- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.ml
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See title “Why the Internet Isn’t Fun Anymore”. Click link to see. Page loads and shows cookie consent popup over 2/3 of the page. Yeah, well played.
I’m old school. Sometimes when I’m doing a deep dive into a new technical topic, I like to print to paper, go off and sit in my back yard with a beer and a pen to make margin notes. Today, I was trying to understand some web framework esoterica. I found what would have been a 14 page very deep dive article with code samples.
I haven’t written code more complex than simple scripting to automate stuff for years. I can still understand code. I wanted to understand this better to make some decisions about security setting in Apache for the devs who are interacting with this framework.
Hit print, and the preview window popped up. As I said, it was 14 pages. Before sending the the printer, I glanced at the first page. There was this big, square blank space on the bottom right, obscuring text. I canceled the print preview. There was a big ad overlay on the bottom right of the screen. I closed it and went back the print preview. I could see the first page.
I scrolled through the preview. Every other page had a different blank section obscuring the text. They were all smaller than the first, but made it unreadable. I’m assuming it’s some other overlay designed to come up as I scroll.
I could likely have pulled up the developer view and started editing so I could get a readable printed copy.
It wasn’t worth it. I closed the page and moved on.
Like I said I’m old school. I absolutely appreciate that someone took the time to do what looked like a very technical deep dive on what I was looking for. I do not want to read that type of deep technical material on a site with constantly popping up animated ads interrupting my conversation. I’m not even that upset, I just see it as another example of why I don’t like the timeline we’re in.
Have you tried reader mode? In both firefox and chrome (i think, I haven’t checked other browsers) there’s a button usually in the address bar that you can click and it’ll format the article into a readable page instead of a bunch of ad-riddled garbage. It works pretty well generally.
Thanks! I’ll try that next time.
Ridiculous … for 11k of text.
The social-media Web as we knew it, a place where we consumed the posts of our fellow-humans and posted in return, appears to be over.
The social media web was literally the start of the decline. There used to be thousands of niche internet forums, now everything is in a AOL style walled garden.
The thing I hated most with social media is that no one really wanted to email anymore.
I used to have several pen pals around the world. We would exchange long mails every couple of days telling each other about our lives. But the moment social media popped up, the one-on-one conversations started to shift to posts with something everybody got to comment on. And on top of that, they didn’t seem very personal anymore. Not like the friends I used to know.
Didn’t take long for those friendships to fizzle out. I’m still quite sad about it.I wonder if Discord is replacing that? Lots of teens have their private discord servers (or whatever they’re called) where they chat with each other. It reminds me of ICQ, MSN Messenger, Trillian, and the other chat protocols we used to have.
I never had the experience of email pen pals, but there are still ways people are connecting with each other authentically online.
Discord seems to be ethereal. If you’re on when things are happening, cool. If not…it’s just a wasteland, like walking into a bar at 10am and seeing holographic echoes of last night.
usenet was probably the first community I found on the internet, and I think the format is still a good template for human interaction. Reddit was, in a way, very similar in it’s “old” and pre-enshittified format and I believe that’s why it found success. It’s less about discovery and more about deep dive, niche communities where you can connect with real and remote people with the same interests.
I use the internet for so much more than social media; the only real downside (aside from the loss of communities like usenet/reddit as a common point of connection) is that the search engines have tipped over and are getting worse rather than better. They’re falling into the AI/ML autocorrect disaster hole where specific, technical queries are dumbed down to an 8 year old’s level of perception because that’s what the average user is searching for.
Web2.0 was bullshit and plebs fell for it.
So now we are under fucking survielliance regime and social media is used to drive public opinion better than cable ever could.
I thought Web 2.0 was stuff like AJAX and DHTML, like Google Maps compared to old MapQuest. That started in the mid 00’s. The tracking stuff came about a decade later.
Tracking stuff came as soon as you could communicate asynchronously with a server, really. It became widely known and a plague in the 10s but it started as soon as Ajax was available. Keep in mind that Google and most of the websites were free and ads driven almost from the start because that was the only way to create a critical mass of users.
You could definitely track folks with cookies well before Web 2.0, but the storage and processors necessary for the sort of data harvesting we see today didn’t really get profitable until the '10s. Before that Google would run ads that were relevant to the search query rather than tracking your move around the web.
Web 2.0 was the web going from being just documents to web applications. And to an extend it’s great, the problem is when sites that are supposed to be just documents (like news sites) try to become applications.
The AOL garden was amazing as a kid, lately I’ve been wondering if there’s going to be something similar for my baby when she gets older.
In the early 00s, here in my city, it was fun to go to a certain pedestrians-only avenue to drink with friends. Or a date. If you do it now - yes, post-COVID lockdowns! - you can’t hold a conversation for five fucking minutes without someone interrupting you with advertisement. As a result, people use that avenue nowadays strictly to commute.
I’ve ditched TV when I was 14. (I don’t regret it.) But plenty people told me that open TV, and then cabled TV, became unbearable due to the sheer amount of advertisement.
Unless I recognise the number, I’m not bothering to pick the phone up any more. I’m probably not the only one doing it.
Are you noticing the pattern? Perhaps the internet suffers a bit more with it because people are a bit freer to do what they want here, but the problem is not exclusive to the internet, it’s everywhere advertisers appear. The world has become less fun due to advertisers (“how do people DARE to have fun and ignore our «marketing opportunities»?”).
Wait. So, like a person interrupts you? Can you explain this like I don’t understand it?
Wait. So, like a person interrupts you?
The thing in my city? It’s like this, but each 5~10 minutes. Each time it’s a different person advertising something else. It’s frequent enough that you can’t hold a decent conversation, even if your only “mistake” was to sit on a bench in a public space. If you ignore the advertiser, they’ll insist and use a slightly louder tone, as if you were assumed to be deaf; and if you ask them to leave you alone [even politely] they’ll babble about “trying to help you so you don’t miss this amazing opportunity”.
Just to give you an idea: once, my then girlfriend and me decided to count it. We sit on a bench, drinking some booze, and we got twelve advertisers bugging us in a hour and half. Including: eyeglasses stores, phone providers advertising “number portability”, local popular restaurants, handcrafted accessories sellers, gold buyers, so goes on.
It’s basically an offline example of the same thing that happens on the internet. Everybody and their dog wants your attention, and they’ll make sure to be heard against your will. The text doesn’t directly acknowledge that, but note how everything there ties it to advertisers, from “S.E.O. hackers have ruined the trick of adding “Reddit” to searches to find human-generated answers” (why? For ad views!) to Tiktok “pushes us to scroll through another dozen videos of cooking demonstrations or funny animals” (why? Ad views.)
Wtf that’s nuts and sounds like it breaks several laws, like harassment and disturbing the peace or sum. I’d definitely have a stern word with them.
I never looked for potential laws against that, because… well, Latin America. But I think that it would be hard to classify it as either - it’s multiple independent and uncoordinated agents, and the disturbance/harassment is not due to one of them interacting with you, but all of them.
I think that the city needs to pass some law specifically against selling and advertising stuff on public places.
This is gonna sound silly but I have that with joggers. Like I just want to relax in the park and there’s all these joggers stressing me out with their self improvement vibes. So I end up having to go outside the city to find some peace in nature.
To be fair I do it myself too.
Anyway that sounds really annoying for you.
One time my roommate let a solicitor in during Corona. My god I gave him such a stern word I wouldn’t be surprised if he quit because of it. I was so angry because I hadn’t seen my friends in ages and then this fucker can just come visit? There’s no way that was legal in Germany.
Well, in my country you can call the police when the person doesn’t leave you alone when told so. But given the US police and US Freedom of Speech ™ I’m not so sure…
I guess I am lucky since that doesn’t happen where I live.
Not comment OP, but I assume its similar to mine. People will approach you to give you flyers of their buisness, free samples, or otherwise smooth talk you to enter their shop/stand.
When you’re sitting in a restaurant or bar chilling with friends. It is a thing that happens.
It’s “a thing that happens” when it’s sporadic. But when it becomes frequent, annoying or obtrusive enough, it becomes a reason to avoid the space, it makes the space less fun. Same deal with the internet.
The author wants to bring light to the issue, but they’re also part of the problem and actively making it worse. They pretty much only talk about Twitter because that’s pretty much all they use. They’re not even trying to explore the internet. Lemmy and Mastadon are big exceptions to his conclusion, but he probably has no idea about them because he’s not actually fighting to take his control back from Twitter’s algorithm.
With kbin and lemmy, there’s a spark of the good ol’ days, but the players are all scattered across so many disconnected grids. I’m sure there are some great communities popping up, but they may be fleeting, or instances might crash and disappear. Mastodon is good, and growing every day and also has some of that Ye Olde Twitter Feels, but — BUT! — I don’t have a lot of fun on it.
Has anybody found any fun communities to share?
I’m feeling the opposite, with federation it’s trying too hard to be like social media.
I prefer to have disconnected communities like the forums of the old times.
I’m pretty happy with Lemmy and still ok with YouTube. It feels like old times, BEFORE social media sites and apps re-centralized the Internet.
What we need is a searchable database for the fediverse. The ways to find communities in lemmy and individuals to follow on Mastodon could be better.
I can remember the first time I thought there was something seriously wrong with all the social media habits people were getting sucked into; that was probably like in 2008 or so, when some of my colleagues and I used to joke about how we could never get through any kind of interaction with another colleague of ours without her constantly scrolling her phone like 25 times a minute. It only got worse from there…
The biggest sigh of relief I have had in a long, long time was deleting my Google apps and account. I also deleted Facebook, Twitter, and lastly Reddit account over the summer. The only “social accounts” I have today are this one and my new e-mail account. I now use Startpage for searching if I need it, so no more “googling” things. I haven’t subbed to cable since 2010, but I do sub to HBO (er… “Max” now ffs… I am considering dumping that too…), and The Criterion Channel which is still awesome. Rest of the time, I work, game, hike, or swim.
Getting rid of Google is sort of like trying to get all the fish out of the sea. They are everywhere, hooked into everything, and they constantly nag you. I had to give them another e-mail address before I could even delete the one I had with them, which really annoyed me. None of their business where I got off to… except it is. According to them. So, I had to trash that email account too afterwards just so I could stop getting stupid Google spam.
Anyway, it is definitely possible to unplug just takes some effort. The internet is a lot more pleasant without all that nonsense. :)
Ads?
It’s a chore. It’s where life happens anymore. Take some time off, and you lose the thread of reality.
Anyone else feeling like all these platforms are being intentionally dismantled in order to prevent us uniting?
