Internet developments have gone from exciting to dreadful.
Idk if this is the right community for this conversation, but it's been on my mind and I want to share it with someone.
In the 00's every new thing we heard about the internet was exciting. There were new protocols, new ways to communicate, new ways to share files, new ways to find each other. Every time we heard anything new about the internet, it was always progress.
That lasted into the early teens and then things started changing. Things started stagnating. Now we're well into the phase where every new piece of news we hear is negative. New legislations, new privacy intrusions, new restrictions, new technologies to lock content away and keep us from sharing, or seeing the content we were looking for. New ways to force ads.
At one point the Internet was my most favorite thing in the world. Now I don't know if I even like it anymore. I certainly don't look forward to hearing news about it. It's sad, man. We've lost a lot. The mega corps took the internet from us, changed it from a million small sites that people created because they had big ideas, or were passionate about small ones, and turned it into a few enormous sites with no new ideas, no passion, just an insatiable desire for money.
We're at the end of an era, and unlike the last 20 years of progress, I don't think most of us will like what the next era brings.
Well. Those corporations took their money and threw it in. Basically fusions of different services. Besides that you have a lot of clickbaits and cheap stuff like dropshops and so on.
You gotta be very picky on what services you use. Lemmy f.e. is amazing for me. It does not feel like someone wants to get money off me.
The internet basically became what the analog world was before and it's anything else than amazing.
Edit: in short terms: Capitalism took the internet from the people.
Well said. The Internet was certainly a lot more fun before anyone figured out how to make money on it. But it's insane that these companies make more money now than even the largest giants did when I was a kid, and it's still not enough for them. I'm just flabbergasted by their insatiable desire. They could keep a good product and still pull insane profits, but they're willing to burn it all down for another percentage point on their quarterly return. I guess that's a change to the world in general now too. There used to be a common wisdom that if you built a great product, and made your customers happy, you'd be successful. The prevailing attitude now is that the success that comes from that isn't enough anymore. You need to make the worst product that you're still able to sell, and then make sure you sell it to the same people multiple times. It's gross.
It’s the cancer that capitalism truly is. If you’re not growing, you’re failing and enshittification is an inevitable late stage consequence of capitalism.
It’s just pump and dump.
Maybe, but I don't think it is. Enshittification is a direct result of our tax policy that encourages cashing out, only looks at the short term, and requires constant growth.
There was a time when companies built a reputation and held onto it for a hundred years. We could go back to that.
Tax the rich.
Agreed. We need to revert to meaningful tax brackets and apply some new ones to prevent billionaires.
Yup. Wikipedia is a good example for an instance that solely exists to support people.
There are plenty sites of this. Take a look at some websites that are teaching you skills without asking for money and so on.
That's how I remember the internet. Sharing knowledge. Of course bigger sites need to make ends meet somehow and that fine with me. But as you already said - more more more.
I’d say that the old Internet is still there. It’s just sharing space with the much bigger, much more mainstream, capitalist juggernaut now, with limited overlap.
Other than online shopping, my Internet use hasn’t changed all that much since 2008, other than having to add a bunch of anti-tracking stuff to my web browser.
Yeah. I just know that forums aren't a thing any more. Old fashioned browser games are rare.
Otherwise a lot of valuable news sites became clickbait ad bloated monsters. Only a few are still good.
But yeah.. it gets easily overshadowed
What they do is the essence of capitalism. More growth. More profits. Enough, or the same as last year, is not sufficient. It must be more, the numbers must go up. And any publicly traded company is legally bound to pursue gains for its shareholders, they actually cannot stop. What makes a corporation is the same thing that makes them hellbent on yet another fraction of a percentage in profits.
The whole system is utterly ridiculous and fundamentally incompatible with reality, once you actually think about these things. A system demanding infinite growth in a finite world.
This is a lovely summary of modern capitalism. The carnival barkers would have you still believe that excellence rises to the top, but it doesn't. What wins is the appearance of excellence, as a facade for the least effort possible, like you said.
Share markets created this perverse incentive that rewards businesses for appearing successful even if they produce fuck all. I'm thinking of Jack Welch era GE or today's preeminent carbon credit trading firm, Tesla Motors.
It reminds me of the feedback loop engulfing the major LLMs as they consume more and more of their own content and start outputting lower and lower quality: the original goal of rewarding the best is long lost, replaced by making line go up at all costs.
The 90s were worse imo when it came to quarterly returns
Yeah, for all of Lemmy's shortcomings, it's the best thing to happen to my internet in the last year.
A decently thriving online community of thousands of active users, not run by an entity or corporate board intent on sucking every last cent from people? Hell yeah!
Funny I said the same thing in 1995.
The internet is what you make of it. Meaning, you don’t need the entire wide area network, you just need what you don’t want in your local area network.
In terms of an interconnected network, you need only what you need!
This is an amazing time. Lemmy, self hosting, docker, cloud hosting, $100 consumer devices that rival $10k servers from ten years ago, AI, LLM, global gaming, etc….
Yeah I’m with you. Just look at reddit. Enshitification has gone too far and it’s leading to decentralization. Here we are, after all.
I’m sure the streaming services are next. The nice thing about software tech is it is easy for folks to develop alternatives
100% + you can already see it on the fringes. The need for a server to stream content evaporates w/advancement in client-side compute. Why plex or jellyfin when you can do it all in the rendering layer?
Our interconnected network layers function because of open standards, with layers decoupling complexity up & down (sep of concerns) as well as left & right (standards that facilitate novel capabilities).
In 2004 I was a radical young man protesting for bikes and against the Iraq War. At one of the meetups another kid who had been at the RNC protest in New York showed us this software someone had hacked together overnight to broadcast SMS messages. Basically you could send an SMS to a VOIP phone number and it would echo the SMS to everyone subscribed. They were using it to communicate in the crowd at the protest and avoid police kettles. It was pretty cool but I admit I didn't really see it as being more broadly useful.
Later that night the group went for drinks and I was talking with one of the older radicals and he was telling me that the internet was too good and too powerful and they were going to shut it down. I thought that was absurd. How could they get rid of the internet!? He said they would figure out a way to shut it down, there's just no way they could leave it out there, it's too dangerous for them to do so.
Now I look at the thing we call "the internet" in 2023 and it looks nothing like that internet. The current internet is completely corralled, controlled and monetized. He was totally right. While they never "flipped the switch" on it they used salami tactics little by little until there was nothing left.
It's death by a thousand cuts, and we're not even at the death, yet. No matter how cut up and enervated the internet already is, the denial is present for those that refuse to see it or just don't remember the time before the cuts. It's even in this thread, basically wearing this face:
There didn't even need to be a deliberate cartel for this to happen either.
Amazon realized it could make money and grow the company by offering cloud services and now AWS runs something like 30% of the internet.
Google turned their leading search algorithms into an extensive tracking and advertising platform that integrates with most of the internet.
Apple decided that people don't need to be allowed to tinker with and repair their own devices so that hardware can be locked into a four-year cycle of planned obsolescence.
A whole bunch of profit-maximizing firms did the hard job of controlling everything for the governments.
I only really watch foss stuff, which should be exciting, but I get tired as it's always much of the same news:
So I'm not exactly thrilled about anything either, tho for every different reasons
A complete rewrite/redesign actually happens but with half of the original app's features missing
Ugh, flashbacks to KDE 4...
and GNOME 3 too
Rewrites have failed so often that I wonder why people still think they make any sense.
It's easy to look at source code and see that it's got complicated. It's harder to work out when it's complicated because it needs to do something complicated like model something from the real world that's complicated, or when it's complicated because it's accumulated loads of old crap. If you start experimenting with a rewrite, typically it'll look like it mostly works before you've added most of the necessary complexity, and that can trick people into thinking that it wasn't actually necessary.
Yeah, but what I meant more is that in almost every case, refactoring is the way to go.
I've been looking into continuing or updating old programs that don't have maintainers in the FSF/GNU list, but the mailing lists and archaic webpages don't help much.
I'm still learning, but I'm tired of not seeing enough good FOSS alternatives or only discontinued ones.
yes, it's much needed now as many projects needs contributions and you can create a website and list all of the contributions that is required to make it a real foss alternative
In the meanwhile, EU legislation has gone from being so boring you would prefer to watch the grass grow to making headlines that make you smile.
Ironically, farmers, the people most interested and invested into watching grass grow, has benefited greatly from EU agriculture subsidiaries in the past.
What about the people who watch paint dry? Surely the EU has their back covered too.
Nah, that's what the paint is for..
The enshitification of all things is so frustrating. You witness perfectly useful technology being destroyed in the pursuit of like 5 dollars. I don't answer the phone unless I've told someone to call me because it's always a robot, my email inbox is full of garbage I didn't ask for so I don't check in much, now they've got robots texting me scams. I can't even pay for petrol in peace, because they make a nickel having a tiny television try to sell me an energy drink. And nothing is done because heaven forefend that anything should come in the way of an extra .02% increase in some asshole's quarterly report.
I was pumping gas a couple of weeks ago and that stupid TV came on and started playing ads at full blast. I stopped pumping, went inside, and pulled a Karen. I asked for the manager and then told him that I want someone to know that I'm never coming back to that station because it's forcing ads on me when I'm already paying for a product. Then I left and will never go back. I know they don't give a shit about one person, but if more people took these stands then we could stop having so much shit shoved down our throats.
I can't in good conscience make a worker's day worse because of something they don't control, but I understand the sentiment. I agree though that collective action is probably our best shot at seeing change.
I wasn't rude about it. I doubt it had any measurable impact on their day at all.
Yea, as long as you aren't rude to the employee at all, you are good in my book.
If I was going to complain, I would start with something like, "Hey I know this isn't your fault and you just work here, but can you tell your boss..." Not only will that let the employee know that it's nothing personal, but the employee is more likely to bring it up to management.
You can thank capitalism for this, back at the dawn of the internet it was largely just regular people running sites and building organic networks. Then the internet started getting commercialized, and the tech started turning increasingly user hostile and exploitative.
Corporations complain about how IOT was supposed to be the next big thing but it went bust. Meanwhile they are the ones who tried to use it intrude on everyones lives. Which is why no one wants it.
some goofball did a whole song about it
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
some goofball did a whole song about it
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.
a classic
I've been using Linux for decades and I don't use the big tech sites much. I get excited about a new release of Gnome or KDE or some cool command line utility...
Because you are right, the web is taken over and they want to turn it into cable TV subscriptions for sites and verified internet accounts etc.
The goals of the security agencies and the goals of the big tech ad agencies go hand in hand. None of them care about the users, and both of them just wants the user data, as much as possible.
I think using tech like Lemmy and Matrix gets us away from all of that shit, and it's good enough these days for anyone to use without too much trouble.
I read it as: 'They embraced, extended and extinguished what you held dear'.
Exactly.
I totally agree with you here. Now it feels like bots (AI) making content for bots (crawlers) and the only thing we a getting programmed to use is Google, where your question is answered without the need to even visit the website it took the data from.
It's just boring and I'm a website developer 🤷♂️
Google has been trying very hard, for a very long time, to be the only destination on the internet. They want all the traffic. They started with site summaries at the top of the search page, then they moved to AMP, where they're in charge of serving the content that others create, now they even show Reddit chains on their home page, and who knows what they have planned next. By serving content that other people created they get to serve their ads and keep 100% of the revenue, rather than sharing a pittance with some small AdSense publisher. They announced to the world that their values had changed when they changed their motto from Don't Be Evil, and they're certainly ignoring it now.
Even before it changed its motto, the idea of a company saying "don't do evil" is on the same level as a cat saying "don't scratch furniture".
Welcome to capitalism
Now go home?
The way I see it Steve Jobs marked a turning point with those Apple events. The corporate platitude bullshit with the "you told us and we listened" jargon. Before technology was mainly hobbyist nerds making stuff out of the love of technology. There was a two way relationship where the developers trusted the users and the users trusted the developers be acting in good faith. Now it's lifeless and jaded beneath a veneer of forced corporate smiles. Over the years everyone adopted the turtleneck speak in one way or another.
It's an insult to our intelligence to push anti-patterns. All while expecting us to engage like sheep in the mandatory capitalist pep rally. 'We made 20% efficiency to your oppressive experience. Now cheer! I said CHEER damn it'.
One of the posters in these replies, right now, is like an animated Steve Jobs turtleneck come to life trying to peddle hustlegrinds.
if it wasn't him, it would have been someone else. this is just what capitalism does - monetize every single aspect of anything people enjoy.
Eh… He was a great marketer, but he didn't usher in our current tech dystopia. I blame social media.
I blame Google. When the same company owns the most popular search engine, most widely-used browser, most popular email service, one of the largest video sharing platforms, and the largest online advertiser, that’s called a monopoly.
Our current tech dystopia has many facets and factors that went into creating it.
Jobs' quest to simplify computing (great), unfortunately came along with a maniacal god complex and demand for control that led to Apple creating a monopolistic vertically integrated walled garden that stifles innovation and avoids competition. It's the model that Google has increasingly pursued and is a part of why tech innovation has stalled out these days.
The death of this guy has to do with some of it, he worked on some pretty cool stuff and was an all-around pretty awesome dude working for the betterment of the world.
you mean the murder of this guy
That widely depends on what you are using it for. I think it’s amazing.
I can buy a computer for $500 with 8 cores, 32GB ram, 512GB NVME storage. I can install free open source linux distribution on it that manages virtual machines. It can run dozens of containerized free/open source applications on it.
Then, i can use my domain name and freely available services like letsencrypt and cloudflare to make it securely available on the internet.
Internet is what you make of it, always has been.
If you only rely to 3rd party websites then you’re missing out on a lot of usability.
I guess it depends on when you stared using it.
Today, a lot if people take a lot of things for granted.
I still remember the days of waiting for a website to load, making myself coffee while it’s loading.
Now i can stream realtime 4k video of my house on my phone, served by my computer.
I can game with friends conencted to my voice chat server that i own and has awesome voice quality and low latency.
I can have all my files available wherever i am, instantly.
I can forget my phone and my laptop, login to my server at a friend’s computer and do whatever i need to do.
All that wouldn’t be possible if the internet was stuck in the 90’s.
Bit of a silly question:
I got quite the overkill server‡ for free‡‡ a little while ago and I've been struggling to find stuff to do with it
What kind of stuff do you self host?
Basically all I've got currently is TrueNAS Scale running on mine and it feels like a bit of a waste just running that.
‡ My server is from 2012 but it's got dual hexacore Xeons (can't recall exact model), 192GB of RAM, and about 40 TB of storage in Raid-Z2. The storage came from my old crusty NAS, I didn't get that for free.
‡‡ Well mostly free, I was told I could have it if I got it out of they're garage which took about 2 days.
So it idles with a 250W power consumption?
Surprisingly no
It idles at about 150w
Here are a couple of ideas:
I'm sure there's more
The best (and simplest) thing I have running is AdGuard Home. It’s a DNS server you run that blocks ads on the entire network.
I also run a wireguard server on my router and clients on my laptops and phone.
With these combined when on the road on cell or Wi-Fi connections all my traffic goes right to my home internet and it’s like I’m home.
I have access to all internal services, devices, and I get no ads in apps and websites (where technically possible). Highly highly recommend. I couldn’t live without it.
I also have home assistant running but that is way more work than just installing a server. It’s almost a hobby in of itself.
Editing - I didn’t mention it but PiHole is an alternative to AdGuard Home. I didn’t mention PiHole to keep things simple but after years of using PiHole I’ve switched to AdGuard Home mostly because of the per client configs, ease of maintenance and UI. As always, check out both and choose what’s best for you.
I’m not hosting a lot, just things i wanted to have in order to replace having a pc with installed apps. I want stuff to be a available on a web browser.
Some of the things i host:
NGINX Proxy manager - pretty much required Joplin - notes, apps for all platforms available Wiki.js - to replace Joplin, i don’t like installed apps HomeAssistant - home automation Mealie - converted my family paper cookbook Paperless-ngx - documents organization Mumble - voice chat server for gaming and meetings NextCloud - pretty much self explanatory Jellyfin - i want to be able to play media that is stored on the NAS, family photos, videos MQTT - self explanatory ZigbeeToMQTT - connect zigbee devices to MQTT Grafana - pretty graphs WireGuard - VPN access Trillium - to replace joplin for actual note taking Homepage - to display and organize all services VS Code Server - self explanatory OctoPrint - printer management Whoogle - i don’t like ads and “algorithms”
My total TDP is 15 watts. Idle is about 5W. I can’t imagine what i would do with a higher power consuming machine, it wouldn’t be financially feasible.
In my teenage years, the Internet was my favorite escape from the horribleness of my offline life. I thought it would always remain so, so decided to start a career in software engineering because that would be an improvement to the world.
Now that I haven't been a teenager for nearly ten years, often enough the Internet is actively bad for my mental health and I have to get away from it to improve my mood. I have no interest in participating in propaganda wars.
Now it's up to you to take a shot at creating the next exciting thing. Aim high and give all you can to succeed.
What do you have in mind for the 99.99% of people that don't win the tech innovation lottery?
What do you have in mind for the 99.99% of people that don't win the tech innovation lottery?
Choose and make the winners. Exciting stuff on the internet is not exclusive. On lemmy, everybody wins.
To summarize, then, you have nothing but empty hustlegrind slogans.
Making money is not a goal on lemmy, so why should there be more rewards than entertainment?
If you want to make money, you have to look elsewhere. Crypto was an idea, but as we know, not sustainable.
If you don't find something, build it. Think like Bill Gates: build a platform where everybody can earn something. Don't keep everything for yourself.
Edit: Don't think like Bill Gates. Just consider the idea of not squeezing out all profits for yourself, which, ironically, I have first read as a quote of him.
So you're telling me I should get into eugenics and strive to blame all the world's problems on the people outside the imperial core breeding too much?
No, he's telling you to get into some really fucked up pedo shit with
you should think like Bill Gates and play 9/11 in minecraft
Millions must never remember
Think like Bill Gates: use monopoly power to drive all your competitors out of business then write your own antitrust settlement where you pinkie swear to be a good boy for five whole years.
The key part is that Bill Gates made the conscious decision to leave profits on the table for others. I haven't heard that advice from anybody else.
That said, there are many more evil things like breaking the platform promise and taking over app categories. But there is no need to copy those ideas.
Bruh you just told people to think like a billionaire pedophile eugenics guy and you really need to address that before we talk about anything else.
Changed. Better?
I forgot the pedophile allegations and haven't heard about the eugenics. The critique is correct and that background information makes me feel bad for the phrasing.
The phrasing was meant for the billionaire part, though. When a person is all about making money and that person stresses how important it is not to be greedy when building a platform, then that's something to remember.
That's so very much more evil than anything that happened at Little St. James during Bill Gates' return visits, huh?
The idea that Bill Gates left money on the table for others with Microsoft isn't just wrong, it's so exactly the opposite of reality that it boggles the mind. Did he leave money on the table for other DOSes with windows 95? For other office suites with MSOffice? For Netscape with bundled IE?
Where did you get such a comprehensively false idea from?
I read it in an interview years ago.
The office suits and the browsers are indeed among the apps that were taken over. The money was made by all the other commercial apps, and games.
I should say that I don't support that abuse of power.
Just take the L, accept your corpo hustlegrind clown show isn't being received well, and stop dodging labels the way a failed carnival act dodges produce thrown by the audience.
This just in: billionaire pedophile eugenics guy lies
That's just a lie you are a liar
Edit: or a credulous fool
So, again, more empty hustlegrind slogans.
If you walked out of your bubble and pitched those at a homeless person, you'd be lucky if all you got was spit on.
Like a child predator and frequent flyer at Little St. James that used "philanthropy" to wreck the United States public school system and broker eugenics experiments in impoverished countries? The one that made sure covid vaccines remained locked down under patent? I refuse.
Exactly. I think lemmy is flawed, but it's a lot more exciting than the status quo, so I try to help out. Right to repair isn't Internet specific, but it'll likely have an ripple effect as people decide to take back ownership of their devices and data. Cryptocurrency is a ponzy scheme, but the idea of a decentralized service as important as a currency is exciting, especially for the ripple effect it's likely to cause (e.g. we could use similar tech to decentralize lemmy).
There's a lot of exciting stuff if you know where to look.
Do you think it was invented as a Ponzi scheme, or has that just become the perception based off the massive initial growth in value? I think that the goal was always for the eventual stabilization of the currency, which of course means that mining becomes less and less profitable. It needs to eventually hit a point where mining produces no new coins for the currency to hit stability. But then idk why anyone would run the servers required for verification. At that point the verification becomes massively power intensive. So maybe it was always a Ponzi scheme? I'm no crypto expert, so I don't really know.
It was corrupted in much the same way the stock market was corrupted. That whole thing is mostly speculative gambling now, when it was supposed to about profit sharing with companies that were either sound investments currently with steady profits or up-and-coming companies that had potential. Now it's just casino gambling betting on prices that are completely divorced from reality that expects infinite growth of made up value.
Go read a bit of Satoshi's white paper on Bitcoin. It was created in response to the banking industry as a way for individuals to securely own digital currency without a centralized institution.
I have. I know the stated goal. The question is do you think that was the actual intent, or was it always intended as an elaborate ponzi scheme? I think it has more or less lived up to its stated goal, but as a currency. People think it's a Ponzi scheme because it's treated as an investment. From that perspective I can see why they think that and I wonder if they think that's what it was originally created for.
If it was a Ponzi scheme from the get go he would have cashed out his billions by now.
No, it just didn't get traction for actual transactions fast enough and it just became a target for speculation. That's a positive feedback loop where volatility discourages use as a currency while encouraging speculation.
I think what we need is to establish an independent digital currency first, and then decentralize it. For example, GNU Taler, and then build out the infrastructure and a cryptocurrency could then be phased in. Once the mass market uses digital payments outside the banking network regularly, they'll be ready to adopt something like BitCoin for international use.
A big part of it is that people are so unbelievably cynical now. They'll rush over one another to point out and then circlejerk over the most negative aspects of every new development, while ignoring every positive.
The old internet would have flipped out over ChatGPT, much less Midjourney, and generated thousands of hilarious stories and images and websites that made ridiculous random comic books or fake government websites for absurd departments or whatever. They would have been delighted with it...and as an afterthought it may have occurred to them that there might be downsides.
Today, people get furious about the fact that AI exists, that it was trained on existing material, that it might affect people's lives. Long articles are written on the terrible effects AI is going to have on politics or media. Post an AI-generated image in anything other than an AI-art forum, and you'll be absolutely lambasted. Suggest that there may just be a few updates and watch the downvotes and angry replies flood in.
Part of that is just experience. We've lived though a few 'revolutions' for which the net effect was...arguably not so great. Part of it is that the age of the average Internet-savvy user is like 35-40 now, not 22, so they're bringing a level of fear and skepticism that wasn't there before.
And partly there just seems to be a sort of social malaise and negativity that wasn't there before. People in 2005 were happy and excited for the future. Now everybody just seems fearful, angry, and burned out.
I think ever since I came here, it was with the same message: the time for postmodern cynicism where nothing ever matters is over, it's time to embrace a new sincerity, a return to a more human Internet we imagined from yester-year, while still acknowledging the the advancement and progress that happened during the Web 2.0 era.
And I think the Fediverse, decentralized social media to something more akin to the various independent forums and blogs that still has all the advantages of centralization, is the start of something beautiful.
lol
I just ignore the news entirely and enjoy my little part of the internet with the people I like.
This is the correct method, my tiny corner of the internet with my friends playing games and chatting in ways we enjoy.
We use the internet for us, if I have to cut a huge swath of the internet in order to maintain my healthy space, I will.
Yeah but my corners were Reddit and Twitter...
Find a better corner, if I become dissatisfied with Lemmy, that's exactly what I'll do, it's what I've done with reddit, Meta is next.
I’m really enjoying the fedi, but a return to the text and ANSI graphics and community of 93 BBS keeps calling me.
Hah, that's part of what I want to do with z0rz.net
Godspeed with your effort.
Out of curiosity, were you born roughly in the early 1990s? I asked because I could have written very much the same stuff as you, except shifted back 10 years. By the year 2000, in my view, the Internet was already locked down and was a completely shitty version of what I felt "the real Internet" was like. Technology in the late 1980s and early 1990s was (from my view) hopeful and optimistic, constantly getting better (computers doubling in speed and memory and getting cheaper every year), and by the early 2000s, it was just shitty AIM and MSN Messenger and Windows-only KaZaA garbage with MySpace and shitty centralization like that. MySpace completely shit all over the early web rings.
I've come to realize that it's always been shitty. That's my conclusion after going on a nostalgia trip and watching old Computer Chronicles shows and reading old computer articles from my golden age, now through adult glasses. I just didn't understand all the politics and power manoeuvres at the time because I was a stupid kid who just saw cool things. Look at all the cool and exciting and great stuff that was happening in the late 1980s and early 1990s that I thought was so wonderful, and realize that it was mostly just shitty attempts by shitty power-hungry companies trying to lock down something cooler that had happened earlier.
The difference in the early days I think is that companies wanted to control us and make our lives as terrible as possible. They just couldn't because computers weren't powerful enough yet.
Nah, I'm a Gen X'er. I agree that the internet in the 90's was cool, but by the late 90's, early 00's it was a lot more polished and bandwidth was plentiful enough to actually get a lot of stuff done online without ridiculous wait times. After MySpace fell and Facebook took over, it was still pretty cool. It's when Facebook established dominance over the web, sharing their shitty like buttons everywhere, Google started buying out cool companies and making their search engine worse, and blogs & forums started dying that I think the internet lost its soul.
@duncesplayed @Anticorp Or, as some people said at the time: "Windows '95 is Amiga '87."
Yahoo and ISPs like AOL tried that. And were partly successful. Yahoo was the 'literally' the home page for 90% of Internet users. In India, ISPs were decentralized but it's only JIO or Airtel now, if you 24x7 service and connectivity.
Enshittification my dear comrades.
Granted, the more academic term is known as rent-seeking. Even lib economists warn against this and is the source of so many ills of society.
Two exhaustively long comment chains in this thread so far insist that the problem is not enshittification but not enough passionate and innovative hustlegrinding.
Internet was ruined with the rise of smartphones. Every dumb Karen and her friends started to post on the internet. With PC it was somewhat barrier for idiots. Pre social media times were the best. Nowadays idiots rule the internet.
Yea its the 'Karen' who are the problem and definitely not incels and reactionaries who definitely didn't exist pre-smartphones.
Reddit for instance had subreddits like r/jailbait, r/WatchPeopleDie, r/Beatingwomen and so many more.
This is like watching a nature documentary
dae people you politically disagree with are dehumanized animals amirite
so funny
Shut up Kevin. Cracker ass name you got.
To be fair, you have to have a very high IQ to understand
Rick and Mortythe Internet...I would argue it was ruined once social media companies found out how to monetize data. Facebook and MySpace were huuuuuge back before smartphones existed, and using a PC was actually not that huge of a hurdle for surfing the web. It was when companies went “oh shit, we can sell user data to market ads” that they all scrambled to make things easier to use and adopt.
AOL.com ruined the internet!
old man screams at cloud
Things that are hard to believe still exist:
Being a somewhat tech illiterate millennial (only knows how to navigate windows and passed a data structures class) it feels like any of these things could be eventually taken out next (probably not Linux just because it'd be the hardest)
I wouldn't at all be surprised if they found a way to monetize hard drives into a subscription based storage service
Mostly I don't understand much, but I know that I witnessed the internet turn from a fast clickable diverse wonderland to a place dominated by 6 websites which take up 4GB RAM to run, followed by the further decline of youtube (started going for ADHD related results in 2011), google (search results started sucking in 2019) and reddit (mods started getting banhappy in 2020)
We are in a new phase and what you call stagnation is actually the maturity and stability of the internet that is spawning new services at the moment. For example:
Logistics are coming online. Loading lists, import/export paperwork, scheduling your truck unloading time from your smartphone. Lots of saas startups in that area.
Factories are coming online. Scheduling production across factories/countries on a single product level is still sci-fi, but they are working on it.
Trades are coming online. Billing software, planning, documentation. Each sector has their own ways to get accelerated and now they see value in it.
Plenty of stuff that was happening in excel sheets is replaced with a tailored web services which are content aware and allow live data entry/analysis from multiple end points.
There is so much work to be done. Universal availability and reliability of data centers, mobile networks, fibre connections were the backbone neccessary to build the next generation of services. They are in the making.
Yes there have been a lot of improvements to the way businesses operate due to the internet. I love how banking has changed, internet shopping, remote work, and all of that kind of stuff. I think that's kind of separate from what I'm talking about though. I suppose I should have said the World Wide Web and not the internet, specially the WWW as used by individuals and groups for communication and sharing.
I actually despise the way banking has changed. Elder people, barely familiar with making calls from a mobile phone, are expected to use their phone banking app as a security token, to say something that happens every day. And that's talking about people that can actually afford a mobile phone with internet access.
Furthermore, I've personally dealt with a number of elderly people scammed out of their life savings because they unknowingly gave scammers full remote access to their phone - The phone that contains the banking app seniors barely understand, the same phone their SMS based MFA codes are sent to.
To add insult to injury, the banks are refusing to reimburse any funds lost as they state the client allowed an outsider to access their account and transfer all available funds.
This is outrageous. I can see it happening all the time but I wish there were more visibility about this.
100% agreed. Imagine all of your reserves gone at such a vulnerable age and no recourse whatsoever. I thought your money was meant to be safer in a bank.
Old people can still go into the branch if that's more their speed, assuming there are still any branches around. My credit union shut the local branch down and opened up some stupid branch that doesn't even have cash on hand.
Not in all cases. In a number of cases elderly people no longer hold licences and getting to and from the bank isn't terribly realistic.
In theory, yes they can, in practice employees and elder people don't work very well together, and these employers are there just for appearances.
Who knows what this new money will do with the old ad-financed entertainment parts of the internet. VR/AR could actually get a second chance and maybe "smart" devices more usefulness than spamming ads. I hope cities and municipalities discover their role as online activity promoters for offline life.
Well, at least in terms of information security a lot of progress was made, you just don't tend to hear anything about that. I'd say the 2010s was the time where all that was being put into place, actually.
That exciting early 2000s Internet was unbelievably shitty. Nearly every widely-used protocol was easily exploitable or had massive flaws, hardly any encryption being in place, bad password practices and very little security-awareness among users, very widespread malware, etc.
There's definitely a lot of answers that are looking for a question out there, with lots of corporate greed in play, but I don't think it's quite as grim as you make it out to be.
It's not just the Internet, it's all technology. In the 90s, there was sort of excitement over anything new coming to the market. Now it's ”oh good, new tech for our overlords to somehow screw us with”. Doesn't help that back then there were a hell of a lot more true technological progress, just look at what a PC was like in 1990 compared to 1999.
Currently use the internet for Steam, Lemmy and streaming I cut down from Gigabit to 12mbps because I just don't use it any more.
I remember getting really angry at Facebook for all their shit about eight years ago. It used to be that when I met someone and they learned my profession, they said it was "cool." I was angry that FB would turn the public against us. Fuck them. They started this downward trend.
Replying to myself:
Also, tech became a place to make money rather than a passion, like law and medicine. It's full of people who don't love it, but wanted to get rich. It took a friend's observations for me to figure that out.
This causes me unending frustration using the web now. There are so many terrible practices on so many websites, just because they think it'll make them a little extra money. I used to run a bunch of blogs as my primary means of income, and I always refused to do things that I found annoying. These days the companies seem to seek out whatever is annoying and use that strategy without fail.
I know it kinda sounds like a broken record when people say this but it's still true - the problem is capitalism.
Where there is gold, there will be diggers.
Popularity and by extension, money, will corrupt and ruin everything.
How can we stop it?
Be careful what you promote in case it actually becomes popular and be careful of those who lust after money if they try to worm in. Be extra careful to not lust after money yourself if you ever find yourself in position where you could make a lot of it, it will slowly but surely eventually corrupt you if you stop being mindful of it or assume you are immune to it.
Yeah, but when individual awareness isn't enough, how can we stop it?
Well i'm hoping people might think about it. Gatekeeping is one solution but its very bad solution too. Once something becomes popular enough businessmen become interested its kind of too late to start reacting. Can't think of any solutions for actively dealing with ongoing situation that dont create more and new problems.
End capital with 155mm HE shells. Datacenters are especially weak against those.
This reads as more Individualism. We gotta band together, the corporations already have.
I probably worded it badly then, because more individualism is last thing we need now
Make open source choices when possible. Open source is the internet version of shopping local.
Capitalism ruins everything. Even if you can argue it’s what made it.
The invisible hand giveth and the invisible hand taken away
Not sure the mega corps have it all, there are still small sites that people run, I my self run some stuff. My lemme instance for 1.
The way I see it, is the mega corps have the budget to make hosting with them cheaper that running at home.
What I meant is that they killed the ways we used to communicate (blogs, forums, etc.) by consolidating everything into a few sites, and then after ensuring the deaths of those platforms, started squeezing the new consolidated platforms for everything they're worth. Yes, people chose to move to the new platforms, and slowly abandoned the old ones, but this has been a very engineered outcome. This is always where they hoped the road would lead. They offered the bait, and then sprung the trap.
They only killed the old tach off cuz the masses moved in, in the early days (think dialup) you had only the tech savvy online. You had to wait for everything, email, blogs, news the lot. Then the alway on internet landed and all that stopped, now you can reach anyone anywhere. all the non-tech savvy joined and the mega corps saw the rich gold mine.
The real issue is the lack of tech savvy people making small sites, the mega corps have the platforms and thats where everyone went. Its cheap and easy to be on a mega platform then to run your own site, anyone who does run a site will not see much traffic as its hidden by the big names
Hey its not all bad, ChatGPT and midjourney have been really entertaining. We now also run on decentralised media.
Okay ChatGPT has been an exciting announcement. That's true, thanks for reminding me. It's somewhat of a double edged sword too though. It's hugely beneficial for my job right now, but I'm also seriously concerned about the future of my career for the first time since entering this field. I have no delusions that ChatGPT won't eventually replace millions of programmers. Programmers won't completely go away, but when companies get their LLMs set up, and figure out how to integrate ChatGPT into their systems, programmers, analysts, writers, and about 80% of the careers on the planet are going to be seriously impacted.
Fortunately or unfortunately I think there is plenty of time before successful adoption starts to impact the majority of IT related careers. Just based on the rate of adoption of other useful but complicated IT frameworks like k8s.
It's really weird that someone downvoted your comment. It's not offensive in any way, and it contributes to the conversation. I see the most innocent stuff get heavily downvoted on this platform for some reason.
It’s the equivalent of a dead and abandoned shopping mall in a shit hole city once popular. It was a course charted long before the 00s though.
It's more like it's being revealed (or more obvious) what the purpose of the Internet was really for. Remember that it was created by DARPA for military purposes. It was never for altruism.
It wasn't altruistic per se, but that doesn't make it nefarious, either. At it's core, it was just a network connectivity design that resists node failure. It was us that used that foundation to create a virtual space that everyone could participate in. We now have outsized bad actors like Google and Microsoft and Amazon and alphabet agencies that are trying to influence that virtual space, but its culture was built by us.
Altruism doesn't need to be a part of it. And while the military started the Internet, universities made it what it is today, and for a long time it was merely a medium for sharing information.
The highway system was also created by the military, yet it has connected people far more than it has facilitated war. We definitely went too far on adapting to highways, but for many years it was just a better way to get from A to B.
The problem, I think, is that the average person just wants something better than what they have now (incremental change), and they don't want to pay for it. People preferred roads to trains because they were faster and they didn't pay for it directly, and now we have fewer trains. Likewise, people wanted content on websites for free, so content producers introduced ads to their products.
If you want something, you need to vote with your wallet and your ballot. Just doing one isn't enough.
how do you make a separate internet?
Optimization is the natural path of all things commercial. When the Internet was young it was more experimental as a whole and that was fun for people. Computing is still experimental but the experimentation isn't obvious as it was back then. Unfortunately that means adventure finding you across your computer screen doesn't happen as often. You either need to look for it around the fringes or look beyond the monitor.
Turning your service to shit to extract the most money from your “users” at the expense of usability is the end result of commercialisation in every instance that has ever existed so far during capitalism.
Even if it destroys the product, this will not stop capitalists ruining it in the name of a few extra dollars/currency in the short term.
Good observation. Your options are to reduce your reliance on such services or become increasingly mad at the world. I think the former is more attractive.
The solution to things going wrong and getting worse is performative smug apathy. Get schwifty.
Sir this is a Wendy's
You're not doing a very good job at that "not becoming increasingly mad" thing you were sermonizing about.
I’m already one step ahead because I DO reduce my reliance on anything commercial.
Relying on capitalist companies for anything long-lasting or worthwhile is foolish.
That's an enshittified way of describing enshittification.
https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys
Not really. Did you read the rest of my message?
Yes. I didn't see anything worth commenting on, then or now.
Then why are you here?
Because you are not the sum of this site, or of the universe.
Your very cool tryhard apathy performance isn't new to me or impressive. If you're so awesome touching grass and ignoring systemic problems, keep doing that away from here. Please.
I tried to make an optimistic point about the Internet not being the only interesting part of life and you unwarranted used it as a platform to complain about capitalism. Who's a tryhard?
You are.
You sermonized about how cool apathy is and how people that express frustration with bad things need to go outside, and yet here you are. Still.
Go outside. Be very cool and apathetic there. I look forward to congratulating you in your absence.
I'm on a plane rn 😬
Don't go!
You're such a very important uncaring hustlegrinder Vincent Adultman doing a business that you're going to win a last word game!
For a lot of people, there's nothing more fun and creative than an unsolved problem.
Monetization/commercialization/organization of the Internet was a super complex problem for a lot of business trying to make it big, and it made for a beautiful shitshow.
But now that the business problem is approaching solution, it's losing that fun and creativity.
The 00s were also filled with corporations monopolizing entire portions of the industry with almost no resistance, even going so far as to have protections for their empires legislated. We're aware of what happens and we get mad about it, before we were ignorant to everything except for what we were told by those mega corporations.
IBM's proprietary software runs all financial transactions in the USA. Apple and Microsoft are the only commercial operating systems. nVidia can sue the pants off of anybody who even thinks about rendering things in a similar manner to their GPU firmware capabilities.
This is why I'm currently trying to figure out how to setup an intranet via something like openvpn. Basically a walled garden that keeps the corpos out. My version of it will also be locked to a max of 1.5mbit/s to help with bandwidth costs.
I've looked at private 5g for this a couple times using something like Openstack Magma. Get me and few friends and family and I've have decent coverage I think.
Holy shit never expected to see this comment on lemmy. I worked on magma in the early days of it
I'll bookmark this. After failing to build a meshnet, I'd love to fail to build a cell network :)
Couldn't you leverage i2p or tor?
I made a comment here about why I'm wanting it to be a walled garden. I'm not sure if i2p or tor would be able to achieve the same results. I don't know enough about them to be sure, and I know tor at least has proxy services that allow non-tor browsers to connect to tor sites, which is something I'm wanting to avoid for security reasons.
Let us know if you ever deploy it!
I replied to someone else with more details if you're interested. I will definitely try to remember to let y'all know.
What are you gonna use it for?
It'd mainly be for older PCs (winXP and earlier along with the Mac and maybe linux equivalents). The idea is to setup a raspberry pi as a middleman so that "retro PCs" can securely connect to a network without having to worry about the numerous security holes that now exist. The raspberry pi would block anything that isn't coming through the VPN. Additionally, I'm wanting to set it up so that people who don't have the space or money for a "retro PC" can connect via virtual machine running older operating systems.
The reason why I'm wanting to exclude newer operating systems from connecting directly (though if I feel they're secure enough then I might allow newer ones as well) is partially because older PCs and web browsers would likely struggle with displaying modern web 2.0 sites. If newer PCs are allowed to join the network with modern browsers, then you run the risk of compromising the idea of having a network that attempts to operates off web 1.0/early web 2.0 design.
Another factor is that while newer PCs might be immune to most, if not all, of the security holes associated with older OSes, a clever hacker might be able to use a newer PC as a carrier (similar to how a person with a viral immunity to a virus can still spread it). Alternatively, a user who thinks they "know what they're doing" could potentially end up creating a bridge between the intranet and the wider internet. I doubt the network would ever get large enough for that to be a real risk, but I want to try to be proactive about it since the majority of the systems connecting would already be heavily compromised due to age and lack of security updates.
One thing I'm struggling with is figuring out how to ensure connecting clients are running on certain OSes or hardware using "off the shelf parts", if that's even possible to begin with. I might be able to use a web landing page that exploits security holes to check the OS/hardware and probe for connections to the external web. However, I'm not super familiar with hacking or programming systems like this, which is why I'm having to resort to using "off the shelf parts" so to speak.
Regardless, I've been trying to put together a list of software, hardware and cloud services (I'm planning to host a node or two via a service like AWS if it looks like it'd be possible to do without opening it to the external web) that I'd need to make it happen.
Edit: an additional detail is that I'm hoping that the age of the hardware/software will mean that I can use cheap and outdated hardware to run the system. The idea behind the bandwidth cap is 50% cost, 50% trying to reinforce the idea that you're not supposed to be making super modern, flashy sites. Additionally, the bandwidth cap would only apply from the node to the user, while webservers, game servers, etc would have a higher cap (maybe eventually uncapped) between nodes to avoid congestion. Basically:
User <-1.5mbit/s-> node <- ???mbit/s -> server
Or
Server <- ???mbit/s -> node <- ???mbit/s -> server
Or
user <- 1.5mbit/s -> node <- 1.5mbit/s -> user
Why 1.5mbit/s? That's the speed of a T-1 line (it was originally going to be dial-up for that sweet, sweet BEEEEEEEDONKIDONK KSHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH until I realized how much of a headache dealing with analog-digital-analog would be)
That's quite an ambitious project. I hope you're able to get it all done!
Thank you! I've got a bunch of things I've been struggling with lately, so who knows if or when I'll actually get it running, but I've been trying to move in that direction.
Do you have a github repo, mailing list, rss feed, or some other way to track this project? It sounds interesting...
Not at the moment. Tbh I'm struggling with a lot in my life right now so who knows if it ever actually gets off the ground, but I'm trying to move in that direction.
We need an alternative to Email
What the fuck is wrong with email now ?
It's one of the only things that hasn't been ruined those past few internet decades, only slightly improved, and is still decentralized and can still allow you to self host, don't you touch it
It's unencrypted
Is it encrypted while in transit between servers?
The answer is almost universally "no", if you didn't encrypt it yourself and are sending a cross-domain mail
I'm fairly sure connecting over TLS was the default last time I set up my server. But of course that only protects it from people snooping on the wires.
Yes, but that's almost certainly you connecting to the pop3 server (usually indeed provides TLS), or the server connecting to a dedicated smarthost for delivery (sometimes does as well). But mail exchange between MTAs that don't use smarthosts but reach the MX destination directly is mostly unencrypted, through port 25
whats wrong with email?
Not encrypted
That's by law, we need new politicians email is fine
Easily intercepted, not encrypted by default
?
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It's just that the Minitel was invented again to work over Internet. But internet is still there. What's sad is when the people who are interested in the technologies don't understand what internet actually is.