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

Thank God I can come home to all my dear bots and feds here at chapo dot chat

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.

Yeah it fucking sucks. Every ad man gets the wall.

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.

It's also been so thoroughly enshitfied by big tech that the useable internet is a handful of social media sites.

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.

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

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.

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.

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 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.

woe betide the marketing profession and those who partipate

it's great how everything just sucks more and more and there's no end in sight

let's delete all computers in the world and start over from scratch (but after capitalism has been abolished)

Siderant but every company that has you make a workday account on their external site when you apply can get fucked. I'm not gonna spend 2 hours filling out an application, after already sending my resume, after confirming my email address to a site I'm never going to use again in my life, to not get an interview anyway.

If you are after that sweet metadata just make your race and gender questions a bit more robust. (I still don't know if those are meant to be inclusionary or exclusionary.)

It's called dead internet theory

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.