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.

biddy,
duncesplayed,

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.

ajsadauskas,
@ajsadauskas@aus.social avatar

@duncesplayed @Anticorp Or, as some people said at the time: "Windows '95 is Amiga '87."

Deus,
@Deus@charcha.cc avatar

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.

Anticorp,

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.

GarfieldYaoi,

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.

UlyssesT,

Two exhaustively long comment chains in this thread so far insist that the problem is not enshittification but not enough passionate and innovative hustlegrinding.

morshupls morshupls

doctorcrimson, (edited )

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.

sooper_dooper_roofer, (edited )

Things that are hard to believe still exist:

  • Linux
  • VLC media player
  • Pirate Bay (torrents/filesharing in general)
  • hard drives
  • email
  • google earth

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)

NaoPb,

I just ignore the news entirely and enjoy my little part of the internet with the people I like.

CaptKoala,

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.

mek2600,

Yeah but my corners were Reddit and Twitter…

CaptKoala,

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.

WeiSheiLindon,

Yeah and the most popular services absolutely suck. We haven’t stagnated due to no more room for innovation, we’ve stagnated due to a lack of passion. It’s hard to make infrastructure, I get that. Seriously though, we can’t claim innovation is impossible due to what’s already been done, while ignoring hundreds of services that suck due to no innovation.

interdimensionalmeme,

This isn’t a lack of passion, the corporations pursuing monetization have sucked all the air out of the air internet.

UlyssesT,

The implication of that “passion” post was that all innovation is cool and good and no innovation enshittifies the product by making it greedier and worse.

WeiSheiLindon,

Thanks for explaining a bit, people were strangely mad at this comment. A property of strangers on the internet it would seem.

bigboopballs,

we’ve stagnated due to a lack of passion.

lmao. ok why, what happened to the passion?

NotErisma,

Aww don’t you like beep boop pig poop balls version 69?

UlyssesT,

Not enough innovation! Putting passion on the blockchain with a subscription service should take care of that morshupls

WeiSheiLindon,

There may have been passion in the beginning, but no longer. Greed takes over where passion once thrived. Profit is prioritized over functionality, despite profit margins already being sufficient to allow the companies employees to live comfortably and for the company to invest in new things. Measures to increase profit in this situation always replace passion. Companies that try their best to get more money from their users, rather than bringing in new paying users with new features, are the very reason why we’ve stagnated. So a lack of passion indeed. Because without passion what reason does one have to continue innovating? If one does not feel for the project they are developing, does that project not suffer for it? Passion is the root of innovation. It may be passion for giving your family a better life, passion to give the world an easier way to do something, or passion to make the best version of a thing you can imagine, but it’s all passion. Without it, innovation can’t continue. Innovation is required to make things better, but without passion innovation has no seed to grow from.

UlyssesT,

Enshittification will continue until passion improves.

pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

zbyte64, (edited )

You can’t raise a family on passion, some of us have more mouths to feed then our own.

allocsb,

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.

chiliedogg,

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.

O__O,

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.

allocsb,

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.

O__O,

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.

UlyssesT,

or become increasingly mad at the world

The solution to things going wrong and getting worse is performative smug apathy. Get schwifty. smuglord

allocsb,

Sir this is a Wendy’s

UlyssesT,

Your options are to reduce your reliance on such services or become increasingly mad at the world. I think the former is more attractive.

You’re not doing a very good job at that “not becoming increasingly mad” thing you were sermonizing about.

https://hexbear.net/pictrs/image/e273fa40-967e-496d-89ec-b4d1e4c7dbba.png

UlyssesT,

Optimization is the natural path of all things commercial

That’s an enshittified way of describing enshittification.

pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

allocsb,

Not really. Did you read the rest of my message?

UlyssesT,

Yes. I didn’t see anything worth commenting on, then or now.

allocsb,

Then why are you here?

UlyssesT,

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.

allocsb,

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?

UlyssesT,

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. congratulations

allocsb,

I’m on a plane rn 😬

UlyssesT,

congratulations

allocsb,

Don’t go!

UlyssesT,

You’re such a very important uncaring hustlegrinder Vincent Adultman doing a business that you’re going to win a last word game! congratulations

allocsb,

I am your worst nightmare! I am grind!

UlyssesT,

Almost there! Show how much you care about performative apathy! congratulations

allocsb,

I’m not apathetic and don’t know where you got that impression friend!!!

UlyssesT,

I’m not apathetic

No shit. Your sermons about how people need to stop caring about things being bad and getting worse definitely rung hollow.

and don’t know where you got that impression friend!!!

Dodge all the labels you like friend but no amount of exclamation marks is making you any less transparent!!!

allocsb,

For real though, the subject of this thread is whether the Internet is or isn’t fun anymore it doesn’t mention or allude to enshittification and ignoring the topic of the thread by forcing that context is pretty mean. I know you don’t like capitalism but do you expect people to be receptive to what you have to say when you detail them and don’t care about what they have to say?

UlyssesT,

it doesn’t mention or allude to enshittification

It does, even if you wish it didn’t. Lots of other people felt the same way in the comments even if you don’t like that.

On the other hand, your apathy sermon offers nothing to that person. It’s not just a thought-terminating cliche. It’s clearly failed you as well because you’re still here and you’re still posting.

allocsb,

I still don’t get why you think it’s apathetic or doesn’t offer anything. All I’m saying is you have to change with the world and the world isn’t the Internet

UlyssesT,

All I’m saying is you have to change with the world and the world isn’t the Internet

If it’s that simple and that easy, logout logout-lemmy and work those hustlegrindy miracles! Concern trolling people here with your not-apathy sermons about the coolness of apathy is wasting your precious hustlegrindy time! Change the world already!

Or better yet, don’t. Stay here and keep posting about how you’re totally not preaching the virtues of apathy while preaching the virtues of apathy. That’s probably better than any version of improving the world that you in particular have in mind.

So continue. Keep telling me how much you don’t care about not caring while skydiving and doing crossfit while securing the Jones account and selling the rights to your exciting new blockchain-based startup. antelope-popcorn

allocsb,

Ok I’m home now my final thoughts are you’ve massively projected your world view upon the kind of person I actually am and some day you’ll learn that arguing on the Internet doesn’t solve anything!

UlyssesT,

some day you’ll learn that arguing on the Internet doesn’t solve anything

What are you still doing here then, exactly?

You are very important and must continue providing updates about your very important dynamic Vincent Adultman lifestyle where you’re hustlegrinding and on a mission to change the world. congratulations

reksas,

Popularity and by extension, money, will corrupt and ruin everything.

marco,
@marco@beehaw.org avatar

Corey’s enshittification theory explains it …medium.com/microincentives-and-enshittification-…

pomodoro_longbreak,
@pomodoro_longbreak@sh.itjust.works avatar

How can we stop it?

mobilehugh,

Make open source choices when possible. Open source is the internet version of shopping local.

reksas,

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.

butterflyattack,

Yeah, but when individual awareness isn’t enough, how can we stop it?

reksas,

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.

interdimensionalmeme,

End capital with 155mm HE shells. Datacenters are especially weak against those.

zbyte64,

This reads as more Individualism. We gotta band together, the corporations already have.

reksas,

I probably worded it badly then, because more individualism is last thing we need now

some_guy,

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.

some_guy,

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.

Ubermeisters,

Where there is gold, there will be diggers.

Anticorp,

It’s full of people who don’t love it, but wanted to get rich

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.

butterflyattack,

I know it kinda sounds like a broken record when people say this but it’s still true - the problem is capitalism.

BelieveRevolt,

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.

forgotmylastusername,

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’.

some_guy,

Eh… He was a great marketer, but he didn’t usher in our current tech dystopia. I blame social media.

masterspace,

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.

Cfrolich,

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.

judgeholden,

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.

bennieandthez,
@bennieandthez@lemmygrad.ml avatar

But my great man theory!! 😫

UlyssesT,

Over the years everyone adopted the turtleneck speak in one way or another.

One of the posters in these replies, right now, is like an animated Steve Jobs turtleneck come to life trying to peddle hustlegrinds.

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. corporate-art

sgharms,

I’m really enjoying the fedi, but a return to the text and ANSI graphics and community of 93 BBS keeps calling me.

demonen,

Hah, that’s part of what I want to do with z0rz.net

sgharms,

Godspeed with your effort.

candle_lighter,
@candle_lighter@lemmy.ml avatar

We need an alternative to Email

nudnyekscentryk,
@nudnyekscentryk@szmer.info avatar

whats wrong with email?

Edgelord_Of_Tomorrow,

Easily intercepted, not encrypted by default

candle_lighter,
@candle_lighter@lemmy.ml avatar

Not encrypted

Jimmycakes,

That’s by law, we need new politicians email is fine

Jimmycrackcrack,

?

TheCaconym,

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

smileyhead,

Hard to selfhost and no E2EE by default I guess. First one can be blamed on Gmail and OutLook, second one is lack of mass PGP usage.

O__O,

Hard to self host is one of those things that has now become received wisdom in tech circles. It isn’t hard to self host email. More people should do it.

TheCaconym,

Exactly right. I keep reading this and I never know how to respond, it really isn’t that hard and it’s worth it. I’ve posted this before here but personally I go with a postfix+mariadb+dovecot+postfixadmin+spamassassin+opendkim stack; it’s extremely easy to set up (if you read the docs) and it has suited me perfectly. Once it’s configured it’s rock solid

Beyond the obvious privacy advantages, being able to generate an email alias at any time (to the point where you can create one dedicated for each shitty thing you subscribe to) is also very useful for spam protection / infinite free trials and the like. Also aliases redirecting towards many recipients for easy organizing / mailing-list-like behaviour

TheCaconym,

Gmail is actually relatively chill accepting stuff from self-hosted MTAs, even new ones the IP of which hasn’t established a reputation yet

Outlook is indeed rougher but none of them even come close to the awfulness that are Apple / icloud email servers

duncesplayed,

PGP itself is a bit of mess.

For one thing, there’s really only one major/popular implementation of it these days, which is GPG. The codebase is arcane. Pretty major security vulnerabilities pop up constantly. It doesn’t have stable funding. Several years ago the entire project almost collapsed when the world discovered it had been maintained for several years by a single person who didn’t have any time or money to maintain it. The situation is a little bit better now, but not much.

(For this reason, people are starting to use age instead of gpg, as the code is much smaller, cleaner, forces safe defaults, and doesn’t seem to have security problems)

But the bigger problem that was never properly solved with PGP is key distribution. How do you get somebody’s key in the first place? Some people put their keys on their own personal (https) webpage, which is fine, but that’s not a solution for everyone, and doesn’t scale very well. Okay, so you might use a key server, but that has privacy implications (your identity is essentially public to the world) and centralizes everything down to a handful of small “trusted” key servers (since there would be no way to trust key servers in a decentralized way). We should probably just have email servers themselves serve keys somehow, but nobody’s put that into the email standard protocols.

The fact that keys expire amplifies all the problems with key distribution, and encourages people to do really unsafe things with keys, like just blindly trust them. You can sign other people’s keys for them, but that also does not scale very well.

The key distribution problem is something that things like Signal have “solved” with things like phone number verification, but there’s really no clear way to solve it on something totally distributed like email.

candle_lighter,
@candle_lighter@lemmy.ml avatar

It’s unencrypted

venusenvy47,

Is it encrypted while in transit between servers?

TheCaconym,

The answer is almost universally “no”, if you didn’t encrypt it yourself and are sending a cross-domain mail

stsquad,

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.

TheCaconym,

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

uralsolo,

deleted_by_author

    •
    sooper_dooper_roofer,

    Millions, Billions even, of adults will learn and date and play with children in the Roblox metaverse if we don’t play IRL Minecraft

    bennieandthez,
    @bennieandthez@lemmygrad.ml avatar

    The ipad kid problem is mostly because parents don’t bother giving their kids attention.

    UlyssesT,

    Blaming individual parents and their consumer choices does absolutely nothing to solve a society-wide problem.

    bennieandthez,
    @bennieandthez@lemmygrad.ml avatar

    yeah you’re right

    arlaerion,

    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…

    uralsolo,

    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.

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