Getting hit by a paywall to read this article, maybe made the point better than the article!
this post was submitted on 17 Oct 2023
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it's so sad. this is going to sound pathetic, but -- i remember in high school browsing reddit and twitter and 4chan and almost getting a buzz off of it, the interactions felt so cutting-edge, funny and fresh and perfectly transient, it felt like i had a voice for the first time, able to post and have people like what i posted.
and now we're kinda just...going thru the motions and everything is worse and companies are just blindly nuking things we used to hold sacred
I hear you. When I was a teen, Internet was:
A handful of focused websites or your buddies geocities / angelfire site.
Chatting in crazy chat rooms on IRC, and having your close friends on ICQ.
Using a dial up modem to play doom, Warcraft 2, red alert, duke nukem, quake, StarCraft, total annihilation.. etc.
Those were fun times. Felt like the bleeding edge of tech.. hiding out and having fun in places people haven't even heard of.
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I know there is truth in that the internet I worse.
But I do wonder how much of our feeling that is worse is more based on the glamor of youth and nostalgia.
I think there’s some of this, but I do honestly believe the internet has fundamentally changed and the makeup of it is a lot different. This isn’t all bad, but there’s a lot of things that we’ve lost now that the internet has become more centralized and corporate in general. At least proportionally I think there’s far fewer passion project websites and a lot of people gather on big websites instead, and there’s fewer communities that are strictly about a niche topic. In some sense this is good because things are generally more accessible to the average person, but I feel like the niche weirdos have been drowned out a bit in the eternal September, and there’s something a little sad about that too!
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Imagine needing proof of something so basic that you could see it just being being online over the past decade, if not decade and a half.
Not everyone is old enough to know the difference. Imagine being 20. What frame of reference do you have?
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Sometimes people think they know the obvious answer and they turn out to be wrong. It's good to have clear evidence of what is going on.
In recent years, it’s been harder to love the internet, a miracle of connectivity that feels ever more bloated, stagnant, commercialized, and junkified. We are just now starting to understand the specifics of this transformation—the true influence of Silicon Valley’s vise grip on our lives. It turns out that the slow rot we might feel isn’t just in our heads, after all.
☹️
The Internet is getting more decentralized, with better alternatives for big corporate services
it's it though?
in our Fediverse bubble yes.
but so many average people just don't care.
They care, they just don't know about the alternatives, and most don't have the time or knowledge to research them, especially with the biggest companies doing their best to mystify technology as a whole, and reduce user experience to a carefully cultivated all inclusive proprietary prison
They care in the sense that they want [Facebook|Youtube|Twitter|Instagram] without the enshittification. When told about alternatives with some promise that aren't exactly that, they often don't have the mental energy to explore.
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Its much more than "the internet is worse". Everything technology is worse, can't have nice things.
I have a microwave/air fryer/convection combo that I can't use unless I install a phone app. It came with the apartment. It has only a few "buttons" on its face. The UI is almost completely non-intuitive, but the app makes it easy. Every time I bake bread I fight the urge to blow my brains out as I navigate to the app. I have become that which I mocked.
I yearn for the days when my toaster just made toast.
There's a line that needs to be drawn between things that benefit from IoT and things that should've remained dumb
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I can't believe this is true. Show pictures and link to the vendor. I wanna see this for myself.
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It turns outcapitalism is great for maximising profits, but terrible for consumers, and demanding open-source products is the only way out of this hell-hole
Here's the proof: vaguely motions in the general direction of everything
This is the Internet. We don't need proof.
…but also paywalls it
Maybe it's time to regulate the fuck out of the internet.
The thing is, who is going to regulate a transnational, abstract and ethereal space?
Well you could start by regulating the major US companies since those are the root of the issue described here. The internet as an abstract space is perfectly fine because there are enough independent providers for the required services to use or host on the internet. It's the few that abuse.
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> have proof that internet is worse
> requires subscription to read
There you have it, boys!
I mean I'm on board with the generality, but looking up the original article it looks like was was taken down, stating:
EDITOR’S NOTE 10/6/2023: After careful review of the op-ed, "How Google Alters Search Queries to Get at Your Wallet," and relevant material provided to us following its publication, WIRED editorial leadership has determined that the story does not meet our editorial standards. It has been removed.
Apologies for the disgusting timestamp. I'm quoting.
It could be I'm missing something though since I can't see the whole article. It sounded like the Wired article was the basis for this one by The Atlantic.
The internet isn't worse, it's just the web. The Internet is much better actually:
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There are more subsea cables with more capacity, the Internet is meshed better these days. Losing any single subsea cable doesn't have as much of an impact as it used to.
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Additionally you don't need to cache stuff with reverse proxies in each AS anymore because long distance transmission has gotten way cheaper, and more available.
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The last mile issues are also solved, though for now only in densly populated areas in advanced economies. With fiber connections to individual dwellings you get scaling that's infinite for practical purposes. This also means you can have a gigabit connection end to end without bloating buffers on DSL or DOCSIS modems.
Worse than what?
Than it was.
Not just nostalgia tinted glasses, it really was better in the earlier years.
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