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.
Sometimes, if you're lucky, it's just the recipe broken down with advice for ingredients and the like.
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
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.
search.marginalia.nu
http://wiby.me
http://ooh.directory
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.
Yeah, I kmow