How the internet became shit • Hacker News Board

Re: How the internet became shit

#91

Post by MrVandemar » Sat, Apr 20, 2024, 6:03 AM UTC

pixl97 wrote: post #14

tempsy wrote: post #4

I feel like this applies to more than just the internet. New construction houses are crap quality. Restaurant food quality seems like it's gotten worse and much more expensive. But yes Google is probably the best example of this...type in any shopping term and Google search basically turns into a more cluttered Amazon search result page.

>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…

> "This is called survivorship bias. Plenty of hold houses were total shit. They're not around any longer."

Nah. Like the old saying goes, pick two: fast, cheap, good.

Guess which two home-building companies pick.

I'm an owner-builder, and we contracted out some parts of our build. We were extremely lucky to find some excellent tradespeople. In conversation almost always there were remarks on a lot of tradespeople being on crystal meth!

My wife put in the insulation into the roof and frame walls. She had no experience, just read up about it, worked out how to do it right and did it. The contractors installing the plaster-board were dead impressed, and said it was the best insulation job they'd seen. My wife wasn't racing the clock, or doing it just to get paid. She did it so we have a nice warm house in Winter, and no tradesperson is going to approach your house with the same attitude. All they're thinking about is "beer o'clock".

Re: How the internet became shit

#92

Post by MrVandemar » Sat, Apr 20, 2024, 8:28 AM UTC

umeshunni wrote: post #15

boomboomsubban wrote: post #5

This feels more like an advertisement for bearblog than a meaningful critique. "Have you heard of enshittification? Well I guarantee my free product won't go that way. Sign up today!"

It's the perfect example of the phenomenon they're describing.

I feel like the site is so aggressively lo-fi but tuned to creating no-frills blogs in the highly portable markdown format, that it's kind of resistant to that kind of thing.

The whole thing seems sincere, and though that's not a guarantee of quality, it seems like an indicator of it.

Re: How the internet became shit

#93

Post by oliwarner » Sat, Apr 20, 2024, 11:35 AM UTC

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 think you're right for the wrong reason.

I don't think it's because people do and don't have preexisting employment, it's because people feel they can become "creators".

The metrics have turned from hits to followers, to enable a constant stream of monetised opinion and product placement.

I'll be the last person to say they shouldn't be paid for their work, but I think it has hurt our collective creativity that we focus so hard on how to become a celebrity and sell our audience to advertisers. I miss the days of relative anonymity on New grounds. I guess that has moved to Roblox but even that's poisoned by cash.

Re: How the internet became shit

#94

Post by bdw5204 » Sun, Apr 21, 2024, 1:10 PM UTC

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #51

bdw5204 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a better solution would be to bring back strong career security. Allowing companies to increase their profits by laying off workers is a policy choice. As is allowing companies to outsource jobs to cheaper jurisdictions. There is no law of nature that says that the US has to allow free trade to impoverish and dispossess its middle class so that its upper class can get even wealthier.

Not allowing companies to lay off workers who aren't doing productive work would put them at a competitive disadvantage against foreign competitors or new companies, and then they still lose their jobs when the company goes bust. Not allowing new companies to compete with existing ones would entrench monopolies and accelerate concentration of wealth. Neither of these are desirable results.

How is this any different from the current economy where great companies are frequently going bust because of Wall Street strip mining? One prominent example is a company called Sears which was Amazon before Amazon. Why is General Electric so uncompetitive these days? Why are Dodge and Chrysler now owned by a subsidiary of an Italian company headquartered in Amsterdam?

Also, it is the neoliberal economics of the past 30-40 years that has "entrenched monopolies and accelerated consolidation of wealth". Just look at the FAANG companies, how they turned their CEOs into the first ever trillionaires and how they manipulated the tech labor market in ways that have been long term detrimental to workers.

The current economic system also destroys loyalty and motivation on the part of workers because promotions are earned by getting a new job elsewhere rather than by merit. This means being good at interviewing not good at the job. I think it's beyond obvious how demoralizing that is for morale in the workforce, at least once workers realize that they have no job security and that there's usually no point or reward to working harder than bare minimum. Job security and valuing retention over poaching the shiny object from your competitor means loyal employees whose incentives are aligned with the employer.

It's also bizarre to me how people are unaware that the system I'm describing actually existed during the most prosperous time in American history: the post war boom. Its unraveling boosted short term profits at the expense of the long term. But now we are living in the long term and the bill for decades of neoliberalism is coming due so we can all observe firsthand just how "desirable" its results are in the present catastrophically bad economy.

Re: How the internet became shit

#95

Post by soco » Mon, Apr 22, 2024, 10:24 AM UTC

ryandrake wrote: post #71

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. Hasn't this been the case for most of history? "The Arts" were historically disproportionately populated by aristocrats, their families, the idle wealthy, and people who could afford to dabble and create and not worry about their art bringing in m…

Actually artists did make a living from art, they were just a few and under the protection of those with big wealth. Now everybody and their mother wants to be an artist, and for what is worth, many more can do it - it's just the definition of "artist" kinda switched from "lives from art" to "creates art" because we can finally have that time and resources to do it. And then some compare themselves to the old artists and thinks why shouldn't we live from art too - forgetting the amount of networking and ass-kissing a medieval artist had to do to earn a living at the court. So what is really new is the concept "doing art for art's sake but expecting to get paid".

Re: How the internet became shit

#96

Post by dang » Mon, Apr 22, 2024, 7:24 PM UTC

camdenlock wrote: post #8

[flagged]

We've banned this account for posting unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments, and for using HN primarily for ideological battle. These things are not what the site is for and destroy what it is for.

If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

Re: How the internet became shit

#97

Post by sogen » Mon, Apr 22, 2024, 7:44 PM UTC

sogen wrote: post #58

quasarj wrote: post #13

Is there really a good, working, add blocker for iOS? The one I use works some of the time, but often gets detected and blocked-back by sites...

Adguard (paid), has been working great out of the box on my iPhone. Tried others but this one has been the best so far. I don't use their included VPN, so don't have opinions on it. Greatest advantage is being able to use Custom Filters. One caveat: my aging iPad sometimes struggles or reload pages, and runs out of memory, not sure if I should attribute it to the adblocker or to the iPad's age, probably should restar…

Can't edit, but wanted to say _DNS_ instead of VPN in my original comment.

Re: How the internet became shit

#98

Post by camdenlock » Tue, Apr 23, 2024, 10:24 PM UTC

dang wrote: post #96

camdenlock wrote: post #8

[flagged]

We've banned this account for posting unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments, and for using HN primarily for ideological battle. These things are not what the site is for and destroy what it is for. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html .

[dead]

Re: How the internet became shit

#99

Post by asdff » Thu, Apr 25, 2024, 8:47 PM UTC

cogman10 wrote: post #54

asdff wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you aren't getting your money back in endless salad and breadsticks while engorging on that fettucine, you are doing olive garden wrong. It is a restaurant best eaten by the heavy set and the stoned.

You aren't getting your money back on endless salad and breadsticks. That salad bowl cost them 2, maybe 3 dollars of ingredients and those breadsticks are even cheaper. Unless you are eating 10 bowls of salad or 10 pounds of breadsticks, olive garden is winning here. Companies don't offer "unlimited" stuff if they don't know how to extract more money from you than you can consume.

> Unless you are eating 10 bowls of salad or 10 pounds of breadsticks

This is exactly how the power users do it at olive garden. People even smuggle in tupperware. You only need to beat the average to be in the money, which isn't hard to do if you go hog wild.