Every site is trying to pull a Bonzai Buddy now.
“We need all your info for advertising, not you can’t opt out unless you make an account and give us your email. Oops, looks like I hid the opt-out under a subheader. Amazon is now profiling you.”
WE USED TO CALL THAT SHIT A VIRUS.
ITS EVERY. FUCKING. WEBSITE. NOW
“Hi I’m going to block this entire site until you give me your info, this is very cool and normal.”
Capitalism ruined the internet. The whole thing is malware now.
I miss the internet. I miss personally maintained websites, bulletin board forums, link pages, sprite comics whatever. It was sooooo much more fun. There was new stuff everywhere and in infinite variety. Now it’s instagram
It’s so sad and disgusting. And the old internet, if it’s not gone, is impossible to find anymore. SEO has buried everything. : (
It’s such a bummer. Whenever I’m bored with an internet connection it reminds me of that. It used to be I’d think of something I don’t know, Google it and look at all the pages different people made on the subject, whatever it may be from quicksand to medabots, you could find like a dozen at minimum websites made by just like…people who liked thst shit enough to make a website. They all had their style and voice. It felt truly limitless and like there was alway something out there waiting that you’d really be able to dig into.
Insee vestiges now ang again for s popular prior to 2014 or so. If I google pokemon, I get Serebii and Bulbapedia and PokemonDB. And it’s an absolute delight! I googe lile Zelda TotK and I get game8, gamewith, IGN, which I get for almost every game. And those sites are fucking garbage that have to insert 40 paragraphs before they answer your question.
“Whats the fastest way to grind coins” for a game will get you results about how useful coins are, what you can buy with coins, why you might want to grind coins, other currencies in the game, then 3 sentences in the middle somewhere that actually answer the question.
Remember how cool Stumbleupon was in the beginning, when it was all that kind of shit? Hit a button and get a random website that some random person made on like the evolution of horse manes or some shit. Then, like everything good, it got bought up by some megacorp and started redirecting to sponsored content.
What we’re seeing is the Wal-Martification inherent to capitalism.
I don’t mean this to offend but your instinct here, which is entirely relatable, is paralleled by the people whose political inclination is to try and wind back the clock to the 1950s or the Wild West or “before corporatism” (whatever the hell that’s supposed to mean) etc.
Obviously the huge distinction here is that you haven’t crafted your entire political analysis based on achieving a return to what was and you’ve accurately identified the political and economic forces at play that have caused things to develop in this way and you have a viable solution for the problem you’ve diagnosed. On the other hand, those groups have none.
The way that individual production and small-scale local production with small marketplaces that brought together groups with similar interests and some larger agora-like regional hubs gradually turned into increasingly larger corporate entities that vacuumed up all the small production, distribution, and exchange until all we’re left with is tiny little farmer’s markets existing within the margins between massive operations like Amazon, Wal-Mart, Costco etc. that are pretty much unavoidable today is nearly a 1:1 analogy for how the internet started and how it’s going, except in classic internet fashion of course this was done as a speedrun.
Thank God I can come home to all my dear bots and feds here at chapo dot chat
Today I was informed that it’s tankies, not neoliberals, who want to abandon the ROC, and the neolibs definitely won’t pull out of Taiwan the instant the US has chip parity. Gosh durned tankies.
But there’s an interesting question: will the US ever actually achieve chip parity, or will the industry just build some potempkin factory that’s always 5 years away from completion so they can keep milking the subsidies indefinitely?
I feel safe on this website. I know there’s no point to all of you being feds because they already have microphones in my walls.
This is related to a bigger problem, which is that you can’t really even trust newer communities to even have real people anymore.
Hexbear/Chapo.chat was kinda okay because it came about around 2020? I think? Which was still before AI became massive
but 4 years of AI evolution is huge, and I think that in another 3 years’ time it’ll be impossible to know if literally anything on the internet is even real, with the exception of stuff that’s dated to the “before-fore times”
The fake pictures and fake text are already extremely realistic, and videos should reach the same point in a few years time
It’s already begun so much.
I shit you not I’ve been using chatGPT to handle EVERYTHING “professional”. I figured that since porky is such a perfectionist, I’ll just use chatGPT to fake a whole bunch of shit: cover letters, resumes, interview prep, work emails where I fake being a complete yes-man just so I can get hired and keep my job. ChatGPT will do all the buttering up for me, and I hope to learn how to play along to find out ways on how to trick anyone into giving me a raise or even hire me.
What percentage of processing power is used just to run tracking cookies, ads, and other pop-up bullshit. God help you if you’re on limited mobile data when every website wants to auto-load video ads.
Definitely ThE mOsT rAtIoNaL sYsTeM
This reminds me of a particularly cursed enshittification dream I had where I was in a bar restroom and the soap dispenser was blocked unless you downloaded their app and created an account.
Too late, it’s real. I tried to use a public toilet in Sweden once with QR code payment lock on the door. I couldn’t get the fucking thing to work while I was in the middle of doing the gotta go dance so I ran up the street and found another public toilet at a place that still had an actual human person taking coins.
I visited a cousin recently and he took me to his gym for a workout, and according to him they replaced half the mechanical weights with DIGITAL WEIGHTS. That you need a special band AND an account for. Because why? Novelty? It’s not like anyone reads the spam emails we’re all forced to slog through to even participate in society.
Yeah it fucking sucks. Every ad man gets the wall.
Bill Hicks had it right
