Every site is trying to pull a Bonzai Buddy now.
"We need all your info for advertising, not you can't opt out unless you make an account and give us your email. Oops, looks like I hid the opt-out under a subheader. Amazon is now profiling you."
WE USED TO CALL THAT SHIT A VIRUS.
ITS EVERY. FUCKING. WEBSITE. NOW
"Hi I'm going to block this entire site until you give me your info, this is very cool and normal."
Capitalism ruined the internet. The whole thing is malware now.
I miss the internet. I miss personally maintained websites, bulletin board forums, link pages, sprite comics whatever. It was sooooo much more fun. There was new stuff everywhere and in infinite variety. Now it's instagram
It's so sad and disgusting. And the old internet, if it's not gone, is impossible to find anymore. SEO has buried everything. : (
It's such a bummer. Whenever I'm bored with an internet connection it reminds me of that. It used to be I'd think of something I don't know, Google it and look at all the pages different people made on the subject, whatever it may be from quicksand to medabots, you could find like a dozen at minimum websites made by just like...people who liked thst shit enough to make a website. They all had their style and voice. It felt truly limitless and like there was alway something out there waiting that you'd really be able to dig into.
Insee vestiges now ang again for s popular prior to 2014 or so. If I google pokemon, I get Serebii and Bulbapedia and PokemonDB. And it's an absolute delight! I googe lile Zelda TotK and I get game8, gamewith, IGN, which I get for almost every game. And those sites are fucking garbage that have to insert 40 paragraphs before they answer your question.
"Whats the fastest way to grind coins" for a game will get you results about how useful coins are, what you can buy with coins, why you might want to grind coins, other currencies in the game, then 3 sentences in the middle somewhere that actually answer the question.
Recipes are also being completely wrecked by SEO and monetisation garbage. If I want a recipe for chocolate cake I have to scroll through page after page of irrelevant text. And it's not a gastronomical essay, which is an enjoyable literary genre in its own right, no it is all pointless filler text that only exists as a place to put keywords for search engines and to have something to put between the ads.
Oh you want a recipe for cookies? Let me tell you about how using agave syrup instead of sugar cured my sister in law's covid
Sometimes, if you're lucky, it's just the recipe broken down with advice for ingredients and the like.
Remember how cool Stumbleupon was in the beginning, when it was all that kind of shit? Hit a button and get a random website that some random person made on like the evolution of horse manes or some shit. Then, like everything good, it got bought up by some megacorp and started redirecting to sponsored content.
could you elaborate on what these 3 search engines do?
They search smaller and/or lesser known websites. The last one specifically searches for blogs. If you have a query, they're not so good. But if you want to learn about a topic, they can be useful.
What we're seeing is the Wal-Martification inherent to capitalism.
I don't mean this to offend but your instinct here, which is entirely relatable, is paralleled by the people whose political inclination is to try and wind back the clock to the 1950s or the Wild West or "before corporatism" (whatever the hell that's supposed to mean) etc.
Obviously the huge distinction here is that you haven't crafted your entire political analysis based on achieving a return to what was and you've accurately identified the political and economic forces at play that have caused things to develop in this way and you have a viable solution for the problem you've diagnosed. On the other hand, those groups have none.
The way that individual production and small-scale local production with small marketplaces that brought together groups with similar interests and some larger agora-like regional hubs gradually turned into increasingly larger corporate entities that vacuumed up all the small production, distribution, and exchange until all we're left with is tiny little farmer's markets existing within the margins between massive operations like Amazon, Wal-Mart, Costco etc. that are pretty much unavoidable today is nearly a 1:1 analogy for how the internet started and how it's going, except in classic internet fashion of course this was done as a speedrun.
Thank God I can come home to all my dear bots and feds here at chapo dot chat
Today I was informed that it's tankies, not neoliberals, who want to abandon the ROC, and the neolibs definitely won't pull out of Taiwan the instant the US has chip parity. Gosh durned tankies.
But there's an interesting question: will the US ever actually achieve chip parity, or will the industry just build some potempkin factory that's always 5 years away from completion so they can keep milking the subsidies indefinitely?
"The factory totally would have worked, but we built it in Arizona and then Lake Mead dried up and semiconductor manufacturing needs lots of water. " Who could have predicted that? (Ignore those environmentalist nut jobs screaming about climate change and your eyes that could see the bathtub ring around the lake where the water level used to be long before the semiconductor plant was started.)
Sorry, boss said you have to stay late at the office tonight
from each according to his ability wink wink am I getting the lingo right
I feel safe on this website. I know there's no point to all of you being feds because they already have microphones in my walls.
This is related to a bigger problem, which is that you can't really even trust newer communities to even have real people anymore.
Hexbear/Chapo.chat was kinda okay because it came about around 2020? I think? Which was still before AI became massive
but 4 years of AI evolution is huge, and I think that in another 3 years' time it'll be impossible to know if literally anything on the internet is even real, with the exception of stuff that's dated to the "before-fore times"
The fake pictures and fake text are already extremely realistic, and videos should reach the same point in a few years time
It's already begun so much.
I shit you not I've been using chatGPT to handle EVERYTHING "professional". I figured that since porky is such a perfectionist, I'll just use chatGPT to fake a whole bunch of shit: cover letters, resumes, interview prep, work emails where I fake being a complete yes-man just so I can get hired and keep my job. ChatGPT will do all the buttering up for me, and I hope to learn how to play along to find out ways on how to trick anyone into giving me a raise or even hire me.
What percentage of processing power is used just to run tracking cookies, ads, and other pop-up bullshit. God help you if you're on limited mobile data when every website wants to auto-load video ads.
Definitely ThE mOsT rAtIoNaL sYsTeM
what about when the advert will load but the content will not
whoever made that possible should be placed in the advertisement torture nexus
microchip on brain loaded with petabytes of adverts
This reminds me of a particularly cursed enshittification dream I had where I was in a bar restroom and the soap dispenser was blocked unless you downloaded their app and created an account.
Too late, it’s real. I tried to use a public toilet in Sweden once with QR code payment lock on the door. I couldn’t get the fucking thing to work while I was in the middle of doing the gotta go dance so I ran up the street and found another public toilet at a place that still had an actual human person taking coins.
Yeah. It's hard to find one where you don't pay, and they tend to be nasty or uncomfortable for other reasons (men really need to learn to sit down for cleanliness' sake smh + public drunkness being allowed means being shitfaced and all that entails is also allowed) - in Germany there are toilets on most trains and highway parking lots (not truck stops/gas stations!)
A company called Sanifair has a de facto monopoly on public toilets and they want as much as 1€ per visit.
Not sure if true, but the reason why the USA doesn't have paid ones is an organized vandalism campaign against them in the 1970s according to something I once read.
Well I'm not in the USA, just living in another Angloid country.
I mean yeah you're sort of right, it's a gamble finding clean public toilets because it's up to the city/town's council to invest in constant cleaning from their budget. The city near me where I work has their main public toilets very well looked after, so I'm used to the high standard.
I'll be sure to bring this up next time the eurangutans get uppity
That really depends on the country. In Denmark you wouldn't expect to have to pay, although a few places charge people. Often this is done more as an anti-homeless thing than as a revenue generation thing.
In Germany you should expect to pay for a public toilet visit. Enforcement varies, from just a dish of coins with a sign urging you to "tip" the cleaning staff, over a grumpy looking lady sitting next to the dish, shaming you with her eyes to leave a "tip", over said lady only handing you the key to the restroom after you've paid her to having actual turnstiles preventing freeloaders from relieving themselves. As far as I understand this tipping culture exists as a result of the cleaning staff being paid dogshit wages so you should absolutely leave a tip if you're able to.
I can't remember how it is in Sweden but I don't remember it as being as pervasive as in Germany.
Often this is done more as an anti-homeless thing
europa delenda est
Sweden is a cashless society with coin-operated public toilets :D
(hospitals and schools are where you will find free toilets here)
I visited a cousin recently and he took me to his gym for a workout, and according to him they replaced half the mechanical weights with DIGITAL WEIGHTS. That you need a special band AND an account for. Because why? Novelty? It's not like anyone reads the spam emails we're all forced to slog through to even participate in society.
Don Draper's sole redeeming action was his brave attack against an American outpost during the Korean War
It's also been so thoroughly enshitfied by big tech that the useable internet is a handful of social media sites.
It’s not that bad for me, but then I’ve got eight finely tuned anti-bullshit browser extensions and a DNS sinkhole. No one should have to construct a whole elaborate tower defense like this just to get on the web.
eight finely tuned anti-bullshit browser extensions
Drop your mixtape bro.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/adnauseam/ or https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock-origin/ blocks ads
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/behind_the_overlay/ gives you a universal button that closes popups
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/i-dont-care-about-cookies/ removes cookie banners/popups
https://gitlab.com/magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-chrome-clean removes paywalls on news sites
https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/view-page-archive/ shows you webpage archives
it's the same as ublock origin if you activate "strict blocking" under settings, except it also generates fake clicks on ads to fuck with advertisers
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/adnauseam/
I'm at over $22,000 so far, how's yours?
- https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock
- https://gitlab.com/magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-firefox-clean
- https://github.com/kkapsner/CanvasBlocker/
- https://decentraleyes.org/
- https://github.com/mozilla/multi-account-containers
- https://github.com/stoically/temporary-containers
- https://docs.clearurls.xyz/
- https://noscript.net/
- https://www.daniel.priv.no/web-extensions/amp2html.html
- https://nextdns.io/
DNS sinkhole
Hell yeah, comrade. I'm running a IDS along with a sinkhole myself.
These days I seldom enable NoScript. It’s useful on rare occasions. Once upon a time I tried working with it from a block-by-default starting position, but eventually the tediousness of managing the filters wore me down.
I personally find that the most tragic thing about the internet is how if you looked at the way it was made you'd almost think it was the product of a socialist state. It is a product of intensive collaboration between different researchers, fully subsidized by the state every step of the way and the end result effectively given away for free to the public. Now it is rendered a wasteland, carved up and privatized, and with LLMs and image generators it can only get worse as everything gets filled up with computer generated slop.
However, let's take a moment to think about how much good such technology could do if it was subservient to the needs of a socialist state, search engines that actually give you what you want, central planning networks with unparalleled efficiency, social media that prevents the reproduction of reactionary thought, a free, fully organized and easy to access centralized digital library of all academic resources. I can't help but be hopeful for whatever society comes out of this capitalist hell.
I think this is a very common pattern. Some new social or technological space opens up that allows people to collaborate and create something actually valuable together, and then hordes of capitalistic parasites come storming in to set up as many fences as possible so they can charge tolls and harness the new kinds of art and tech that was created for advertising, extraction, and rentierism.
Humans create value by organizing and capitalists are privatizing the means by which we organize. This is true of third spaces IRL and it’s true of social media.
You are by far not the only person to think that something like the Internet and the Web specifically would be most useful for a socialist state and even easier to create it.
Only IRL, in that socialist state that had people trying, things went differently, because officials and directors and administrators felt that such a system would threaten their power.
Probably could have happened to a limited extent if its authors wouldn't be idealistic idiots describing their communist dreams right away to those predators behind redwood tables. Should have been more modest.
Only IRL, in that socialist state that had people trying, things went differently, because officials and directors and administrators felt that such a system would threaten their power.
Would you mind providing some evidence for this claim? I assume you're talking here about the Soviet Union, but I have never heard that Soviet scientists tried to build an internet but were stopped by government officials. I'd like to see some evidence of this before I just take your word for it, you know? Thanks!
Well that is a tantalizingly sparse wikipedia article. If I had more time, I'd pirate the book it seems to be summarizing, because it seems like it could be an interesting read. Have you read the book? Or did you make do with the extremely sparse wikipedia article?
I don't remember most of things I've read about this, because it's sort of a common knowledge for everybody in ex-USSR interested in history of cybernetics in the latter.
Which makes the fact that a Murrikan tankie hasn't heard of it even funnier.
EDIT: Ah, yes, look at the references in the Russian version.
Show me where this article says it was about the threat to the power of bureaucrats & not the feasibility of cyberneticizing the economy in the first place lmao. If it's so easy why hasn't anyone than China even begun to do it with modern technology? Walmart and Amazon sharing information along their chaotic just-in-time supply chain does NOT count. Rich investors prefer to use information technology to get an advantage over others, rather than cyberneticize economies anywhere.
In the Russian version of the article you will find it, including even ministries most opposed to it and references to other attempts. The English version seemed its translation to me on the first glance, a glitch in my firmware so to say.
For USSR it would in theory (not considering politics inside a bureaucratic system) be easier due to the command system of the economy.
And some local transitions of this kind even happened in USSR, but to preserve balance of power between ministries, service branches etc there would be elements in the chain that wouldn't be converted specifically so to not give away control to a different organization.
That would look as stupid as automated data submission to some analytic center, but some stage of the calculations it would perform (for planning purposes or something else) would be done by human computers. Purely for organizational\political purposes - "no, that other ministry can't do it without us".
Or they wouldn't be global - some plants etc would submit data to some computational center of one ministry, some to another, but those centers wouldn't share data or expertise.
That was also the case with much less ambitious modernization projects in the USSR.
The english language one also references a book about how there was a failure to network the country for various reasons. There are all kinds of valid historical materialist criticisms of the soviet union but I'm not buying this pop history take about how bureaucrats were threatened by a cybernetic system that barely existed conceptually
The English version doesn't reference many things other than that book. The Russian version has a rather long list.
but I’m not buying this pop history take about how bureaucrats were threatened by a cybernetic system that barely existed conceptually
The whole history of USSR's demise consists of various bureaucratic groups perceiving any change as a threat.
at least bonzi buddy stayed on your desktop or laptop, now every fucking thing requires installing an app on my phone so they can track me
I really need to follow through with setting up an android VM on my NAS so I can install apps to it and avoid the tracking bullshit
tbf your phone doesn't need apps to track you, the OS already does that
yeah but the companies who want me to install apps aren't privy to that, that's why they want me to install apps
"Calculator requires access to your location information, files, etc. To function properly. "
We are the product.
Oh, and if you use paid services, you are still the product!
It would almost be forgivable if it didn’t slow everything to a crawl. At this point I’d let them put a tracking chip in my fucking brain if they’d just let websites load properly, but we aren’t even going to get that.
It's so fucking bad! Nothiung should load less than instantaneously but between the amount of crap shoved in to every site and the atrocious coding habits of "webdev" everything is an absurdly inefficient mess.
Best I can do is Bounty ads beamed directly to your prefrontal cortex
The internet has become useless for news. Back in the old days you could use Google to find articles and read them. Today, everything is behind a paywal and Google results for news content has turned from a list of links to useful information to a list of banner ads for subscription services.
And no, I'm not going to buy a subscription for Racism Weekly or The Hunt The Poor For Sport Times just because they happen to have some interview with a ghoul or happens to be the ones who exposed some generic local government scandal. And even if I had disposable income and wanted to spend some of it on the self-important stenographers who calls themselves journalists, there's no way I would buy more than one or two subscriptions and I would still be excluded from most of the stuff Google tries to push.
And no, I'm not going to buy a subscription for Racism Weekly or The Hunt The Poor For Sport Times just because they happen to have some interview with a ghoul or happens to be the ones who exposed some generic local government scandal.
New site tagline
Me: goes to website to use its function
website popup: "Oh, you're using your cell phone to visit me! I look WAY better in an app!"
Me: can't figure out a way around the popup and surrenders to the app download
website's app popup: "We're sorry but your cellphone is too old, I can't be installed."
Me: goes to website on a computer made from parts from before the website and my cellphone existed
website: "Hey thanks for logging in, lets get to work"
It tru. Apps? Apps? I used to SCOUR MY FUCKING MACHINE to get rid of spyware like apps. I went nuclear on the boot sector. I DOD formatted by storage just to be certain every trace of spyware was gone.
I'm using uBlock Origin to block most advertising and sketchy our outright hostile and malicious code, uBlacklist to block shit from search results (pinterest), and Firefox for general purpose fuck this shit.
it's great how everything just sucks more and more and there's no end in sight
