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
this post was submitted on 06 Jan 2024
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chapotraphouse
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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.
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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.
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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.
Yeah, I kmow
Thank God I can come home to all my dear bots and feds here at chapo dot chat
Do Tankies Dream of Electric Sheeple?
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?
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Sorry, boss said you have to stay late at the office tonight 
from each according to his ability wink wink am I getting the lingo right
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.
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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
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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.
Step back from the lathe RIGHT NOW 
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.
You pay for public toilets in Europe? 
Yeah. It's hard to find one where you don't pay, and they tend to be nasty or uncomfortable for other reasons (men really need to learn to sit down for cleanliness' sake smh + public drunkness being allowed means being shitfaced and all that entails is also allowed) - in Germany there are toilets on most trains and highway parking lots (not truck stops/gas stations!)
A company called Sanifair has a de facto monopoly on public toilets and they want as much as 1€ per visit.
Not sure if true, but the reason why the USA doesn't have paid ones is an organized vandalism campaign against them in the 1970s according to something I once read.
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I'll be sure to bring this up next time the eurangutans get uppity
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Yeah it fucking sucks. Every ad man gets the wall.
It's also been so thoroughly enshitfied by big tech that the useable internet is a handful of social media sites.
for really generous definitions of "usable"
It’s not that bad for me, but then I’ve got eight finely tuned anti-bullshit browser extensions and a DNS sinkhole. No one should have to construct a whole elaborate tower defense like this just to get on the web.
eight finely tuned anti-bullshit browser extensions
Drop your mixtape bro.
- https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock
- https://gitlab.com/magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-firefox-clean
- https://github.com/kkapsner/CanvasBlocker/
- https://decentraleyes.org/
- https://github.com/mozilla/multi-account-containers
- https://github.com/stoically/temporary-containers
- https://docs.clearurls.xyz/
- https://noscript.net/
- https://www.daniel.priv.no/web-extensions/amp2html.html
- https://nextdns.io/
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I personally find that the most tragic thing about the internet is how if you looked at the way it was made you'd almost think it was the product of a socialist state. It is a product of intensive collaboration between different researchers, fully subsidized by the state every step of the way and the end result effectively given away for free to the public. Now it is rendered a wasteland, carved up and privatized, and with LLMs and image generators it can only get worse as everything gets filled up with computer generated slop.
However, let's take a moment to think about how much good such technology could do if it was subservient to the needs of a socialist state, search engines that actually give you what you want, central planning networks with unparalleled efficiency, social media that prevents the reproduction of reactionary thought, a free, fully organized and easy to access centralized digital library of all academic resources. I can't help but be hopeful for whatever society comes out of this capitalist hell.
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at least bonzi buddy stayed on your desktop or laptop, now every fucking thing requires installing an app on my phone so they can track me
I really need to follow through with setting up an android VM on my NAS so I can install apps to it and avoid the tracking bullshit
tbf your phone doesn't need apps to track you, the OS already does that
yeah but the companies who want me to install apps aren't privy to that, that's why they want me to install apps
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It would almost be forgivable if it didn’t slow everything to a crawl. At this point I’d let them put a tracking chip in my fucking brain if they’d just let websites load properly, but we aren’t even going to get that.
It's so fucking bad! Nothiung should load less than instantaneously but between the amount of crap shoved in to every site and the atrocious coding habits of "webdev" everything is an absurdly inefficient mess.
Best I can do is Bounty ads beamed directly to your prefrontal cortex
Me: goes to website to use its function
website popup: "Oh, you're using your cell phone to visit me! I look WAY better in an app!"
Me: can't figure out a way around the popup and surrenders to the app download
website's app popup: "We're sorry but your cellphone is too old, I can't be installed."
Me: goes to website on a computer made from parts from before the website and my cellphone existed
website: "Hey thanks for logging in, lets get to work"
it's great how everything just sucks more and more and there's no end in sight
It tru. Apps? Apps? I used to SCOUR MY FUCKING MACHINE to get rid of spyware like apps. I went nuclear on the boot sector. I DOD formatted by storage just to be certain every trace of spyware was gone.
I'm using uBlock Origin to block most advertising and sketchy our outright hostile and malicious code, uBlacklist to block shit from search results (pinterest), and Firefox for general purpose fuck this shit.
The internet has become useless for news. Back in the old days you could use Google to find articles and read them. Today, everything is behind a paywal and Google results for news content has turned from a list of links to useful information to a list of banner ads for subscription services.
And no, I'm not going to buy a subscription for Racism Weekly or The Hunt The Poor For Sport Times just because they happen to have some interview with a ghoul or happens to be the ones who exposed some generic local government scandal. And even if I had disposable income and wanted to spend some of it on the self-important stenographers who calls themselves journalists, there's no way I would buy more than one or two subscriptions and I would still be excluded from most of the stuff Google tries to push.
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let's delete all computers in the world and start over from scratch (but after capitalism has been abolished)
But everyone knows that if we do the butlerian jihad computers will just be replaced with psychopathic mentats smdh.
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Archive.org will eventually be destroyed under capitalism, but it’s both a wonderful window onto how the web used to be and also the equivalent of low-background steel for human knowledge. That and Wikipedia are the only unsullied places I can think of that have outlasted the last 15 years or so of enshittification.
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