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How the internet became shit

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Re: How the internet became shit

#81

Post by swatcoder »

nolist_policy wrote: post #64
zero-sharp wrote: post #2

I'm just confused about how the average person is supposed to navigate the internet. Is the assumption now that everybody knows about ad blocking plugins?

Belive it or not, but the Internet is usable even with Ads. I'd even say that Ad quality has gone up without adblock users noticing, I don't see fullscreen or 1/2 screen Ads anymore. Privacy on the other hand...

The vast majority of search results surfaced for me by Google, Bing, or DDG are blogspam structured to alternate between one paragraph of text and then a square ad of about the same size, which is essentially a half screen of advertising saturated into the content and the meat of the content has moved from the top of the article (as in traditional journalism) to the bottom (to maximize ad exposure).

Depending on how the ads are being served, it's either a bunch of blank squares in those space because my ad block strategies successfully stopped them from loading or its a wash of color noise and bold graphic design demanding my attention.

Then, there's almost always either a GDPR compliance popup over the bottom 50%-75% of the page or a "subcribe now" call to action popup over the whole thing, or (most often) both.

I would so much prefer to have access to whatever Internet you do. Please tell us where to find it.

In the meantime, I just avoid exploring the internet through search engines as much as I can.

Re: How the internet became shit

#82

Post by JohnMakin »

Honestly, the phase we're in right now reminds me a LOT of the dot-com bubble burst. Low interest rates, tons of venture capital, companies hemorhaging cash and still skyrocketing their valuation, and from what I recall (I know memory can be faulty) towards the end of the bubble as companies got desperate to generate revenue we started to see nigh-unusable ad-riddled pages that looked very much like what we see these days.

Even though it'd be bad for me personally and for my career, I do hope the bubble bursts soon. There is no chance this is sustainable.

Re: How the internet became shit

#83

Post by xbpx »

082349872349872 wrote: post #35
xbpx wrote: post #11

You ever drive down a main drag of any town or city pretty much anywhere that has a fairly unregulated capitalist system? Advertising everywhere. Signage. People dressed as hotdogs paid a few bucks an hour to wave a sign shaped like a ketchup bottle. The mystery to me is why this group of early web pioneers thought it could be any different. Enshitification isn't new, it's not even different from "making money and ma…

> The mystery to me is why this group of early web pioneers thought it could be any different. It's obvious now that bringing the world to the net would make the net a lot more like the world, but you see, those of us who came up in the pre-Canter & Siegel days had actually hoped that it would make the world more like the (in the before times) net.

I know, my statement there is harsh. The early tech culture emerged from 60s counter cultural forces that had, to their credit, really impacted the world. So it probably wasn't as naive as it seems now.

Re: How the internet became shit

#84

Post by pixl97 »

shrimp_emoji wrote: post #72
pixl97 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>New construction houses are crap quality This is called survivorship bias. Plenty of hold houses were total shit. They're not around any longer. There is also a second bias of the depletion of natural materials older houses were made of, massive increases in population, and massively changed consumer tastes/requirements. >Restaurant food quality seems like it's gotten worse and much more expensive. This is a mix of…

> depletion of natural materials older houses were made of, massive increases in population, So you're saying depopulation is the answer. How interesting. :^)

No, you are saying that :)

If for example we start harvesting asteroids we may be able to provide everyone with a gold throne at low cost. But, providing everyone with with a platinum encrusted gold throne doesn't make hardwood grow any faster.

Unless of course you think the great oxygen catastrophe was a mistake.

Re: How the internet became shit

#85

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

keiferski wrote: post #6

When lamenting the "old Internet", a lot of people forget that the vast majority of the people creating content on it were gainfully employed with strong career security. Meaning that they didn't need to make money from their hobbyist online projects, so they didn't need to monetize it. This is a lot different from today, where any sort of journalist/writer/artist/filmmaker is basically dependent on making content th…

"When lamenting the "old Internet", a lot of people forget that the vast majority of the people creating content on it were gainfully employed with strong career security. Meaning that they didn't need to make money from their hobbyist online projects, so they didn't need to monetize it."

No bogus distinction between "developers" and "users".

No so-called "tech" companies acting as middlemen, calling their commercial surveillance "services".

The word "monetize" is not one I recall seeing on the early internet.

The internet was once thought as a medium that could be used to sell widgets,^1 not as a medium to provide free "services" that are a front for commercial surveillance. People will pay for widgets. No one thinks, "How do I monetize selling widgets?" People will generally not pay for what today's "developers" are creating. Hence the question, "How do I monetize it?" Easy, just ruin the internet by selling people out to advertisers. Until it collapses under the weight of all the garbage.

Perhaps someone might try to argue that people in the early days were just not thinking creatively and "innovating", and that today, they are. Yeah, right. Having lived through those days, what I saw was nerds who failed, and failed again, to find a business model, something they could produce that people would pay for. Eventually they gave up and sold out to advertising, which no one on the internet ever liked at all. Now people think this is a "business model" and represents "innovation". To me, nerds today actually seem less creative and less innovative because generally they all do the same thing: sell out to advertising and conduct surveillance.

1. Not that I am a fan of the company and what they have done to internet commerce, but Amazon has done quite well selling widgets.

Re: How the internet became shit

#86

Post by barfbagginus »

keiferski wrote: post #6

When lamenting the "old Internet", a lot of people forget that the vast majority of the people creating content on it were gainfully employed with strong career security. Meaning that they didn't need to make money from their hobbyist online projects, so they didn't need to monetize it. This is a lot different from today, where any sort of journalist/writer/artist/filmmaker is basically dependent on making content th…

I would rather have an Internet where I don't hear anything from anyone trying to monetize my attention.

The current Internet hides those people - who I assure you still exist - who are trying to share knowledge for free.

Re: How the internet became shit

#87

Post by antisthenes »

keiferski wrote: post #10
jjmarr wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It makes me wonder if a sort of "basic income for Internet creators" would work. Instead of individuals trying to optimize their content for maximum income, it would instead work like this: if the group determines that you make great content, you get a small stipend monthly. There are no other expectations or optimization requirements, merely that you continue making the content I think you invented Patreon.

Yeah, but Patreon is still beholden to the individual-market optimizer model. I'm talking about a group, a collective, that deliberately funds stuff that is merely good content. Maybe a collective Patreon-like "guild" would be a starting point.

> I'm talking about a group, a collective, that deliberately funds stuff that is merely good content

Why does this group need to be different from the general Youtube (insert any platform here) audience that votes with their views/likes/subscribes ?

What am I missing?

Re: How the internet became shit

#88

Post by epalm »

> companies that offer a free service but start charging once they've locked in a client-base (I'm looking at you Heroku).

I don’t know much about Heroku, or if it’s been enshittified (yet?), but a company that offers a free product and somewhere down the line starts charging for it sounds fine to me.

And anyone who believed a product produced by real people working at a real company could be free forever was kidding themselves.

(In general though I agree with the sentiment of the article.)

Re: How the internet became shit

#89

Post by fsckboy »

I was surprised where that piece went, because I was thinking about enshittification from the other direction. Where he goes is "people now search reddit instead of google to get higher quality results because less monetizing." But what I had in mind in terms of the internet becoming shit is, how did reddit become so shitty compared to where reddit started? And my expected answer was going to be in the direction of "eternal september".

Re: How the internet became shit

#90

Post by keiferski »

antisthenes wrote: post #87
keiferski wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, but Patreon is still beholden to the individual-market optimizer model. I'm talking about a group, a collective, that deliberately funds stuff that is merely good content. Maybe a collective Patreon-like "guild" would be a starting point.

> I'm talking about a group, a collective, that deliberately funds stuff that is merely good content Why does this group need to be different from the general Youtube (insert any platform here) audience that votes with their views/likes/subscribes ? What am I missing?

Because the YouTuber watcher votes for MrBeast, not for the niche intellectual content that populated the early web.

The point is to decouple quality content creation from the ad-matrix and fund it in other ways.

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