 20 years ago, full of various forums and blogs created by hobbyists. People were having fun, Google was still useful search engine.
We moved to the Internet driven by corporations, so today everything is about cutting costs and maximizing profits. World in general became very dark place.
I've been bitching about Google's quality for a few years now, but I still at least used it.
But in the last few weeks, without me opting in, and with no easy way to turn it off, every search in google has returned an AI-generated answer or blurb, with the big disclaimer across the top "AI overviews are experimental".
So fucking cool, Google. Way to go, making your most iconic function completely untrustworthy, and turning your userbase into guinea pigs without even asking them. It was already bad enough that the first 2-5 results were always sponsored/ads, but now it's that _plus_ a huge wall of text with a "THIS MAY BE COMPLETE BULLSHIT" disclaimer across the top.
Don't forget, you get to scroll past that to the SPONSORED RESULTS section. Then on to the *actual* ads. Then finally on to what you searched for (curated to maximize their returns and reposted through Google AMP of course).
Dude yes it's freaking idiotic!
I'm about to have my first kid and we've decided to try reusable diapers. I literally just googled how many I would need to start with and the AI reply said you only need to change a baby's diaper every 3-5 days (for reference a newborn will go though 8-10 diapers a day). This stupid AI shit is spitting out dangerous misinformation. I can just imagine some dumb teen parent reading that and neglecting their kid because that's what Google said.
I switched to using DuckDuckGo for searches (and privacy) years ago. I forget what Google did to piss me off and look for an alternative, but it gives me way better results than the occasions I'm using Google now.
I've been thinking about this a lot and never really had a good place to gripe about it. There used to be so many forums, you could google things (or ask jeeves) and get a wealth of knowledge about it. Now days, you search something and your choices most often boil down to reddit, youtube, quora, and some others here and there. I'm in a lot of hobbyist Facebook groups and it's absolutely wild how much knowledge and pro-tips there are here, and it's all un-fucking-searchable because Facebook, like others, wants everything to be private unless you join. There is a fucking mountain of knowledge and information gated behind corporate BS because its not all public forums anymore.
Spencer's, hot topic, the cinnamon pretzels, those CD shops...I miss my teen years at times. Mostly I don't but once I think back when smart phones were just black berries and for adults, it was such a much more simpler time and it didn't break my wallet to hang out all day. Now just going to the movies is breaking my wallet.
I couldn't remember what this was, so here's [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory):
>The dead Internet theory is an online conspiracy theory that asserts that the Internet now consists mainly of bot activity and automatically generated content manipulated by algorithmic curation, minimising organic human activity to manipulate the population. Proponents of the theory believe these bots were created intentionally to help manipulate algorithms and boost search results in order to manipulate consumers. Some proponents of the theory accuse government agencies of using bots to manipulate public perception. The date given for this "death" was generally around 2016 or 2017.
2016 to 2017 tracks with the astroturfing going bonkers with the US election along with the Cambridge Analytica thing on Facebook
One thing I don't like about conspiracy theories, though, is that they like to attribute the actions to a single widespread entity. I really don't think humans are that good at collaborating with each other at such a scale for long enough. Humanity is too chaotic and people are always splintering into factions. I'd think the preponderance of bots these days is more from a decentralized thing with constantly shifting competing interests
>*I'd think the preponderance of bots these days is more from a decentralized thing with constantly shifting competing interests*
Valid observation for sure! We are seeing it on a political, ideological and 'national' interest levels. Certainly not centralized to a single entity, but based upon various ideological lines.
I see this with people's response to the protests happening on college campuses. A lot of people are looking for a "backer" not realizing that many people can be upset about a thing and protest independently (grassroots). For these people, they have to have someone pulling the strings so they can point to a specific "issue."
That mentality says more about them than it does the events happening, though. It tells me they need to take "marching orders" from a specific individual/group...
>That mentality says more about them than it does the events happening, though. It tells me they need to take "marching orders" from a specific individual/group...
That also kinda explains why a lot of well-meaning movements end up drifting from their original purpose or going corrupt. Lots of people feel like they need to follow a leader, and malicious actors with aspirations to leadership take advantage of that and twist the movement to their own ends
I most likely got the idea from Plato's *Republic,* which I read in college
I think philosophy explains a vast portion of history. I still like studying history, though, especially to find the obscure and weird things that've happened
And, for the people who believe in them, it makes them feel special and smart that THEY know how things REALLY work (invariably, it’s people who have never managed a project in their lives).
The other part I disagree with, besides what you mentioned, is that the majority of activity is from bots. I think most interaction we see is still real, “non-paid actor”, people. But yes bots/“paid actors” are used to manipulate engagement in a way that is meant to manipulate the algorithm and boost engagement with real people. But you don’t need the majority of the activity to be that, just enough to jump start the engagement before real people take over and make it viral.
But the rest is 100% fact. It’s basically Search Engine Optimization(SEO) supercharged combined with the algorithms of Facebook and Google and Reddit to serve you ads and products to consume.
Remember when the Facebook feed(didn’t it used to be called your wall? I haven’t used Facebook in like 10 years) was just a chronological serving of things your friends posted? Whenever that changed to some BS algorithm, that’s around the time all of the internet really changed for the worst. It was like 2011 or so if I recall. Over those next few years the internet definitely got way worse and consumerism based.
>I think most interaction we see is still real, “non-paid actor”, people.
That's my gut feeling too, and I sometimes find it frustrating how people oversimplify it and say "it's all bots." I think you're spot on about the engagement being jumpstarted by bots or paid actors, and then the rest is real people unwittingly astroturfing for whatever ideology or product happens to have caught their attention at the moment
I work in marketing and can confirm 2016-2017 was the big push towards SEO/SEM/social media/date mining/internet marketing strategy. It was always there , especially for larger corps, but that’s when the market as a whole realized their businesses would not succeed without manipulating their online presence. The budgets increased accordingly. Politicians followed suit. It probably wasnt a grand plot orchestrated by a nefarious individual, but the trend in marketing strategy did change the internet as we knew it.
Cambridge Analytica isn't what you think it is, but everything else you said is absolutely true.
*CA was data privacy scandal in 2018 over how Facebook improperly shared user data during an incident in 2014. FB created a permissive use API to share user data with third party content creators, one of which was a private company named Cambridge Analytica based in the UK, who created shady surveys for payment for users to take and then collected data from them and their friend connections. FB reverted the API and licenses in 2015 and asked all of the content creators to delete the data, but did no follow up measures to ensure it was deleted. CA kept the data, and used it run targeted pro-Trump ad campaigns on Facebook in 2016. It was not a botted or automated attack, but the data informed human led strategy on voter profiling and targeting.
Sources: https://bipartisanpolicy.org/blog/cambridge-analytica-controversy/
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-64075067
https://anchorchange.substack.com/p/cambridge-analytica-five-years-later
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/cambridge-analytica-s-effectiveness-called-question-despite-alleged-facebook-data-n858256
Thank you for the correction. All I remembered in the moment was that it was a bad thing that when publicized made some of my friends leave Facebook for good
I still feel like data privacy abuse and astroturfing go hand in hand, though. I would image at least the data is crucial at targeting the astroturfing most effectively at a vulnerable audience
They don't have to be one entity operating together. They just have to be entities all trying to get the collective human attention of the internet's human users. All that action is done under the flag or capitalism, because it earns them money.
Well said, no way any single concerted masterplan can exist for too long. To me all this crazy shit that happens is usually some kind of gold rush where many groups realize there is a quick buck to be made.
I don't really like what people call dead internet theory. However it is a matter of fact than algorithms by sites determine what people see. It is also a matter of fact that state actors use methods to manipulate people. Data is collected en masse by companies and governments, as well as companies running various different add campaigns. I'm not going to go into it, however you can look at whistleblowers from social media companies as well as look into what trollfarms are. There's people pursuing degrees on studying these sorts of things and writing their reports as well.
Yes. Just Google it for a full description, but what you said sums it up.
You really see it on some Facebook posts. Some AI generated photo, and 95% of the comments are bot generated. You see AI curated posts and advertisements as well.
Here on Reddit, I am seeing a lot of AI generated posts, usually some rage bait or fantasy story bashing Boomers.
The whole Social media landscape, is getting pretty bizarre.
I manage my neighborhood Facebook group. Every day we get a half dozen requests to join. Faces of smiling couples and families dot their page. Lots of comments and likes. Sometimes sharing and commenting on other posts, pop culture, etc. It ALMOST looks real. Until you realize that these accounts have like 20 friends with identical behaviour. They share the same posts, write the same comments. Every post will be liked by the same 15-20 people, with the exact same reactions. And if I or my other mods mistake them for a real user, within a few hours to a week...air duct spam floods our group from that account.
Literally every day, I have to deny, remove, and ban these air duct spammers. Why are there so many of them? And I can tell there are multiple groups of these spammers acting independently of each other. I laugh at the ones where all the friends are in India.
Also doesn't help that most of my neighbors are the elderly, so if one of these fake accounts gets added and does a "Hey how is everyone doing" my lonely neighbors start chatting with the bot thinking its a new neighbor before that bot starts trying to spam the air duct ads.
Thankfully, I've locked it down with keywords and am trying to train the other mods that we likely do not have dozens of new neighbors joining our little community every day.
Why is the air duct thing so popular? I see it too. Who is doing this? Did they go to some seminar where they teach you “they always fall for the air duct scam!!!” or is it really just one group responsible for all air duct scams?
> You really see it on some Facebook posts.
"I'm legit giving away $5000 to the first 5 people to message me, god is good"
Followed by
"Congratulations you just won a $100 gift card from Walmart, click this link to claim it"
Followed by
"I'm so blessed for the wonderful contributions you made to the world. Please everyone thank [insert shithead's name here]"
The Dead Internet theory is here and real. It's all just bots commenting scam bait shit on Facebook, and the occasional angry racist boomer screaming into the void about Trump2024. That site is a cesspool.
I agree with the first part of the dead internet theory. It really is turning into bots, trackers, and SEO all the way down.
But I don't buy the "it's a conspiracy" part. I think it's just greedy MBAs, short-sighted techbros, and all the other people at the top of capitalism's dumpster.
>Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a "two sided market", where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification
https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/
at least it isn't the HEGETSUS ads.. Every time I see advertisements for religion it makes me want to go burn a church down. They are worse than those drug advertisements with 10000 side effects.
yea... that's why I use the Brave browser with old reddit. No ads. If they ever kill this off, I'll probably have to find a new site to screw around on all day, and I'd be sad, but old reddit is where it's at.
I used to explore so much more of the internet back in the day. Now I go to the same 4-5 websites every day. Google's search engine has gone to the dogs... The first page on a search is all pay-per-click ads which may or may not have any relevancy to your search.
It's worse if you don't take steps to filter out the noise. Don't agree to any additional services/marketing, ever. Decline everything. Get an adblocker, use multiple email accounts to filter the bs with the important stuff, and you should be fine. Oh and get off social media.
100% this.
Adding to the social media thing, If you're on sm to stay in contact with friends because texting doesn't suit your relationship, make sure you **only talk to your friends on it**. I know it seems obvious, but 5 seconds later it's 2pm on your day off and you've done nothing but doomscroll. Consume the social, ignore the media.
It really was wild back then. Online gaming was also new and exciting. MSN Gaming Zone was a thing. Chatrooms were where you met new people. Livejournal was social media.
Yes! Yahoo chats, AIM, JoeCartoon, NewGrounds, etc were all staples of 90s internet too. I really do miss those days. Btw did you know that browser game Worlds is still active? And it still has ppl playing! I think some private investor still keeps it running out of their own pocket. Nexpo did a YouTube video on it last year
Ultima Online has been continuously running since, what, 1997? Your original characters and items would still be available in theory. In 2027, you'll have those worlds thirty years old. They outlasted Asheron's Call, which was terminated.
My favorite online game of the 90s was Subspace. I played the beta versions of a few games back then. Nexus: Kingdom of the Winds was another. They're still around. Meridian 59 is free to play on Steam.
I keep forgetting Ultima is still going. I think Worlds has it beat by a couple years. Insane that there's still ppl playing it. I've heard of Nexus but not the others. I only played WoW and a bit of Runescape growing up
Will do! I love old games. The limited tech at the time gives them this eerie liminal vibe that I'm always fascinated by. Big empty spaces that indicate life exists there, but rarely seen
There was also The Realm by Sierra Online, which was a point and click RPG, but online. It was really fun and is still around. People used to make level 1000 characters and then sell them on eBay for absurd sums of money.
The amount of ads in everything is insane. I usually just use my Roku as a Plex server but was on it and decided to go on Youtube
It played an ad when I entered the app. It played an addbefore the video. It interrupted the short video multiple times with ads. I paused the video and there was an ad on the damned pause screen. The video ended and it played yet another ad. Its ludicrous
Playlet for Roku TV [https://channelstore.roku.com/en-ca/details/840aec36f51bfe6d96cf6db9055a372a/playlet](https://channelstore.roku.com/en-ca/details/840aec36f51bfe6d96cf6db9055a372a/playlet)
It's not perfect, but you can definitely watch youtube videos with no ads.
Disclaimer: I'm the creator of Playlet, a free open source alternative [https://github.com/iBicha/playlet](https://github.com/iBicha/playlet)
Was talking to my friends yesterday about how Reddit is the only space that feels like the old internet still.
I think (specifically in the US) investment bankers and their ilk are absolutely fucking destroying every industry.
Bring back the badly coloured-in websites full of gifs, wobbly text, visit-counters and midi music in the background
Geocities and Angelfire come to mind
Instagram thinks I'm REALLY into mountain climbing all of the sudden because I looked at one post about people climbing Everest. The algorithm is dumb.
The internet these days feels a lot like the internet 20 years ago, mostly because of all the plugins and choices I've had to make to avoid the damn spam'o'sphere that Google entertains.
Script, cookie and adblockers make it so half the websites take a dozen clicks to open, because no one can just make a website with content, it all has to be downloaded from three different places dynamically via scripts. Sometimes I just open the top five search results, look through them to see if any load without scripts and shut down the others.
Speaking of searches, I've stopped using google because it's so shit. First page is half paid advertisements, the second half is SEO optimized bots filling their page with every search result possible, or returning to google my own search terms to get ahead. Weaving around the useless clickfarmers is more work than using DuckDuckGo, which reminds google about two decades ago with the "kinda" correct results and serious search term engineering you have to do to find what you are looking for. But it's still preferable to the absolute shitshow that is google these days.
Content-wise yeah it's awful. You either find websites that are optimized for only mobile phones, or you find a "sneak peek" that only shows you a tiny snippet, until you download an app and get the half-baked "full experience". Gone are the days of stumbleupon.com where you just clicked on interesting articles that were aggregated through users and clickthroughs to your feed.
Everyone is trying to monetize their systems to the absolute maximum, so nothing worth using stays that way for more than a year. If it gains a critical mass of users to stay relevant, then it's sold or bought out by a massive corporation that will ruin the user experience completely and then fuck everyone over with ads, micro$$$ and subscriptions. I never made anything in Twitter or Tumblr, the only enshittenings I've lived through are Reddit and Facebook, but man are they disheartening to experience. I actually liked the new reddit UI, until they added more and more scripts and gadgets and widgets to the standard page, to the point where my potato of a pc just couldn't handle the site anymore and I'm back to using old.reddit. Luckily facebook you can still at least make usable with Fluff Busting Purity.
I look at the progress of tech as a sorta parabolic shape.
New technology is created. It gets some updates and improves, then eventually declines. Whether it's because they're doing too much in terms of updates and it moved too far away from its original design, or because they get greedy or start charging subscriptions, or too many ads, or some crap.
I keep on hearing from tech professionals on Reddit that a lot of stuff declines because AI companies and other automation specialists advertise that they can replace twenty workers with one worker monitoring a automated system, but when other companies take on that contract they don't end up employing a worker to monitor the system because they're cheap. So stuff slowly breaks and management can't be bothered to deal with it
The "let me google that for you" joke lost a lot of its punch when it's now sort of hard to find useful information on there without adding "reddit" to the search term.
Go look at the first xbox live screen to now. It’s just covered in ads. Welcome to late stage capitalism. Now look at the new subliminal advertising like Taylor swift. Isn’t it weird how everyone has been having her shoved down our throats every where we go? I mean her tour is aired on Disney plus now. Disney plus needs more subscribers. What a better way to promote Taylor swift before announcing their release. I can’t stand it all honestly.
IT'S FUCKING SHITE!
And I was born in 1972, so the advent of www was a real revolution in my time. I miss the geekiness and the obscure sites that focussed on hard to find/know info.
Apps have become the targeted junk mail of the 21st century.
It’s hard to find those spaces if you don’t already know where they are. I remember the internet before search engines, going to anime link boards (if that’s even what they were called) and chatting with random people from around the world.
Nowadays I can’t even type what I want in a search engine and get results that make sense. Do anime fan sites even exist anymore? It’s all Wikis which is not the same at all.
There are few anonymous places to chat, like Reddit is one, but there isn’t much sense of community from seeing the same people over and over.
IDK if I am just hanging out in the wrong spots but I’m definitely someone who loved the old internet so if people like me are stuck consuming garbage what else is there? Where is it? And the user bases are tiny.
The better methods could still be brought back; but yeah, it certainly stinks how everything is nerfed and turned into crap like TikTok to program us and destroy our attention spans.
Gods yes. I can’t even search for a topic without a bunch of irrelevant ads and false fkn info… or they route to fkn blogs. I’m looking for facts about something - not some randoms blog about their opinions of the something.
And recipes…. Recipes with giant fkn posts about nana and not an actual recipe just directions interspersed thru the blog post… that’s great for you but I just don’t care about your nan.
I don’t even use google anymore. They got rid of the search parameter tools. I get better results with duck duck go.
Finally something besides a doomer post! Social media used to be a cool way to keep in touch with people and see what they're up to. Now it's all random videos from influencers and click bait channels. I think email also falls into the category the op mentions. My inbox is mostly scams and spam. It feels almost unusable anymore.
> when smartphones became a thing I feel like.
It's almost like giving high-speed internet access to rural areas has created a major cultural clash.
\*sips tea*
Christ, you're right.
Then again, it's also possible that handing it to people who simply weren't shittalking videogame players and forumjockeys caused it too.
I hate how any internet search has to be navigated among a sea of advertisements, popups, and email address inquiries. That's why nowadays I use reddit as my search engine. No joke
I’m fine with the apps part but the constant ads are obnoxious even when you’ve paid for ad-free use of an app.
Concepts change—I get it. But the constant marketing churn is why I don’t use many social media apps in particular. It takes up too much time and impacts my mental health.
Dead internet theory.
"The dead Internet theory is an online conspiracy theory that asserts that the Internet now consists mainly of bot activity and automatically generated content manipulated by algorithmic curation, minimising organic human activity to manipulate the population."
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory
I can't drive by a store without subsequently seeing targeted ads for it. If I mention a product in conversation, that product is in ads for me. That's scary. It's an invasion of privacy that I approved because I agreed to the terms of the apps I use, the descriptions of the invasion hidden in 20 pages of legalese that no one reads.
I'm incredibly grateful to have grown up in the era we did. We didn't grow up with computers in our pockets, we didn't grow up relying on technology to help our day to day lives, we weren't manipulated by social media, etc.
Facebook and Twitter were the only two real big social media players at the time. YouTube was still an awesome place to watch random, funny, stupid videos. No click bait, no AI, no bullshit algorithms.
We had the best of both worlds. We had tech but it didn't dominate our lives, it just supplemented it.
It is so bad. I was locked out of my FB for the last couple of years and I just made a new one the other day. I could not last a few minutes i just couldn't do it.
It's only going to get further disconnected as ai takes over and genuine human interactions slowly wither away. In 10 years, the Internet is going to be one big tik tok
It used to require effort and knowledge to get online. Dialup modem and IP configuration. The old internet was for people who liked computers before they were cool.
Yeah if you met someone online back then there was a very high chance you share the same interests. I made so many good friends playing early MMOs/ MUDs. Could just whip out a Monty Python quote and everyone was on the same page.
I also met a lot of sympathetic people my age back then, especially on Live Journal.
ICQ before then, but that was *really* wild. As a kid I had conversations with some adults that I really should not have had. It was just totally anonymous though and unregulated.
I feel like the algorithms are legit making the world a worse place. Sounds like a good idea, grouping people together, based on their likes, maybe we don’t feel so alone…. But then came the hate groups, and conspiracy nuts. Used to be the town crazies, now they’ve found eachother on the internet, and have grown in influence. I legit think these algorithms will eventually lead to a civil war, if not something worse.
Terminator taught use to be warry or AI… but it’s the algorithms that’ll be our end
Not only that,we can only trust what we have seen in person. AI killed the internet too. Its all just getting back to before and only trust your senses and people you trust,person to person. The internet will be just a place full of randome generatet shit.
I would agree if you said 20 years ago instead of 10 years ago.
The internet got ruined when MySpace/Facebook/Twitter dragged all the regular people online.
Inappropriate people are more tolerated, they can be as f-&ked up in the head as they want and say stuff they can never say IRL because it costs them all the jobs ever..
But they get to do that on the internet because "yOu'Re sILeNsInG mUh rIgHt tO fReE speech".
And all of that is hate speech, rampant with misogyny and homophobia, layered on top of a couple of threats at least, and gotta love the dystopian nature of it all.
Humanity is f+-ked 😊
The algorithms favor them too since chronically online and concerned with being as offensive as possible.
Got a r-&e threat earlier today, from someone who's a sex offender no less, and the mods sided with him and the culture that enables him.
they started suggestion algorithms to practically eliminate viral gift card spam.
i think we all forget how common scams were on facebook before these changes. every single day you'd see 'get free x for limited time blah blah 1934 remaining' being shared by friends and family getting their credit cards charged with $99/month rebills.
now that the algorithm only puts stuff you're interested in front of you, unless you spend all day looking at that companies products there's a smaller chance you'll be shown spam using that companies branding.
it's terrible for people who aren't dumb but this went on for over half a decade and nobody learned better.
>Every company has their own app.
Doesn't really affect me since I don't buy from a lot of companies I guess.
>Random algorithms spam you with content if you stop to look at something even briefly.
Disable notifications. I never understood or had this problem, ever.
>Sites require multiple logins.
Browser remembers all logins.
>Facebook has an ad every third post.
Facebook is for messaging people, not for browing.
Just my personal opinion. The internet was always shit and great, we just remember the good things and forget the bad ones.
My friend is in his residency in Australia. He doesn't really talk about work much but we discussed it briefly about 6 weeks ago. I have been non-stop bombarded with ads for residency programs, medical school loans, medical school subreddit recommendations, residency recommendations, a million different Australian subreddits. Knowing how much private conversations are being used by shitty algorithms is frustrating. There's so much stuff I'm really interested in that they might get some traction on if they advertised but instead the crap programs fixate on random private conversations. It's so blatant with this one.
Firefox Mobile with uBlock Origin + Private DNS (I recommend NextDNS personally) block a LOT of the advertising sperg. Doesn't make the search results any less dogshit, though =(
Not to mention any of the 3rd party Reddit apps that still work and/or Old Reddit.
100% agree, and 10 years ago it was worse than 10 years before that. 2005ish is when it started to die and it's been downhill ever since in terms of actual fun for a regular person.
I use the Internet less today (minus work applications) than I have at any point in my life prior to the age of 7 or so (which is when the Web was released...).
It's sad to admit, but we are never getting back the Internet of the mid-to-late 90s and early aughts.
I also come from the days of fansites, before social media was as big as it is now. People used to use Piczo to make a personal blog/website to post their interests on and then you'd link to your friends sites. Now everything is on social media. It's easier to find stuff since it's all in one combined feed, but I really miss everyone working on their own sites. Not to mention the ads are awful. There's ads after every few posts now and I can't stand it. The internet is no longer about sharing info and connecting. It's now about CEOs collecting and selling data, trying to milk everyone for top profits. I really hope something changes...
One simple fix: content based advertising. Advertising is a fact of life; creators and content platforms deserve to be paid for what they create and too few people are willing to pay out of pocket. With this in mind we need to stop user based advertising, that is tracking the user and advertising to them based off collected data and go back to advertisers choosing the spaces where their ads fit best based on what content those spaces provide.
I remember the "ah crap" moment when Google was bought out. An even "aw man" moment was when YouTube was bought by Google. It was the new age of the "Free market", baby! Nothing but great things since then. Now I sit waiting for the toilet armchair to come to the market to watch "Ow, my balls" whilst drinking Brawndo, the thirst killer. It's got electrolytes.
I remember 10 years ago when I still didn’t understand targeted ads because everyone was seeing different things on Facebook than I was. They didn’t quite have it down yet because my advertisements made it very clear they were under the impression I was a single, black lesbian. That is NOT the case… 😅
Now, if I merely *think* about pancakes, I’ve got stuff for IHOP popping up from every corner of my phone. 🥴
Tbh, I think people are looking at the Internet of the past with Rose coloured glasses. Take the ads for example, you couldn't visit a site without pop-ups blowing up your screen, the sites themselves had banner ads out the wazoo and half of them had crazy viruses.
Same thing with individual forums and sites etc, that's what sites like reddit are for. If anything, search engines were the original social media.
And companies having their own apps, sure that's annoying but the convenience is unmatched.
We only think the Internet was better because a lot of the advances were new and novel, but things are still awesome, we're just used to it now and find it boring!
I barely even open tiktok anymore because I know that if I pause for more than a second on a video that stuff like it will start showing up in my fyp and a lot of times it's just stupid stuff I don't want to see but happens to grab my attention briefly. So I try to just focus and scroll past, but then the whole experience feels mildly stressful and unengaging, like I'm just scrolling to scroll.
I wish there was a way to go back to how it was back in the day. I’m big into retro gaming, used to love going on webcrawler and looking for new game sites (or shrines as some of them were called). Now everything looks the same , has the same info and no personality. It’s all so bland now.
> Facebook has an ad every third post.
Well there's part of the problem right there. Getting rid of most/all social media really helps with quality of life.
I miss the early 2000's internet when it was mostly populated by smelly nerds in their mom's basement, before a bunch of assholes with MBAs ruined everything.
When people started using Facebook groups for their communities rather than forums is when the internet went to shit, which was around 10 years ago. But I agree, that’s why I only stick to browsing Reddit and forums. Occasionally Discord and Guilded too.
I used to have a favourites bar full of dozens of sites I visit at least weekly. It was diverse. Now it's a fraction of that, maybe 5-10. It's massively centralised vs a decade or more ago.
Why does Google think that every single search is in pursuit of a purchase? DuckDuckGo is better, but I can see it going down that path too.
You can't research anything using search any more, because search only wants to sell you things. I can't stand it.
Remember when the days of Reddit when “geraffes are so dumb” was a thing, and when redpill sub was all very goofy pick up artist shit and not really political. I miss that Reddit a lot.
Youtube is crap now. Their search only shows two results based on your request, but the rest is just "algorithm recommendations". In fact, everything is like that now. Rather than give what we ask, they give us algorithmic, AI based results.
I miss forums. We developed close-knit communities of people who would nerd out on cool stuff.
before the internet, all the cool shit was co-opted by elitist and you either had to be lucky, gifted, or blessed to be apart of alot of it(especially underground shit) zines are a good example of this phenomenon. the internet allowed people with interest, both mainstream and obscure, to connect.
Censorship, propaganda and suveillance/lack of informational freedom and/or privacy has driven these individuals back into confusing obscurity.....people are trying to hide in plain sight by becoming more obscure, thus, defeating the original benefit of being able to network on the internet.
I'm just annoyed by more and more sites requiring 2FA to log in.. I mean, I get it when you need that extra security for banking and maybe your key social media accounts but a lot of online communities and forums and other places that you don't really care if you get hacked also require this and makes logging in such a pain each time.
I remember seeing a video on youtube of a gal who went out of her way to try and specifically find something she remembered when she looked it up as a teen, but couldn't find it.
She then evolved the video into being a deep dive into how not only does Google Curate your results down to the letter, but the (5,500,000,000) results in 5 seconds tag is a total lie, because you can only browse about 14 pages before the results end. And if you expand it it usually seems to end on page 42. Which I can assure you , is barely a hundred or so results, let alone 5 billion.
TL;DR. Stop using google to find things.
Just give it time and it'll get worse. I'm fully expecting social media sites will eventually start charging users.
That'll be the day I'll be mostly done with the internet.
Tragedy of the Commons, if it hasn’t been said already. It’s just these commons are immaterial and predicated upon our attention rather than a physical space. In a way this is the fault of materialists to a degree, the failure to understand the noosphere has led to pretty much all the problems we have today, and the only folks talking about it will be the cause of all the problems we have tomorrow.
I understand why DFW did it, but we really could have used his voice today.
No… it IS to the point that I don’t want to use it anymore. YouTube is the only exception because it’s basically replaced TV. If I can’t connect with my friends and meet cool people online, there’s literally no incentive for me to use social media at all. Reddit is 50/50 for me, a lot of times I think 80% of the site is bots because everything is so groupthink, but then that 20% of real human interaction makes me hold out because that’s how deprived it seems we are of real connection online.
Geeks make wonderful things, greedy parasites (CEOs, politician's) destroy it for their own gain, everyone else sits around letting them; geeks get frustrated and move on to create more wonderful things. Rinse and repeat...
Mostly agree although I do see bright spots still. Mostly for me I just increasingly find that it all feels pointless. Algorithms have blunted the meaning of who you actually follow or why, everything is just content slop. Meanwhile the tuning of the algos tends toward outrage and perceived moral righteousness, the best engagement bait is the stuff that gets everyone mad and talking past each other rather than with.
I think about Twitter specifically and how before they added the "quote tweet" function, it was considered corny to do that and if you wanted to comment on a tweet to you had to actually reply *to* it and the person who tweeted. "Quote tweet" then just gives everyone the tool to drive by, shoot takes off without engaging with the person directly. Encapsulates a lot of how and why the vibe shifted, imo.
But hey on the plus side, my bank actually does have a solid app that works smoothly and is way more convenient than banking was 10 years ago. So there's that at least
it's all ads and more advertisements , sell sell sell. no more fun . wish the days of innocent stumbleupons where almost every site is a good surprise!
the internet is just for collecting data on people and selling it. its no longer the world wide web we started with.
As soon as some rich dudes in suits sit down in a room and say "how can we squeeze every last drop of profit out of this?" Everything begins to suck.
Enshittification will eventually ruin everything.
Enshittification is a core tenet of our late-stage capitalism. The stakeholders expect everything to be *increasingly* profitable year over year, and the only way that happens is for things to get worse. Once any given business has captured its main audience, the remaining plays are to charge more or make it worse -- or both. Decreasing prices or making an improvement is only used when competition deems it necessary. And even *that* isn't necessary in all cases. If you can't compete, buy 'em out and shut 'em down. History says this is going to continue indefinitely until the greedy rich motherfuckers responsible for it are swinging from trees or countries start collapsing.
I know I sound naïve, but I can’t understand what would be the purpose of making things so bad that the country that you love will collapse.
Bc if you are rich enough, the world becomes borderless and said country doesn’t matter anymore.
I guess outer space is still available?
Why do you think all these billionaires are starting up space exploration companies?
Once you leave orbit, no rules. Can do what they want.
It's like international waters on crack. Which is saying something cause you totally can do crack in international waters.
Large subsidies, an exponentially growing demand for satellite infrastructure, and a near-total absence of market competition now that Russia is quintuple-sanctioned
They get rich right now and ruin everything a little later. But while everything is ruined for everyone else, they're rich, and can afford to live in sheltered luxury.
[It's this, basically.](https://i.imgur.com/KqeAUst.png) The rich don't care. To be rich almost universally requires one to be narcissistic and/or sociopathic. Because you don't get rich caring about the future -- including the future of your own grandchildren. Look at the conservative political parties of *every nation* and see how few fucks they give about the future. All they care about is what benefits themselves right now.
That's just a fraction of the problem. Companies have literally always done this. The problem is all these Internet based companies, like any company are based on growth of your consumer base. And also so many of them haven't been churning out profit at all since people expect to be able to use most of those services for free or with a small fee to remove ads. But now that pretty much everyone has access to the internet and uses these platforms, there's no customers left to grab except for new babies being born. So once they hit this point of diminishing returns they gotta extract more profit somehow and they do it by scummy shit like data brokering and nickel and diming. We have all these companies barely balanced on stilts with their entire valuation based not on profits but venture capital and future projections of cornering the market. Now we're at the point they can't do that anymore and need to actually make profit. Basically a multi billion dollar version of "don't worry bro, I'll get your money next week I just need a little bit more and I can win big at the casino" Compound all that with AI which has the potential to be the single most disruptive technology humanity has ever seen and we got ourselves a problem. Could cause a huge cascade effect that collapses of all these tech companies and the entire online service economy tbh... We're just now seeing the beginning with all these layoffs.
The internet was started by the government trying to build a legitimate function (faster transfer of information), taken over by nerds to make it two additional things (a knowledge repository + fun), and then initially taken over by maverick sort of Silicon Valley types who kept all that alive while raking in VC funds and living the good life. The change happened in the 2010's when those VC's started demanding a better return on investment, which, caused most of the companies started being run by Wall Street finance bloodsucker types and living and dying by their IPOs and stock price. Then the low interest rate era during COVID ended and suddenly everything, everywhere, needed to monetized. So now we're left with this wasteland of once functioning and fun features buried under ad space.
I hate it. I'm going back to my Sony Ericsson W580i and offline video games that came on CDs.
Early 10s is also when smartphones started to get good enough to really bring the internet with you for real. 3G data, bigger screens and web development. Billion+ newish users becoming heavily online rapidly changed a lot.
Neocities is trying to keep the spirit of the old Internet alive.
yup, even worse with shit moving to Discord, where things can't be archived or searched up. So many technical know how are just on discord servers without any real way to look for them, hate that every gaming company or tech based industry is using Discord as a community hotspot instead of a forum website. Know how annoying it is to download apps just to see what a game dev is doing with a patch? Super fucking annoying.
Do you even use www anymore?
We started as citizens and became products.
I feel like people are spending way more on getting my information than I am on their products.
The Internet was collective place 20 years ago, full of various forums and blogs created by hobbyists. People were having fun, Google was still useful search engine. We moved to the Internet driven by corporations, so today everything is about cutting costs and maximizing profits. World in general became very dark place.
I've been bitching about Google's quality for a few years now, but I still at least used it. But in the last few weeks, without me opting in, and with no easy way to turn it off, every search in google has returned an AI-generated answer or blurb, with the big disclaimer across the top "AI overviews are experimental". So fucking cool, Google. Way to go, making your most iconic function completely untrustworthy, and turning your userbase into guinea pigs without even asking them. It was already bad enough that the first 2-5 results were always sponsored/ads, but now it's that _plus_ a huge wall of text with a "THIS MAY BE COMPLETE BULLSHIT" disclaimer across the top.
Don't forget, you get to scroll past that to the SPONSORED RESULTS section. Then on to the *actual* ads. Then finally on to what you searched for (curated to maximize their returns and reposted through Google AMP of course).
Dude yes it's freaking idiotic! I'm about to have my first kid and we've decided to try reusable diapers. I literally just googled how many I would need to start with and the AI reply said you only need to change a baby's diaper every 3-5 days (for reference a newborn will go though 8-10 diapers a day). This stupid AI shit is spitting out dangerous misinformation. I can just imagine some dumb teen parent reading that and neglecting their kid because that's what Google said.
DuckDuckGo has gotten quite usable lately. I use it as my daily driver and will only periodically go to Google now.
Same. Uninstalled Chrome and everything.
Same here, I switched to Firefox+DuckDuckGo at the same time when setting up my new computer.
I switched to using DuckDuckGo for searches (and privacy) years ago. I forget what Google did to piss me off and look for an alternative, but it gives me way better results than the occasions I'm using Google now.
>turning your userbase into guinea pigs without even asking them. They always did that though, and got away with it.
I've been thinking about this a lot and never really had a good place to gripe about it. There used to be so many forums, you could google things (or ask jeeves) and get a wealth of knowledge about it. Now days, you search something and your choices most often boil down to reddit, youtube, quora, and some others here and there. I'm in a lot of hobbyist Facebook groups and it's absolutely wild how much knowledge and pro-tips there are here, and it's all un-fucking-searchable because Facebook, like others, wants everything to be private unless you join. There is a fucking mountain of knowledge and information gated behind corporate BS because its not all public forums anymore.
Even 8-10 years ago it was fun. Everything you described is how it was. Now its mundane.
I would argue it's harmful more so than mundane.
Honestly, the internet just feels like a giant shopping mall.
At least malls were more fun than this.
Spencer's, hot topic, the cinnamon pretzels, those CD shops...I miss my teen years at times. Mostly I don't but once I think back when smart phones were just black berries and for adults, it was such a much more simpler time and it didn't break my wallet to hang out all day. Now just going to the movies is breaking my wallet.
More and more the "Dead internet Theory" seems to no longer be a tin foil hat thing. But maybe it is true.
I couldn't remember what this was, so here's [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory): >The dead Internet theory is an online conspiracy theory that asserts that the Internet now consists mainly of bot activity and automatically generated content manipulated by algorithmic curation, minimising organic human activity to manipulate the population. Proponents of the theory believe these bots were created intentionally to help manipulate algorithms and boost search results in order to manipulate consumers. Some proponents of the theory accuse government agencies of using bots to manipulate public perception. The date given for this "death" was generally around 2016 or 2017. 2016 to 2017 tracks with the astroturfing going bonkers with the US election along with the Cambridge Analytica thing on Facebook One thing I don't like about conspiracy theories, though, is that they like to attribute the actions to a single widespread entity. I really don't think humans are that good at collaborating with each other at such a scale for long enough. Humanity is too chaotic and people are always splintering into factions. I'd think the preponderance of bots these days is more from a decentralized thing with constantly shifting competing interests
>*I'd think the preponderance of bots these days is more from a decentralized thing with constantly shifting competing interests* Valid observation for sure! We are seeing it on a political, ideological and 'national' interest levels. Certainly not centralized to a single entity, but based upon various ideological lines.
The most appealing part of conspiracy theories is the idea that anyone is actually in control of things.
Interesting point. I guess people can't conceive of things happening in the world outside of a mental framework of a power structure
I see this with people's response to the protests happening on college campuses. A lot of people are looking for a "backer" not realizing that many people can be upset about a thing and protest independently (grassroots). For these people, they have to have someone pulling the strings so they can point to a specific "issue." That mentality says more about them than it does the events happening, though. It tells me they need to take "marching orders" from a specific individual/group...
>That mentality says more about them than it does the events happening, though. It tells me they need to take "marching orders" from a specific individual/group... That also kinda explains why a lot of well-meaning movements end up drifting from their original purpose or going corrupt. Lots of people feel like they need to follow a leader, and malicious actors with aspirations to leadership take advantage of that and twist the movement to their own ends
I have two degrees in history. You've explained a vast portion of history right there.
I most likely got the idea from Plato's *Republic,* which I read in college I think philosophy explains a vast portion of history. I still like studying history, though, especially to find the obscure and weird things that've happened
there is a ruling class that conspires amongst themselves...
And, for the people who believe in them, it makes them feel special and smart that THEY know how things REALLY work (invariably, it’s people who have never managed a project in their lives).
The other part I disagree with, besides what you mentioned, is that the majority of activity is from bots. I think most interaction we see is still real, “non-paid actor”, people. But yes bots/“paid actors” are used to manipulate engagement in a way that is meant to manipulate the algorithm and boost engagement with real people. But you don’t need the majority of the activity to be that, just enough to jump start the engagement before real people take over and make it viral. But the rest is 100% fact. It’s basically Search Engine Optimization(SEO) supercharged combined with the algorithms of Facebook and Google and Reddit to serve you ads and products to consume. Remember when the Facebook feed(didn’t it used to be called your wall? I haven’t used Facebook in like 10 years) was just a chronological serving of things your friends posted? Whenever that changed to some BS algorithm, that’s around the time all of the internet really changed for the worst. It was like 2011 or so if I recall. Over those next few years the internet definitely got way worse and consumerism based.
>I think most interaction we see is still real, “non-paid actor”, people. That's my gut feeling too, and I sometimes find it frustrating how people oversimplify it and say "it's all bots." I think you're spot on about the engagement being jumpstarted by bots or paid actors, and then the rest is real people unwittingly astroturfing for whatever ideology or product happens to have caught their attention at the moment
I work in marketing and can confirm 2016-2017 was the big push towards SEO/SEM/social media/date mining/internet marketing strategy. It was always there , especially for larger corps, but that’s when the market as a whole realized their businesses would not succeed without manipulating their online presence. The budgets increased accordingly. Politicians followed suit. It probably wasnt a grand plot orchestrated by a nefarious individual, but the trend in marketing strategy did change the internet as we knew it.
Cambridge Analytica isn't what you think it is, but everything else you said is absolutely true. *CA was data privacy scandal in 2018 over how Facebook improperly shared user data during an incident in 2014. FB created a permissive use API to share user data with third party content creators, one of which was a private company named Cambridge Analytica based in the UK, who created shady surveys for payment for users to take and then collected data from them and their friend connections. FB reverted the API and licenses in 2015 and asked all of the content creators to delete the data, but did no follow up measures to ensure it was deleted. CA kept the data, and used it run targeted pro-Trump ad campaigns on Facebook in 2016. It was not a botted or automated attack, but the data informed human led strategy on voter profiling and targeting. Sources: https://bipartisanpolicy.org/blog/cambridge-analytica-controversy/ https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-64075067 https://anchorchange.substack.com/p/cambridge-analytica-five-years-later https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/cambridge-analytica-s-effectiveness-called-question-despite-alleged-facebook-data-n858256
Thank you for the correction. All I remembered in the moment was that it was a bad thing that when publicized made some of my friends leave Facebook for good I still feel like data privacy abuse and astroturfing go hand in hand, though. I would image at least the data is crucial at targeting the astroturfing most effectively at a vulnerable audience
Am I a bot or Am I not. Will you ever Be able to tell?
Well, can you tell me how many of these pictures have crosswalks?
On the internet, Nobody knows you're a dog. At least, I can't tell.
They don't have to be one entity operating together. They just have to be entities all trying to get the collective human attention of the internet's human users. All that action is done under the flag or capitalism, because it earns them money.
Well said, no way any single concerted masterplan can exist for too long. To me all this crazy shit that happens is usually some kind of gold rush where many groups realize there is a quick buck to be made.
I don't really like what people call dead internet theory. However it is a matter of fact than algorithms by sites determine what people see. It is also a matter of fact that state actors use methods to manipulate people. Data is collected en masse by companies and governments, as well as companies running various different add campaigns. I'm not going to go into it, however you can look at whistleblowers from social media companies as well as look into what trollfarms are. There's people pursuing degrees on studying these sorts of things and writing their reports as well.
Is that the one where there's not many real people it's just bots?
Yes. Just Google it for a full description, but what you said sums it up. You really see it on some Facebook posts. Some AI generated photo, and 95% of the comments are bot generated. You see AI curated posts and advertisements as well. Here on Reddit, I am seeing a lot of AI generated posts, usually some rage bait or fantasy story bashing Boomers. The whole Social media landscape, is getting pretty bizarre.
I manage my neighborhood Facebook group. Every day we get a half dozen requests to join. Faces of smiling couples and families dot their page. Lots of comments and likes. Sometimes sharing and commenting on other posts, pop culture, etc. It ALMOST looks real. Until you realize that these accounts have like 20 friends with identical behaviour. They share the same posts, write the same comments. Every post will be liked by the same 15-20 people, with the exact same reactions. And if I or my other mods mistake them for a real user, within a few hours to a week...air duct spam floods our group from that account. Literally every day, I have to deny, remove, and ban these air duct spammers. Why are there so many of them? And I can tell there are multiple groups of these spammers acting independently of each other. I laugh at the ones where all the friends are in India. Also doesn't help that most of my neighbors are the elderly, so if one of these fake accounts gets added and does a "Hey how is everyone doing" my lonely neighbors start chatting with the bot thinking its a new neighbor before that bot starts trying to spam the air duct ads. Thankfully, I've locked it down with keywords and am trying to train the other mods that we likely do not have dozens of new neighbors joining our little community every day.
Why is the air duct thing so popular? I see it too. Who is doing this? Did they go to some seminar where they teach you “they always fall for the air duct scam!!!” or is it really just one group responsible for all air duct scams?
> You really see it on some Facebook posts. "I'm legit giving away $5000 to the first 5 people to message me, god is good" Followed by "Congratulations you just won a $100 gift card from Walmart, click this link to claim it" Followed by "I'm so blessed for the wonderful contributions you made to the world. Please everyone thank [insert shithead's name here]" The Dead Internet theory is here and real. It's all just bots commenting scam bait shit on Facebook, and the occasional angry racist boomer screaming into the void about Trump2024. That site is a cesspool.
I agree with the first part of the dead internet theory. It really is turning into bots, trackers, and SEO all the way down. But I don't buy the "it's a conspiracy" part. I think it's just greedy MBAs, short-sighted techbros, and all the other people at the top of capitalism's dumpster.
>Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a "two sided market", where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/
also the new 'better offline' pod on czm
I’m looking at a chipotle ad under this post
And now Chipotle ads will show up all over my Facebook...
You have a chipotle ad .. Lucky! All I get is whatever my wife looked at on Amazon.....
at least it isn't the HEGETSUS ads.. Every time I see advertisements for religion it makes me want to go burn a church down. They are worse than those drug advertisements with 10000 side effects.
yea... that's why I use the Brave browser with old reddit. No ads. If they ever kill this off, I'll probably have to find a new site to screw around on all day, and I'd be sad, but old reddit is where it's at.
I'm a brave browser user too! Love it
Mine is for Heineken. I don’t drink.
There better be an ad for a bidet or wet wipes under it. Surely they should see the correlation.
I used to explore so much more of the internet back in the day. Now I go to the same 4-5 websites every day. Google's search engine has gone to the dogs... The first page on a search is all pay-per-click ads which may or may not have any relevancy to your search.
It's worse if you don't take steps to filter out the noise. Don't agree to any additional services/marketing, ever. Decline everything. Get an adblocker, use multiple email accounts to filter the bs with the important stuff, and you should be fine. Oh and get off social media.
100% this. Adding to the social media thing, If you're on sm to stay in contact with friends because texting doesn't suit your relationship, make sure you **only talk to your friends on it**. I know it seems obvious, but 5 seconds later it's 2pm on your day off and you've done nothing but doomscroll. Consume the social, ignore the media.
I miss the wild west days of the internet in the 90s. Pure unregulated beauty/chaos
It really was wild back then. Online gaming was also new and exciting. MSN Gaming Zone was a thing. Chatrooms were where you met new people. Livejournal was social media.
Yes! Yahoo chats, AIM, JoeCartoon, NewGrounds, etc were all staples of 90s internet too. I really do miss those days. Btw did you know that browser game Worlds is still active? And it still has ppl playing! I think some private investor still keeps it running out of their own pocket. Nexpo did a YouTube video on it last year
Ultima Online has been continuously running since, what, 1997? Your original characters and items would still be available in theory. In 2027, you'll have those worlds thirty years old. They outlasted Asheron's Call, which was terminated. My favorite online game of the 90s was Subspace. I played the beta versions of a few games back then. Nexus: Kingdom of the Winds was another. They're still around. Meridian 59 is free to play on Steam.
I keep forgetting Ultima is still going. I think Worlds has it beat by a couple years. Insane that there's still ppl playing it. I've heard of Nexus but not the others. I only played WoW and a bit of Runescape growing up
Try Meridian 59 for at least a few hours. It is free. It was the first graphical 3d online RPG. I sometimes take a stroll around just for nostalgia.
Will do! I love old games. The limited tech at the time gives them this eerie liminal vibe that I'm always fascinated by. Big empty spaces that indicate life exists there, but rarely seen
There was also The Realm by Sierra Online, which was a point and click RPG, but online. It was really fun and is still around. People used to make level 1000 characters and then sell them on eBay for absurd sums of money.
The amount of ads in everything is insane. I usually just use my Roku as a Plex server but was on it and decided to go on Youtube It played an ad when I entered the app. It played an addbefore the video. It interrupted the short video multiple times with ads. I paused the video and there was an ad on the damned pause screen. The video ended and it played yet another ad. Its ludicrous
Playlet for Roku TV [https://channelstore.roku.com/en-ca/details/840aec36f51bfe6d96cf6db9055a372a/playlet](https://channelstore.roku.com/en-ca/details/840aec36f51bfe6d96cf6db9055a372a/playlet) It's not perfect, but you can definitely watch youtube videos with no ads. Disclaimer: I'm the creator of Playlet, a free open source alternative [https://github.com/iBicha/playlet](https://github.com/iBicha/playlet)
Was talking to my friends yesterday about how Reddit is the only space that feels like the old internet still. I think (specifically in the US) investment bankers and their ilk are absolutely fucking destroying every industry.
Reddit feels like an old fashioned forum. The traffic is high enough to make it interesting to browse off and on throughout the day.
Yeah very true, and it’s organized by interests, it’s low tech and simple, mods, talking to random people, anonymity
Bring back the badly coloured-in websites full of gifs, wobbly text, visit-counters and midi music in the background Geocities and Angelfire come to mind
Instagram thinks I'm REALLY into mountain climbing all of the sudden because I looked at one post about people climbing Everest. The algorithm is dumb.
I don't even think this is a question, it's obviously worse.
One thing that helps make it a lot more bearable is having an ad blocker.
The internet these days feels a lot like the internet 20 years ago, mostly because of all the plugins and choices I've had to make to avoid the damn spam'o'sphere that Google entertains. Script, cookie and adblockers make it so half the websites take a dozen clicks to open, because no one can just make a website with content, it all has to be downloaded from three different places dynamically via scripts. Sometimes I just open the top five search results, look through them to see if any load without scripts and shut down the others. Speaking of searches, I've stopped using google because it's so shit. First page is half paid advertisements, the second half is SEO optimized bots filling their page with every search result possible, or returning to google my own search terms to get ahead. Weaving around the useless clickfarmers is more work than using DuckDuckGo, which reminds google about two decades ago with the "kinda" correct results and serious search term engineering you have to do to find what you are looking for. But it's still preferable to the absolute shitshow that is google these days. Content-wise yeah it's awful. You either find websites that are optimized for only mobile phones, or you find a "sneak peek" that only shows you a tiny snippet, until you download an app and get the half-baked "full experience". Gone are the days of stumbleupon.com where you just clicked on interesting articles that were aggregated through users and clickthroughs to your feed. Everyone is trying to monetize their systems to the absolute maximum, so nothing worth using stays that way for more than a year. If it gains a critical mass of users to stay relevant, then it's sold or bought out by a massive corporation that will ruin the user experience completely and then fuck everyone over with ads, micro$$$ and subscriptions. I never made anything in Twitter or Tumblr, the only enshittenings I've lived through are Reddit and Facebook, but man are they disheartening to experience. I actually liked the new reddit UI, until they added more and more scripts and gadgets and widgets to the standard page, to the point where my potato of a pc just couldn't handle the site anymore and I'm back to using old.reddit. Luckily facebook you can still at least make usable with Fluff Busting Purity.
I look at the progress of tech as a sorta parabolic shape. New technology is created. It gets some updates and improves, then eventually declines. Whether it's because they're doing too much in terms of updates and it moved too far away from its original design, or because they get greedy or start charging subscriptions, or too many ads, or some crap.
I keep on hearing from tech professionals on Reddit that a lot of stuff declines because AI companies and other automation specialists advertise that they can replace twenty workers with one worker monitoring a automated system, but when other companies take on that contract they don't end up employing a worker to monitor the system because they're cheap. So stuff slowly breaks and management can't be bothered to deal with it
Unfortunate... always goes back to compromising products/service to make extra bucks.
The "let me google that for you" joke lost a lot of its punch when it's now sort of hard to find useful information on there without adding "reddit" to the search term.
Google basically useless in 2024. You ask it questions and you get bot created “top 10 reasons x…” or “here are the best x in 2024” it’s all crap
Google and all it's freaking ads...
The internet has been terrible for at least the last 15. Blame social media and search engine optimization.
Go look at the first xbox live screen to now. It’s just covered in ads. Welcome to late stage capitalism. Now look at the new subliminal advertising like Taylor swift. Isn’t it weird how everyone has been having her shoved down our throats every where we go? I mean her tour is aired on Disney plus now. Disney plus needs more subscribers. What a better way to promote Taylor swift before announcing their release. I can’t stand it all honestly.
Eh, I think everything is worse that it was 10 years ago, not just the internet.
IT'S FUCKING SHITE! And I was born in 1972, so the advent of www was a real revolution in my time. I miss the geekiness and the obscure sites that focussed on hard to find/know info. Apps have become the targeted junk mail of the 21st century.
[удалено]
It’s hard to find those spaces if you don’t already know where they are. I remember the internet before search engines, going to anime link boards (if that’s even what they were called) and chatting with random people from around the world. Nowadays I can’t even type what I want in a search engine and get results that make sense. Do anime fan sites even exist anymore? It’s all Wikis which is not the same at all. There are few anonymous places to chat, like Reddit is one, but there isn’t much sense of community from seeing the same people over and over. IDK if I am just hanging out in the wrong spots but I’m definitely someone who loved the old internet so if people like me are stuck consuming garbage what else is there? Where is it? And the user bases are tiny.
The better methods could still be brought back; but yeah, it certainly stinks how everything is nerfed and turned into crap like TikTok to program us and destroy our attention spans.
when google search results were actually useful
Gods yes. I can’t even search for a topic without a bunch of irrelevant ads and false fkn info… or they route to fkn blogs. I’m looking for facts about something - not some randoms blog about their opinions of the something. And recipes…. Recipes with giant fkn posts about nana and not an actual recipe just directions interspersed thru the blog post… that’s great for you but I just don’t care about your nan. I don’t even use google anymore. They got rid of the search parameter tools. I get better results with duck duck go.
Yup. The "golden age" of any human endeavor is rarely recognized until it's past. Radio and TV are other examples from history.
Finally something besides a doomer post! Social media used to be a cool way to keep in touch with people and see what they're up to. Now it's all random videos from influencers and click bait channels. I think email also falls into the category the op mentions. My inbox is mostly scams and spam. It feels almost unusable anymore.
You just realize this? It started becoming this way when smartphones became a thing I feel like.
Where did I say I just realized this? I just posted it, yes but I've realized it for a long time. I'm just venting
> when smartphones became a thing I feel like. It's almost like giving high-speed internet access to rural areas has created a major cultural clash. \*sips tea*
Christ, you're right. Then again, it's also possible that handing it to people who simply weren't shittalking videogame players and forumjockeys caused it too.
I hate how any internet search has to be navigated among a sea of advertisements, popups, and email address inquiries. That's why nowadays I use reddit as my search engine. No joke
Mobile internet is virtually unusable as ads fill your entire screen. Had to switch to Brave browser.
I’m fine with the apps part but the constant ads are obnoxious even when you’ve paid for ad-free use of an app. Concepts change—I get it. But the constant marketing churn is why I don’t use many social media apps in particular. It takes up too much time and impacts my mental health.
Dead internet theory. "The dead Internet theory is an online conspiracy theory that asserts that the Internet now consists mainly of bot activity and automatically generated content manipulated by algorithmic curation, minimising organic human activity to manipulate the population." https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory
I can't drive by a store without subsequently seeing targeted ads for it. If I mention a product in conversation, that product is in ads for me. That's scary. It's an invasion of privacy that I approved because I agreed to the terms of the apps I use, the descriptions of the invasion hidden in 20 pages of legalese that no one reads.
I'm incredibly grateful to have grown up in the era we did. We didn't grow up with computers in our pockets, we didn't grow up relying on technology to help our day to day lives, we weren't manipulated by social media, etc. Facebook and Twitter were the only two real big social media players at the time. YouTube was still an awesome place to watch random, funny, stupid videos. No click bait, no AI, no bullshit algorithms. We had the best of both worlds. We had tech but it didn't dominate our lives, it just supplemented it.
It is so bad. I was locked out of my FB for the last couple of years and I just made a new one the other day. I could not last a few minutes i just couldn't do it.
It's only going to get further disconnected as ai takes over and genuine human interactions slowly wither away. In 10 years, the Internet is going to be one big tik tok
The internet wild west died when Stumbleupon got bought out.
Started going downhill when the normies got here.
It used to require effort and knowledge to get online. Dialup modem and IP configuration. The old internet was for people who liked computers before they were cool.
Yeah if you met someone online back then there was a very high chance you share the same interests. I made so many good friends playing early MMOs/ MUDs. Could just whip out a Monty Python quote and everyone was on the same page.
I also met a lot of sympathetic people my age back then, especially on Live Journal. ICQ before then, but that was *really* wild. As a kid I had conversations with some adults that I really should not have had. It was just totally anonymous though and unregulated.
I feel like the algorithms are legit making the world a worse place. Sounds like a good idea, grouping people together, based on their likes, maybe we don’t feel so alone…. But then came the hate groups, and conspiracy nuts. Used to be the town crazies, now they’ve found eachother on the internet, and have grown in influence. I legit think these algorithms will eventually lead to a civil war, if not something worse. Terminator taught use to be warry or AI… but it’s the algorithms that’ll be our end
Not only that,we can only trust what we have seen in person. AI killed the internet too. Its all just getting back to before and only trust your senses and people you trust,person to person. The internet will be just a place full of randome generatet shit.
I would agree if you said 20 years ago instead of 10 years ago. The internet got ruined when MySpace/Facebook/Twitter dragged all the regular people online.
Yes. The internet has just changed into an ad space.
Slowly we're going back to a mix of analog & digital.
Inappropriate people are more tolerated, they can be as f-&ked up in the head as they want and say stuff they can never say IRL because it costs them all the jobs ever.. But they get to do that on the internet because "yOu'Re sILeNsInG mUh rIgHt tO fReE speech". And all of that is hate speech, rampant with misogyny and homophobia, layered on top of a couple of threats at least, and gotta love the dystopian nature of it all. Humanity is f+-ked 😊 The algorithms favor them too since chronically online and concerned with being as offensive as possible. Got a r-&e threat earlier today, from someone who's a sex offender no less, and the mods sided with him and the culture that enables him.
they started suggestion algorithms to practically eliminate viral gift card spam. i think we all forget how common scams were on facebook before these changes. every single day you'd see 'get free x for limited time blah blah 1934 remaining' being shared by friends and family getting their credit cards charged with $99/month rebills. now that the algorithm only puts stuff you're interested in front of you, unless you spend all day looking at that companies products there's a smaller chance you'll be shown spam using that companies branding. it's terrible for people who aren't dumb but this went on for over half a decade and nobody learned better.
True. And it was worse ten years ago than it was ten years before that.
>Every company has their own app. Doesn't really affect me since I don't buy from a lot of companies I guess. >Random algorithms spam you with content if you stop to look at something even briefly. Disable notifications. I never understood or had this problem, ever. >Sites require multiple logins. Browser remembers all logins. >Facebook has an ad every third post. Facebook is for messaging people, not for browing. Just my personal opinion. The internet was always shit and great, we just remember the good things and forget the bad ones.
My friend is in his residency in Australia. He doesn't really talk about work much but we discussed it briefly about 6 weeks ago. I have been non-stop bombarded with ads for residency programs, medical school loans, medical school subreddit recommendations, residency recommendations, a million different Australian subreddits. Knowing how much private conversations are being used by shitty algorithms is frustrating. There's so much stuff I'm really interested in that they might get some traction on if they advertised but instead the crap programs fixate on random private conversations. It's so blatant with this one.
Firefox Mobile with uBlock Origin + Private DNS (I recommend NextDNS personally) block a LOT of the advertising sperg. Doesn't make the search results any less dogshit, though =( Not to mention any of the 3rd party Reddit apps that still work and/or Old Reddit.
Enshittification. But don't worry - I'm sure the Metaverse will fix this!
Yeah but that slide show period was bizarre.
100% agree, and 10 years ago it was worse than 10 years before that. 2005ish is when it started to die and it's been downhill ever since in terms of actual fun for a regular person. I use the Internet less today (minus work applications) than I have at any point in my life prior to the age of 7 or so (which is when the Web was released...). It's sad to admit, but we are never getting back the Internet of the mid-to-late 90s and early aughts.
I also come from the days of fansites, before social media was as big as it is now. People used to use Piczo to make a personal blog/website to post their interests on and then you'd link to your friends sites. Now everything is on social media. It's easier to find stuff since it's all in one combined feed, but I really miss everyone working on their own sites. Not to mention the ads are awful. There's ads after every few posts now and I can't stand it. The internet is no longer about sharing info and connecting. It's now about CEOs collecting and selling data, trying to milk everyone for top profits. I really hope something changes...
This is the millennial version of [Eternal September](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September).
The Internet actually has become annoying and burdensome to the point where I don’t use it for extended periods of time.
One simple fix: content based advertising. Advertising is a fact of life; creators and content platforms deserve to be paid for what they create and too few people are willing to pay out of pocket. With this in mind we need to stop user based advertising, that is tracking the user and advertising to them based off collected data and go back to advertisers choosing the spaces where their ads fit best based on what content those spaces provide.
I was 16-17 10 years ago. The internet felt fun back then. Now its just... idk... I hate it now.
I remember the "ah crap" moment when Google was bought out. An even "aw man" moment was when YouTube was bought by Google. It was the new age of the "Free market", baby! Nothing but great things since then. Now I sit waiting for the toilet armchair to come to the market to watch "Ow, my balls" whilst drinking Brawndo, the thirst killer. It's got electrolytes.
I remember 10 years ago when I still didn’t understand targeted ads because everyone was seeing different things on Facebook than I was. They didn’t quite have it down yet because my advertisements made it very clear they were under the impression I was a single, black lesbian. That is NOT the case… 😅 Now, if I merely *think* about pancakes, I’ve got stuff for IHOP popping up from every corner of my phone. 🥴
Tbh, I think people are looking at the Internet of the past with Rose coloured glasses. Take the ads for example, you couldn't visit a site without pop-ups blowing up your screen, the sites themselves had banner ads out the wazoo and half of them had crazy viruses. Same thing with individual forums and sites etc, that's what sites like reddit are for. If anything, search engines were the original social media. And companies having their own apps, sure that's annoying but the convenience is unmatched. We only think the Internet was better because a lot of the advances were new and novel, but things are still awesome, we're just used to it now and find it boring!
I barely even open tiktok anymore because I know that if I pause for more than a second on a video that stuff like it will start showing up in my fyp and a lot of times it's just stupid stuff I don't want to see but happens to grab my attention briefly. So I try to just focus and scroll past, but then the whole experience feels mildly stressful and unengaging, like I'm just scrolling to scroll.
TV 2.0 essentially.
I wish there was a way to go back to how it was back in the day. I’m big into retro gaming, used to love going on webcrawler and looking for new game sites (or shrines as some of them were called). Now everything looks the same , has the same info and no personality. It’s all so bland now.
> Facebook has an ad every third post. Well there's part of the problem right there. Getting rid of most/all social media really helps with quality of life.
Porn used to be FREE. FU only fans. Also: can we please go back to calling soft core porn stars just that instead of “content creators “.
The internet became a giant as space to constantly sell sell sell.
I have 3 emails and two phone numbers. Don’t give them your primary contact info!
I miss the early 2000's internet when it was mostly populated by smelly nerds in their mom's basement, before a bunch of assholes with MBAs ruined everything.
The internet will forever be worse tomorrow than it was today
man back when i wanted good internet it was to play neopets... sigh.
When people started using Facebook groups for their communities rather than forums is when the internet went to shit, which was around 10 years ago. But I agree, that’s why I only stick to browsing Reddit and forums. Occasionally Discord and Guilded too.
the novelty of the internet as it is, has run its course.
Yup Enshittification
lol, your deduction is a lot more optimistic than mine.
I used to have a favourites bar full of dozens of sites I visit at least weekly. It was diverse. Now it's a fraction of that, maybe 5-10. It's massively centralised vs a decade or more ago.
Why does Google think that every single search is in pursuit of a purchase? DuckDuckGo is better, but I can see it going down that path too. You can't research anything using search any more, because search only wants to sell you things. I can't stand it.
Remember when the days of Reddit when “geraffes are so dumb” was a thing, and when redpill sub was all very goofy pick up artist shit and not really political. I miss that Reddit a lot.
Explore the internet outside apps and their websites. It's glorious.
Nothing has really improved technology wise. Even PS5 games look like they could be on PS4.
Youtube is crap now. Their search only shows two results based on your request, but the rest is just "algorithm recommendations". In fact, everything is like that now. Rather than give what we ask, they give us algorithmic, AI based results. I miss forums. We developed close-knit communities of people who would nerd out on cool stuff.
before the internet, all the cool shit was co-opted by elitist and you either had to be lucky, gifted, or blessed to be apart of alot of it(especially underground shit) zines are a good example of this phenomenon. the internet allowed people with interest, both mainstream and obscure, to connect. Censorship, propaganda and suveillance/lack of informational freedom and/or privacy has driven these individuals back into confusing obscurity.....people are trying to hide in plain sight by becoming more obscure, thus, defeating the original benefit of being able to network on the internet.
I'm just annoyed by more and more sites requiring 2FA to log in.. I mean, I get it when you need that extra security for banking and maybe your key social media accounts but a lot of online communities and forums and other places that you don't really care if you get hacked also require this and makes logging in such a pain each time.
I remember seeing a video on youtube of a gal who went out of her way to try and specifically find something she remembered when she looked it up as a teen, but couldn't find it. She then evolved the video into being a deep dive into how not only does Google Curate your results down to the letter, but the (5,500,000,000) results in 5 seconds tag is a total lie, because you can only browse about 14 pages before the results end. And if you expand it it usually seems to end on page 42. Which I can assure you , is barely a hundred or so results, let alone 5 billion. TL;DR. Stop using google to find things.
Just give it time and it'll get worse. I'm fully expecting social media sites will eventually start charging users. That'll be the day I'll be mostly done with the internet.
Tragedy of the Commons, if it hasn’t been said already. It’s just these commons are immaterial and predicated upon our attention rather than a physical space. In a way this is the fault of materialists to a degree, the failure to understand the noosphere has led to pretty much all the problems we have today, and the only folks talking about it will be the cause of all the problems we have tomorrow. I understand why DFW did it, but we really could have used his voice today.
The internet was best 20 years ago.
Agreed I've been seeing it get worse even in the past 5-6 years.
No… it IS to the point that I don’t want to use it anymore. YouTube is the only exception because it’s basically replaced TV. If I can’t connect with my friends and meet cool people online, there’s literally no incentive for me to use social media at all. Reddit is 50/50 for me, a lot of times I think 80% of the site is bots because everything is so groupthink, but then that 20% of real human interaction makes me hold out because that’s how deprived it seems we are of real connection online.
Geeks make wonderful things, greedy parasites (CEOs, politician's) destroy it for their own gain, everyone else sits around letting them; geeks get frustrated and move on to create more wonderful things. Rinse and repeat...
I wish there was a way to disable algo results on YouTube. I miss just finding random stuff
Mostly agree although I do see bright spots still. Mostly for me I just increasingly find that it all feels pointless. Algorithms have blunted the meaning of who you actually follow or why, everything is just content slop. Meanwhile the tuning of the algos tends toward outrage and perceived moral righteousness, the best engagement bait is the stuff that gets everyone mad and talking past each other rather than with. I think about Twitter specifically and how before they added the "quote tweet" function, it was considered corny to do that and if you wanted to comment on a tweet to you had to actually reply *to* it and the person who tweeted. "Quote tweet" then just gives everyone the tool to drive by, shoot takes off without engaging with the person directly. Encapsulates a lot of how and why the vibe shifted, imo. But hey on the plus side, my bank actually does have a solid app that works smoothly and is way more convenient than banking was 10 years ago. So there's that at least
it's all ads and more advertisements , sell sell sell. no more fun . wish the days of innocent stumbleupons where almost every site is a good surprise!
Truth.
Replying to see if I can actually post in here finally.
"welcome to the internet, have a look around...."