Peak internet was like 10-15 years ago
I don’t really miss when even getting stable 100KBps is considered lucky
Uh oh, look around old-timer! If they made Back to the Future today, Marty would be going back to 1994.
gently turns to dust beside you
10-15 years is 2009/10 - 2013/14, not 2003.
You’d have to ve in a crazy rural region for 100kbps…Third world country is might as well a crazy rural region, yes.
In 2009 there was such a provider (talking about Moscow region in Russia) as Skylink, which gave good connectivity in rural areas and Skype traffic was unlimited (I’m not making it up). It was good enough for Skype voice calls.
I haven’t noticed any slowdowns with Firefox and Ublock Origin.
I’ve noticed YT seems to be loading a bit slower than normal, but it still takes less than a few seconds so I don’t really mind.
You’re lucky. I run FF and uBlock and get the pause sometimes. Still better than using YT without uBlock, though.
I take a 2min pause of silence over 30 seconds of ads any day.
Removed by mod
Honestly, I just use the internet less. I’m never going to pay. I can’t be bothered with the loopholes anymore. If it bugs me to pay or subscribe, I leave. I’m fine with them not wanting me as a user, and I hope they’re fine with me not wanting them as a supplier. They don’t have anything that I actually need that badly.
Oddly enough I probably use the internet more than ever. It’s just not that internet.
Weirdly, the only parts of the Internet that I’m really liking these days are Hacker News, Lemmy and the one part that I do pay for, which is Kagi Ultimate. It is very refreshing not to be the product and I do occasionally need to use a search engine for something.
Kagi AstroTurfing needs to stop… Fuck off.
People genuinely like Kagi. I dont really see the problem
I doubt 1% of the comments are genuine users and not themselves botting/faking comments just to inject advertising.
Yeah YouTube brings me a ton of value and I wouldn’t mind paying a bit for it.
Not $14 a month though.
Haha, so true. I really really miss the “old” interwebz. Imagine the content of back-then with the hardware of today. The dream of yesteryear would come true. A blazingly fast net. Just html with a bit of JS (when really needed). Not 10 frameworks (each used for one function), dozens of mb of graphics, a gazillion of cookies and tracker-scripts and… Jeez.
Today i need so much stuff to fight the other stuff, it’s stuffmageddon.
Oh and if you’re also European you can also fight (for free!) the silly cookie-war.
some of our clients are on what the telco calls ‘extended’ dsl. they’re waaaay tf out at the ‘end of the line’ where speeds can be as shitty as 250-500kbps; there’s even a couple still on dialup. so we definitely consider the weight of a page and how many connections are made for each when we do our own sites.
I’d love that… The weight-considered-site that is. Not the 500k line 😁
4chan back before the Nazi takeover was like the wild west. My favorite part was “Lithursday,” when we would share images with embedded PDFs of copyrighted content, including rare books, anarchist materials, and military manuals. I often wonder if those unusually large .jpgs are still floating around the internet waiting to be unlocked. I also saw legitimate acts of activism and terrorism unfolding live, without the interpretation and propaganda of the state.
Oh man, I remember that. I’m sure I still have an Anarchist 's Cookbook floating around from one of those
Oh yes… The rise (and fall) of 4chan. At least the site is still relatively lean, so that’s that 🤷🏻♂️
Not 10 frameworks (each used for one function), dozens of mb of graphics,
Have you seen the old internet?! It would have been even more gifs, music players, and oh the flash websites! Haha I know that’s really not your point but this jumped out at me and made me chuckle.
I’ve heard something to the effect that approximately 80% of all internet traffic passes through Facebook and Google. Unfortunately I can’t find anything to substantiate that claim but it’s sounds plausible.
I remember the early internet. It was a wild place but at least it was fair and balanced. Now every click on every page is designed to serve the for profit attention economy. Kinda sucks in comparison.
Every time I feel this way, I take one more step to getting rid of one of the offending parties.
I’m like 50% off gmail (proton mail rules), 100% off gdrive/google maps, all in on libre office, proton VPN, little snitch, and about to boot linux onto one of my old MBPro‘s so I can start transitioning over to using Linux as a daily driver. I’m new to it but I’m decently tech savvy so I think I can find a distro that is a decent balance of privacy, control, but still user-friendly.
The list goes on, and a lot needs to be done, but my experience at my computer and online in general has been slowly improving over the last year or two since I’ve gotten more aggressive about it. Also leaving Reddit helped lol
Yeah.
And we can still block entire sites on the web.
The sites the friends with adblockers promote.
The friends who don’t notice what they promote.
What unholy bastards the people who own the sites they promote are.
Meanwhile, I’m enjoying the peaceful bliss of Memmy loading everything in reader mode
True and very annoying in the same time! The web is ruined :(
Ha! Recently went to breakfast with a couple of new neighbors (partners).
They were asking me what apps I enjoyed and I told them that I WAS enjoying Apollo. Told them I left Reddit. They sort looked at me. They later said they both worked at home. Their job was creating ad space for the web. One of them gave me the enshitification face. Sigh.
They would have regretted asking me this. They’d be opening an F-droid can of worms they couldn’t stop and my autistic ass wouldn’t be able to gauge if it made them uncomfortable.
What is “the enshitification face”
I can only imagine horrible things
It was sort of like you caught me eating my shit cereal face. ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
What is “the enshitification face”
maybe one of these?
Not to mention sites blacklisting VPN IPs
my own site for my very small business gets about 10 legit visitors a week, none of which have ever connected via a known vpn address (dating back some 15 years). another 100 page views a week on average from legit bots (msn, google, etc).
the rest (and well over 95% of overall traffic) is bots, scrapers, and hackers, many of which use addresses linked to vpn services and pound the sites on the server looking for exploitable scripts (wordpress related, usually; which we’ve never run here), login and contact forms. if i could simply ‘flip a switch’ and redirect all vpn traffic to a separate landing page, i would seriously consider doing so. it wouldn’t affect site availability to our legit users and our target audience. but for now, mod_security is doing a stellar job and is the mvp.
Thing is, most people don’t want to pay for services that to them seemed to be free since forever. And this creates collective social pressure to follow suit. Nothing a big company offers is ever free. You’re just paying in alternate currency.
Screw em companies, only Lemmy devs get my money.
It’s gross though. Say you started to pay, they would still force ads into their product because they’re greedy and demanding more money. We’re seeing this with streaming sites now.
The funny thing is with youtube, for example, I am a premium user. I deactivated all tracking of my habits on there. Now I am greeted, as a homepage, with nothing else than a call to action to reactivate said tracking. As a paying customer I see less (as in none at all) content on the homepage than an anonymous user would. I am subbed to 170+ channels. Yet they tell me they cannot come up with suggestions unless they can track my every step on their platform. sus. And when saying funny I mean extremely aggravating.
oh, i’m totally over it. it’s so liberating to not care about their shitty little digital hell they’ve created. this and discord are literally the only places I interact with people on the internet.
The browser in my computer at work doesn’t have an ad blocker. I haven’t installed one because I most of the time I’m using it to access our intranet. But when I do happen to use the internet, damn are there so many ads! They literally block the content I’m trying to read, and come back even when I try to close it.
All that to say, due to enshittification I will forever keep my ad blocker on my personal computer.
It’s almost as though the overbearing Yahoo/Ask! toolbars that used to plague everyone’s Internet Explorer back in the day have mutated and infected the internet at large. Now most websites feel like one useless, giant malware-riddled toolbar.
Can’t imagine what the web is like outside of ublock origin…
The few websites I see on pcs by clients are essentially state backed so they don’t have ads as well.Scary world I am not eager to experience.
I’m baffled when companies that self-host DNS don’t have DNS-level adblocking.
It’s because there’s websites out there that will entirely break, and for really dumb fucking reasons. I’ve seen some sites not even load due to google tag manager being blocked. Most of the time it’s a signal to me that I don’t want to have anything to do with that domain.
However, if this was at work, that would be a call to IT. Multiply that by potentially hundreds of calls on the regular, and that could get really expensive.
The better solution here I think, is to default the browser install with uBlock Origin already there. Then allow the user the power to toggle the addon to their own liking. Then last, train your employees to know what the addon is, and how to use it.
Then it’s the best of both worlds: websites aren’t necessarily breaking for all users, ads are absent as a default state, and users are empowered to control their own experience. (And yes there’s still going to be Jims and Karens calling for support, but they’re going to regardless, those types will always find a reason.)
Web 2.0 desperately clinging to life. FOSS self hosted web is the future. Internet speeds are fast enough on home networks that self hosting is perfectly viable for essentially everything, and for the few things that can’t be self hosted by just anyone, FOSS alternatives and work arounds to existing paid services exist.
Internet is becoming harder to monopolize, and increasing amounts of power and control are being handed back to the working class online. FOSS has become a movement that has grown exponentially over the last few years.
Their next recourse will be attempting to make jail time a thing for piracy. Both for hosting it and downloading it.
There’s certainly a bubble bursting. You only have to look at all the layoffs.fyi since COVID. I’m just hoping it’s happening in a slow enough way that it’s not going to take more legitimate companies with it.
AI is the next bubble. It will hit a brick wall either legally or just on functionality (maybe both). I can see uses for targeted models, bespoke to a use case, but training those is too expensive right now. General models are just toys IMHO. Unfortunately it’s going to get a few years for everyone to realise.
You are going to train the AI that replaces you. They aren’t going to tell you that though. I’m starting comprehensive plans so that any future work I do can’t be fed into AI. Making hardware that just dumps random input when I’m not using it. Isolating and containing any human input that does happen. Distributing my work across as many devices as possible to only give each it’s single app use worth of data.
The brick wall on AI is not functionality. It’s cost of running the neural networks. It’s simply not financially realistic to integrate ChatGPT into everything.
Some one will say something offensive or a slight threat and the government will charge you for a crime like you did it.
They want the Internet to be HR speak only.
It does seem like FLOSS is experiencing a renaissance due to rampant commercialization of the web
It’s not so simple. I’ve been trying to go the foss self-hosted way, as well as help p2p projects, and I got stuck because I’m behind a cgnat, unable to forward ports, and my shitty isp has no ipv6. I can’t afford vpns at the moment, so I got stuck. Besides, all that needed a lot of tech skills most people won’t have. This is a serious barrier of entry for a lot of people.
