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.
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.
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
You make some valid points. I’m not a millennial, but thanks for including me. :)
I thought computers had peaked for awhile too, and then I built a new one last year so I could run Cyberpunk 2077 on ultra. The new NVMe drives are an enormous leap forward. Mine runs at 650% faster than my previous fastest SSD. They’re flat-out amazing. Graphics computation is also unbelievable these days. DDR5 is wicked fast. Basically I don’t think computer hardware is anywhere close to peaked. It’s still doubling in power every few years.
Yes, I went from a SATA 3 SSD to an m.2 NVMe drive and the difference was incredible. I also went from DDR3 to DDR5, so that was obviously mind blowing. TBH I’m fine with computers capping out, since I just built the most powerful computer I’ve ever built, and got all cutting edge, top tier components, except for the GFX card. The GFX cards were still insanely priced when I built this thing, so I had planned on continuing to use my 980 ti. But it felt like putting an old engine in a new car, so I eventually broke down and bought a Gigabyte AORUS GeForce RTX 3070 Ti 8GB. The 3080’s and 3090’s were almost unobtainable when I built this thing. Now the 4090’s are out, but I don’t see myself upgrading any time soon. I’ll probably just skip the 4 series. What’s really crazy is the cost of the cutting edge stuff. I paid $320 for my RAM and you can get the same RAM for $99 now. I paid $240 for my NVMe HDD, and you can get it for $99. Of course I knew that the prices would plummet, but since I figured this will probably be my last full computer build for a long time, I might as well get all the best stuff available.
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.
They just couldn’t because computers weren’t powerful enough yet
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.
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.
Two exhaustively long comment chains in this thread so far insist that the problem is not enshittification but not enough passionate and innovative hustlegrinding.
we’ve established pretty clearly by now that giving kids iPads makes it harder for them to learn
I work in a school, we got a box of ipads and I am interested in ho we established this.
I am convinced the ipads cannot help to learn anything better than a less expensive and open alternative could, but if I want to speak about that with colleagues or the head of school I need sources…
This is something I’ve thought was true for a while, but your comment made me go back and look for decent sources and while I found a few articles bemoaning tech in schools I also found a lot of good-looking scientific studies saying that it’s fine or even beneficial, so I deleted my comment.
AFAIK now, the negative outcomes are when it’s home schooling or COVID-era distance learning and the kid is only doing work on an ipad, so the problem isn’t the tech itself it’s the absence of a structured school environment with a teacher.
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)
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Assumed it was a TERF subreddit because of the name, but then I went to check it out and it’s just a dumb 'Reddit-core’ism like calling table salt sodium chloride and it’s just like a general discussion place for women.
Incredibly sus to be comparing a community focused on sharing vids of women being beaten and people dying to women just discussing life and their relationships.
Yeah, like whatever, get rid of them too. But like why did you feel the need to “what about” to talking about misandrists in response to someone criticising the amount of violent misogyny present on the early internet?
+1 for FOSS, but it’s not easy to do. It’s sort of like going vegan. It’s great at first, but then you try to go out to eat and it’s hard, family gatherings become difficult and political, people start to push meat or question your motives. You still feel good about it because you’re doing it “for the animals” or whatever, but you’re no longer in the mainstream. While your coworkers all go out to that new steak joint, you’re left behind with your bag of broccoli.
To elaborate, look at Lemmy. You can get FOSS apps for your phone to browse Lemmy, but now try to coordinate some event, like your local soccer club using only FOSS. Plenty of folks are content to blindly consume what Zuck or Goog wants them to see and use.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
Think like Bill Gates
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.
A homeless person is without the mental structure to build something lasting, or else they would not be homeless or would identify differently, e.g. as a traveler.
Bill Gates stan to mask off fascist any% speedrun (8 hours, 3 minutes and 33 seconds)
A homeless person is without the mental structure to build something lasting, or else they would not be homeless or would identify differently, e.g. as a traveler.
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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
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.
Ugh, flashbacks to KDE 4…
and GNOME 3 too
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
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You make some valid points. I’m not a millennial, but thanks for including me. :)
I thought computers had peaked for awhile too, and then I built a new one last year so I could run Cyberpunk 2077 on ultra. The new NVMe drives are an enormous leap forward. Mine runs at 650% faster than my previous fastest SSD. They’re flat-out amazing. Graphics computation is also unbelievable these days. DDR5 is wicked fast. Basically I don’t think computer hardware is anywhere close to peaked. It’s still doubling in power every few years.
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Yes, I went from a SATA 3 SSD to an m.2 NVMe drive and the difference was incredible. I also went from DDR3 to DDR5, so that was obviously mind blowing. TBH I’m fine with computers capping out, since I just built the most powerful computer I’ve ever built, and got all cutting edge, top tier components, except for the GFX card. The GFX cards were still insanely priced when I built this thing, so I had planned on continuing to use my 980 ti. But it felt like putting an old engine in a new car, so I eventually broke down and bought a Gigabyte AORUS GeForce RTX 3070 Ti 8GB. The 3080’s and 3090’s were almost unobtainable when I built this thing. Now the 4090’s are out, but I don’t see myself upgrading any time soon. I’ll probably just skip the 4 series. What’s really crazy is the cost of the cutting edge stuff. I paid $320 for my RAM and you can get the same RAM for $99 now. I paid $240 for my NVMe HDD, and you can get it for $99. Of course I knew that the prices would plummet, but since I figured this will probably be my last full computer build for a long time, I might as well get all the best stuff available.
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.
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.
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.
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The ipad kid problem is mostly because parents don’t bother giving their kids attention.
Blaming individual parents and their consumer choices does absolutely nothing to solve a society-wide problem.
yeah you’re right
I work in a school, we got a box of ipads and I am interested in ho we established this.
I am convinced the ipads cannot help to learn anything better than a less expensive and open alternative could, but if I want to speak about that with colleagues or the head of school I need sources…
This is something I’ve thought was true for a while, but your comment made me go back and look for decent sources and while I found a few articles bemoaning tech in schools I also found a lot of good-looking scientific studies saying that it’s fine or even beneficial, so I deleted my comment.
AFAIK now, the negative outcomes are when it’s home schooling or COVID-era distance learning and the kid is only doing work on an ipad, so the problem isn’t the tech itself it’s the absence of a structured school environment with a teacher.
Millions, Billions even, of adults will learn and date and play with children in the Roblox metaverse if we don’t play IRL Minecraft
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)
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
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 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 🤷♂️
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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”.
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.
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.
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
Shut up Kevin. Cracker ass name you got.
dae people you politically disagree with are dehumanized animals amirite
so funny
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Assumed it was a TERF subreddit because of the name, but then I went to check it out and it’s just a dumb 'Reddit-core’ism like calling table salt sodium chloride and it’s just like a general discussion place for women.
Incredibly sus to be comparing a community focused on sharing vids of women being beaten and people dying to women just discussing life and their relationships.
Yeah, like whatever, get rid of them too. But like why did you feel the need to “what about” to talking about misandrists in response to someone criticising the amount of violent misogyny present on the early internet?
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those subreddits existing makes the incel subreddits ok
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AOL.com ruined the internet!
old man screams at cloud
To be fair, you have to have a very high IQ to understand
Rick and Mortythe Internet…deleted by creator
+1 for FOSS, but it’s not easy to do. It’s sort of like going vegan. It’s great at first, but then you try to go out to eat and it’s hard, family gatherings become difficult and political, people start to push meat or question your motives. You still feel good about it because you’re doing it “for the animals” or whatever, but you’re no longer in the mainstream. While your coworkers all go out to that new steak joint, you’re left behind with your bag of broccoli.
To elaborate, look at Lemmy. You can get FOSS apps for your phone to browse Lemmy, but now try to coordinate some event, like your local soccer club using only FOSS. Plenty of folks are content to blindly consume what Zuck or Goog wants them to see and use.
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What is FOSS?
Free Open Source Software.
Edit: there is also FLOSS which adds the French “Libre” to include “free as in speech”.
In case this wasn’t asked sarcastically - Free and Open Source Software.
Free and Open-Source Software
Or in the case of leaked source Code it’s also Forced Open Source Software.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
That’s so very much more evil than anything that happened at Little St. James during Bill Gates’ return visits, huh?
That’s just a lie you are a liar
Edit: or a credulous fool
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.
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?
you should think like Bill Gates and play 9/11 in minecraft
Millions must never remember
No, he’s telling you to get into some really fucked up pedo shit with
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.
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Bill Gates stan to mask off fascist any% speedrun (8 hours, 3 minutes and 33 seconds)
Please kindly go fuck yourself. Like seriously please go outside and walk into traffic, you worthless disgusting piece of shit.
Your cryptofascism is showing.
You’re a truly disgusting ghoul
lol