Haha, so true. I really really miss the “old” interwebz. Imagine the content of back-then with the hardware of today. The dream of yesteryear would come true. A blazingly fast net. Just html with a bit of JS (when really needed). Not 10 frameworks (each used for one function), dozens of mb of graphics, a gazillion of cookies and tracker-scripts and… Jeez.
Today i need so much stuff to fight the other stuff, it’s stuffmageddon.
Oh and if you’re also European you can also fight (for free!) the silly cookie-war.
4chan back before the Nazi takeover was like the wild west. My favorite part was “Lithursday,” when we would share images with embedded PDFs of copyrighted content, including rare books, anarchist materials, and military manuals. I often wonder if those unusually large .jpgs are still floating around the internet waiting to be unlocked. I also saw legitimate acts of activism and terrorism unfolding live, without the interpretation and propaganda of the state.
Oh yes… The rise (and fall) of 4chan. At least the site is still relatively lean, so that’s that 🤷🏻♂️
Oh man, I remember that. I’m sure I still have an Anarchist 's Cookbook floating around from one of those
some of our clients are on what the telco calls ‘extended’ dsl. they’re waaaay tf out at the ‘end of the line’ where speeds can be as shitty as 250-500kbps; there’s even a couple still on dialup. so we definitely consider the weight of a page and how many connections are made for each when we do our own sites.
I’d love that… The weight-considered-site that is. Not the 500k line 😁
Lemmy is getting pretty good. I’m optimistic that more of the internet will be like this in the future.
between lemmy, mastodon and my own nerd projects, I’m having more fun on the internet than I have since the 90’s. so, while I hate the enshittification, the side effect has been me rediscovering what was so fun in these tubes…
I fear that part of the reason is that it isn’t big enough yet for AstroTurf interest groups to care enough to invest into it. Although maybe AstroTurfing isn’t included in the enshittification label?
For social media to work in the future I think there needs to be additional safeguards that keep enshittification at bay. But picking them will be a delicate art.
Speaking of AstroTurf, they certainly are the leaders synthetic turf. Their artificial turf is not only esthetically appealing, but is designed to withstand the demands of the game.
Ha! Recently went to breakfast with a couple of new neighbors (partners).
They were asking me what apps I enjoyed and I told them that I WAS enjoying Apollo. Told them I left Reddit. They sort looked at me. They later said they both worked at home. Their job was creating ad space for the web. One of them gave me the enshitification face. Sigh.
They would have regretted asking me this. They’d be opening an F-droid can of worms they couldn’t stop and my autistic ass wouldn’t be able to gauge if it made them uncomfortable.
What is “the enshitification face”
I can only imagine horrible things
What is “the enshitification face”
maybe one of these?
Definitely the first one, with the dollar signs.
It was sort of like you caught me eating my shit cereal face. ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
I’d suggest the Firefox extension libredirect. Automatically redirects Twitter, Instagram, Reddit and more to alternative front-ends.
I’m very wary of installing more extensions since I heard how many lucrative requests extension devs get from third parties for allowing them to enshittify their software.
It’s FOSS. You can verify that the code doesn’t make any malicious requests. The only requests it should make are to GitHub/Codeberg to update the list of instances.
Yeah, but that doesn’t prevent the author from selling their extension to an untrusted buyer like in the case of Nano Adblocker.
Wow, didn’t think something like that had happened. That is a valid concern. However, it could be mitigated by disabling auto update and subscribing to the GitHub releases via RSS. Then you can either manually check for malicious commits, or if the extension is more popular, wait a bit for any bad news to come out about the update. Obviously, this isn’t possible for everyone and every extension, so I can understand why people would be cautious of more extensions, but I think Libredirect is a big enough extension that you would hear about it, like the case with Nano Adblocker.
I’ve just blocked YT in my browser, and use https://freetubeapp.io/ instead. It’s a desktop app, so I don’t have to deal with cookies and storage being deleted after every session, just as i can do subscriptions to channels without requiring an account.
So far, it has been an amazing experience, I totally recommend it. And I second the point about Nano AdBlcoker, since I’ve also been one of the victims, since at the time Nano Defender was one of the alternatives pretty well recommended on Reddit, that was better at avoiding anti-adblock scripts. Plus, any extension you have only makes you easier to fingerprint, thus defeating the point of VPN or privacy focused browser. Especially with Mullvad browser + VPN, which is especially build on the idea of sharing the exact same fingerprint with every other Mullvad VPN user.
I’m actually glad for it. It made me switch to Linux, discover Mullvad Browser and their VPN combo, get a GrapheneOS phone, find an amazing Freetube YT desktop client, and dabble with Home Assistant and PIHole. Plus I migrated to Protonmail and Kagi as my search, and Lemmy instead of reddit is also an amazing change, the discussions I’ve seen so far feel better and more in depth, and I’m enjoying my time here so far. The lack of endless content is also great, to help with implementing Digital Minimalism.
So, while I hate any large corporation and their greed with more and more passion, it has lead me to a nice privacy journey, for which I’m glad.
Yes but thats a lot of work, what if all this was already setup
Wow, are you me?? :D
I almost did the same, just my phone is not a pixel, so i had to resort to some other custom ROM. And I still just use good ol’ firefox with proton VPN most of the time.
P.S. I also blocked our TV from accessing the internet as well. Ex. Codeberg is a GitHub replacement, and on mobile Grayjay/LibreTube works great for youtube.
Same for me. I switched to Linux, left reddit currently migrating to proton mail and my next phone will be one where I can install Graphene OS onto. More changes will come soon.
Don’t get stuck w Protonmail. I did, not worth.
Why and what would you recommend instead?
Host own email, just buy a domain.
Proton is still worth it IMO, e-mail is inherently unsafe and Proton still beats using Gmail or Outlook.
It does but at ~$80/year, you might as well buy a domain and host your own email…
Browsers are leading slower and slower
That’s because of heavy use of JavaScript and frameworks like React. Websites like Facebook are a nightmare to deal with.
++ social media has killed personal blogs. Which is one of the biggest losses to me.
No, it’s not due to React. If the code were written in vanilla it wouldn’t be more efficient, just harder to maintain.
The trick is in not using javascript where you don’t need it, which would cut 95% of all its use around the interwebs
It’s not a solution, but as a mitigation, I’m trying to push the idea of an internet right of way into the public consciousness. Here’s the thesis statement from my write-up:
I propose that if a company wants to grow by allowing open access to its services to the public, then that access should create a legal right of way. Any features that were open to users cannot then be closed off so long as the company remains operational. We need an Internet Rights of Way Act, which enforces digital footpaths. Companies shouldn’t be allowed to create little paths into their sites, only to delete them, forcing guests to pay if they wish to maintain access to the networks that they built, the posts that they wrote, or whatever else it is that they were doing there.
As I explain in the link, rights of way already exist for the physical world, so it’s easily explained to even the less technically inclined, and give us a useful legal framework for how they should work.
I agree but I think it needs to be slightly more practical. Sometimes a line of business just dries up and it would damage the company to try and keep that service going. It wouldn’t make sense to force a company into bankruptcy to keep one line going that few people use anymore.
Earlier today, though, I was thinking about sunsetting guarantees. Companies can and should decommission things when it makes business sense, but the user generated content it has gathered shouldn’t just disappear, and they shouldn’t be allowed to destroy the user experience of things people have bought.
So I would propose rules like:
-
If a service is being decomissioned or an entry point to that service being shut down, the content available on that service must be made available as a bulk export. Personal data, such as account data, messages, etc should be made available to users individually, while publicly accessible content should be made available publicly.
-
If a public service is being taken down completely, source code should be made available publicly.
-
If the service for a device which was physically purchased by consumers is being taken down, an update must be provided to allow users to use a local or alternative backend service. The source code for the service must be released publicly.
-
If features are being removed from a service which backed a physically purchased device, an update must be offered which allows users to point to a local or alternative service for either all functionality or, at minimum, the removed functionality. Looking at you, Google, keep removing features…
Yeah, as always, the devil is in the details. For now I think that we need a simple and clear articulation of the main idea. In the exceedingly unlikely event that it ever gets traction, I look forward to hammering out the many nuances.
-
The browser in my computer at work doesn’t have an ad blocker. I haven’t installed one because I most of the time I’m using it to access our intranet. But when I do happen to use the internet, damn are there so many ads! They literally block the content I’m trying to read, and come back even when I try to close it.
All that to say, due to enshittification I will forever keep my ad blocker on my personal computer.
Can’t imagine what the web is like outside of ublock origin…
The few websites I see on pcs by clients are essentially state backed so they don’t have ads as well.Scary world I am not eager to experience.
It’s almost as though the overbearing Yahoo/Ask! toolbars that used to plague everyone’s Internet Explorer back in the day have mutated and infected the internet at large. Now most websites feel like one useless, giant malware-riddled toolbar.
I’m baffled when companies that self-host DNS don’t have DNS-level adblocking.
It’s because there’s websites out there that will entirely break, and for really dumb fucking reasons. I’ve seen some sites not even load due to google tag manager being blocked. Most of the time it’s a signal to me that I don’t want to have anything to do with that domain.
However, if this was at work, that would be a call to IT. Multiply that by potentially hundreds of calls on the regular, and that could get really expensive.
The better solution here I think, is to default the browser install with uBlock Origin already there. Then allow the user the power to toggle the addon to their own liking. Then last, train your employees to know what the addon is, and how to use it.
Then it’s the best of both worlds: websites aren’t necessarily breaking for all users, ads are absent as a default state, and users are empowered to control their own experience. (And yes there’s still going to be Jims and Karens calling for support, but they’re going to regardless, those types will always find a reason.)
Cornerstones of the internet:
- social media
- content sharing (video, audio media)
- websites
Internet resources ruined by ads/corporate greed:
- social media (full of ads, borderline unusable without ad block)
- content sharing (account sharing blocks (Netflix) war on adblockers (YouTube) etc)
- e-mail (spam)
- websites (ads, borderline unusable without adblockers, refuses to load with adblockers)
gg everyone. Time to reinvent everything.
So true. I’d like to add that also because of ads, social media and other websites are full of nonsense clickbait content, and every part of the user experience is designed to keep you scrolling through said content. Even with an adblocker, it’s like wading through a swamp to find anything actually worth looking for. (Of course, there are still websites with no ads, and even the ones with ads aren’t always horrible. But generally, shit sucks.)
I believe you’re referring to “the algorithm”. Which is usually just code for “a bunch of people that view and engage with the content you have viewed/engaged with also viewed/engaged with this”
I understand what they’re doing and I understand why, but sometimes, I just want a reverse chronological feed of my friends activities, so I can keep up to date with their most recent life events.
I’m not internet god, but I have a possible first step forward with a protocol and working implementation ;
Decentralized websites, encrypted and takedown safe. Free, FOSS and based on reciprocal sharing. Nothing very complicated, you need to forward a port and run a program.
I’m just a geek though, not a manager or marketing person so I’d love some people checking it out.
Valmond
I look at Lemmy far less than I did Reddit.
I read only one subreddit still and it is Am I The Asshole, it is very easy to spot the ads because only one add matches the format of the posts. Anything that doesn’t start with AITA is an ad.
That gives me way more time to read books that I have been putting off. Starting with a few books by Cory Doctorow who coined that term enshittification.
It is a lot easier to make time for reading when watching a video will mean an ad before, during, and after every 5 minute clip. I subscribe to a few news shows so I can listen to them as podcasts while I work to support without having ads.
I just don’t look at it if I have to make an account.
Same. Those sites simply don’t exist to me. If it’s so important that I see it, then copy/paste the content.
Right? If your message is important, then set it free. If it’s not, then I’m not gonna care.
Yep, whenever people text me an Instagram or TikTok URL, I just scroll past it. I don’t even bother to find out what it’s supposed to be about, it’s completely inconsequential to me.
It’s like they’re trying to show you a party that’s going on in some private location, but you don’t get in, because you don’t have an account. Well then, they say, if the account is free and you still don’t make it, it’s not our fault. So they close you out.
You telling them to “just copy and paste the content” is like telling them to send you a photo/video of the party. It’s not the same as being there.
Which is 100% fine by them.
They’ve created a situation where we HAVE to use ad-blockers for security, so they instead have to sell our data.
If they can’t make money off ads OR selling our data AND we won’t pay to view the content, all we’re really doing is using up their bandwidth.
My thought exactly, and I don’t feel like missing out either
I have told my wife and several of my friends stop sending me things from ________, ________, and _________. I can’t see them and I refuse to do what is required.
You’re missing nothing on Instagram.
Disagree. There are many amazing creators on the app creating beautiful art and music.
Maybe this is why I’ve been so ready to fully embrace Lemmy for my internetting. It’s the opposite of enshittified, as FOSS often is.
I’ll admit though, I pay for YouTube and get more bang for the buck than any other money I spend on entertainment. I’ve had it for a while though, and did not sign up because of their renewed war on ad blocking. Plus it’s nice that the creators get paid from my view, even though it’s not much.
Direct revenue is logically a better model for creators, but I don’t like that the share of youtube premium revenue is determined by a black box. If it’s distributed according to my total monthly watch time, how can anyone say for sure whether the direct revenue split for a given channel => potential advertising revenue had I watched without premium or adblock? I don’t think even creators could tell you based on the analytics available to them via Youtube.
I canceled and set up memberships on a few channels instead. That way I actually get something out of it (member perks), and I know that at least my favourite creators get 70% of those amounts. Also, sponsorblock
I pay for YouTube as well, it’s worth it bc of YouTube music which I like better than Spotify, I just need podcasts to get on board and we will be good to go. I will add YouTube is the only media I pay for (other than peacock for 1 month a year to watch tour de France)
Firefox with ublock origin plus autoplay while you’re in a music playlist says what?
Seriously firefox mobile can play stuff in the background. If you didn’t know
I’ve not had good luck with Firefox on mobile, I use duckduckgo. I’m not forcing anyone to do what I do. YouTube is my main source of media for the most part. I use it on my smarts TV’s in my house - and I haven’t set up computers on all TV’s yet… So it is what it is and it works for me.
That’s one of the big values for me, the effortless smart device support. Sure I know tech shit and I block ads in every browser I use, but it’s nice when members of my family can just use the YouTube app, full featured, on whatever TV/phone/tablet they have access to at the moment. It’s not a matter of whether I can watch YouTube for free without seeing ads, it’s a question of whether the convenience and creator support are worth the cost of a drive thru meal per month. Add in YouTube music and I don’t even think about it any more.
It’s an ease of use thing, kind of like how Steam ended PC game piracy for many people.
The ad stuff is just an adblock+ error apparently, the throttling is non-existent on ublock origin.
YouTube in general just became slower due to bloat :,)
It’s just more noticable when there isn’t even longer ads to take away the attention
Man, what are you talking about? YouTube has always been slow. It got even worse when they forced everyone to use dash playback, and that was over a decade ago.
I definitely think there’s room to invent some other social websites like Lemmy; things that can A) Monetize themselves in some way other than ads, B) Formulate the way users use them so that they’re resistant to bots, C) Promote well-thought discussion points instead of just regurgitation.
I’m seriously considering something like say, a site that requires users to record a short webcam video introducing themselves before they can post. Obviously, that wouldn’t be a good venue for anyone very privacy-focused, but perhaps you get the idea.
Monetizing through ads isn’t the problem: The problem is that the companies keep getting greedier and seeing the new ways they can exploit the userbase.
Remember when ads were just those animated gif boxes on either side of the content you actually consumed? Pepperidge Farms remembers.
Then they became annoying popups, to the point that EVERY browser ships with popups blocked by default. Now it’s all javascript occupying your screen everywhere. Plus all those invasive “Notifications”
Greed isn’t the problem, per se – it’s that outside of the biggest sites, which could hoover up ad targeting data of hundreds of millions to billions and sell that data through their own internal ad platform – the model was never viable to begin with. Notice that the enshittification really took off all soon as interest rates jumped? Tech startups have all been floating along on easy money, but now that loans aren’t basically free, VC dollars are drying up. Companies that could previously offset their capital burn with yet another round of investment now suddenly need to make money on their own merit, and are finding that they have to cut service to the bone and monetize the bejeezus out of what’s left if they have any chance of survival.
Many leading shittifiers don’t match your explanation. Google, the owner of YouTube, is not a small start-up VC toy.
Monetize
And this is exactly why we won’t actually get any new special projects, because anything which can’t be easily monetized will be treated as competition and ruined deliberately, and anything which can be easily monetized will be purchased and worn like a skin suit by greedy corpos the way the current Internet is being used.
I miss forums. Not that they disappeared completely but that used to be the go-to for good info. Still is maybe, cause I’ve read through a lot of garbage trying to learn about something pretty simple and then hit a forum post that’s like “well it depends if it’s early- or late-season blight”. What? The twenty garden blog posts I studied never mention such a distinction. But there’s Jimmy in Mt Carmel Indiana breaking it down.
It is trivial to replace them. The only difficult part is killing them because they’re sucking all the air out of the internet.
There cannot be a facebook replacement as long as facebook exists. There will not be more than one center of the internet.
No.1 Apparently not present on uBlock Origin, which makes it not a problem for me (though it’s shite that they are doing it anyway). I don’t use YouTube that often anyways.
No.2 You are not loosing a lot - it’s most likely some crappy video about a guy slipping on a banana peel or some shit like this - 99.9% you are not missing on much :D
Yeah, the developers of AdBlock Plus have come out stating the problem is on their side.
https://twitter.com/gorhill/status/1746263759495077919
If you haven’t switched to uBlock Origin, then now is the time.
See as much as I dislike the company, I can see how it would make sense from a business and logic point of view. They are paying for the servers and, to some extent and form, for the content, and by using any ad blocking content you sabotage their earnings from this platform. I’m surprised they are not blocking browsers with said plugins, but that would cause a major uproar. But then again, not much competition around…
They are sabotaging their own platform because of greed.
Most wouldn’t be using an ad blocker if it weren’t for their anti-consumer practices.
fr, i didn’t use for the longest time because a 5 seconds ad before every video and some on the side never bothered me much, it was when it started being 2 UNSKIPABBLE ADS BEFORE EVERY VIDEO, PLUS MID ROLL ADS that I couldn’t deal with it anymore
