the internet is worse.

Internet was better when it was a bunch of forums and personal web pages
- We can get it back, and the antitrust trials are a big part of actually doing it
  https://youtu.be/rimtaSgGz4?si=fQc-lIFzT-0hoeNv
  
  Sure we can but will we? No.
  Twitter has only lost ~10% of it's userbase after repeatedly abusing its own users. Reddit probably less. After everything we've learned about Meta, tens of millions of people signed up on day 1 to join their new service, Threads. Google Chrome still has like 80% market share.
  Changing is honestly a trivial ask, but we won't, because no one cares.
  
  Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
  https://piped.video/rimtaSgGz_4?si=fQc-lIFzT-0hoeNv
  Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
  I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
  
  No we can't. It's been consolidated. Sure some of us might get a little piece of freedom but the web is going to stay consolidated unless something major happens..
- The internet was better when it was Usenet and Gopher.
  
  The internet was better when it was a pair of tin cans and a string.
  
  Honestly, the internet was at its best when it was the fever dream of stoned, sexually frustrated grad students at Berkley. Infinite potential - it could've been anything. Could've. But wouldn't. The real thing, after it became fully saturated in everyday American life, was always going to be some mediocre, watered down corporate cesspool of lowest common denominator, hyper-sanitized garbage. Because that's what people like. They like safe, familiar, predictable, and uncomplicated. Well, most people.

Yup. It definitely feels like over time the human element of the Internet has been replaced by a corporate one. The most blatant example I can think of is youtube. Nowadays it's so obvious rigged in the favour of already established media and a select few content creators.
- Yeah I'm feeling less like a participant, and more like a consumer on the "greater internet" (five big), compared to the early days when corporate presence was minimal, and not remotely slick or subtle. It was like dorky and obvious, and didn't seem remotely like a threat.
  
  Feeling like a consumer is a great way to put it. It especially feels more and more like it when trying to do even the most mundane tasks. Like if you own a product but need to ask a question on Google about it, first you have to scroll past the links to pages trying to sell you the product you typed in, then you might get some reddit links, 2-3 from a smaller forum, and then more links trying to sell you the product. It will say there's thousands of results, but it's just the same 6 links to purchase the product over and over again. So now even basic web searches are mainly for buying stuff.
  
  Anywhere there is money there are charlatans
- I miss the day when you could search YouTube for something like "JFK skyclub" and actually get video of the Skyclub at JFK. Today you'll get 15-minute videos that are 90% a guy talking about his thoughts on JFK, or Skyclub, or airlines, or whatever. If you're really lucky, some of them may feature a few seconds of actual footage of Skyclub.
  It's not just Skyclub or travel videos. If I search for "repair mr coffee" I want to see a howto, not someone's SEO-optimized long winded lecture about whatever coffeemakers they're selling.
  
  So the weird thing is you can still do this but only if YouTube thinks you're the right audience for it. My grandfather looks up all kinds of old things on YouTube and almost always get exactly what he wants on the first hit. However if I do it it ends up more like your example. Interesting and annoying at the same time
  
  "Don't forget to hit the bell and smash that like and subscribe button!"
  
  Yes but it is also way bigger then it was. The amount of data that YouTube has now is just insane. I wonder when they'll start culling old videos.
- But we act like youtube is something more then just a place to post videos. We can build a new youtube tomorrow if people weren't so invested in it. If you have some content on YouTube you just can't live without fine but for everything else lets migrate... sorry, got a little preachy.
  Edit: I get all you think everything's impossible. I get it, I'm not going to be the one to make new youtube but obviously if it were to happen you are not the ones I would pitch to.
  
  Yeah, that's completely untrue... The reason we can't just create a new youtube is the same reason there aren't more ISPs. The infrastructure cost is too high.
  You can't just build a site that allows video uploads and playback, throw it on a Pi and release it to the world. You need scalability, and that costs money.
  Maybe the end solution is a distributed system, but that's not something you can easily sell to the average Joe that doesn't give a shit about the "how" or "why" with Youtube, and simply wants to watch videos.
  I'm not saying that Google isn't the scum of the earth, but there is currently no feasible way to recreate what they've made/bought without an absolutely stupid amount of money.
  
  We can build a new youtube tomorrow
  Unfortunately not. The cost would be astronomical. Youtube bled money like a stuck pig for a long time, and their monetization has turned out predictably awful, every time.
  Don't get me wrong, the competition would be great, or at least having the option of something... less Youtube. There's a reason you don't see a lot of alternatives around, though, and certainly nothing at the same kind of scale.
  
  I get your heart's in the right place. But good luck finding investors to pay for the massive infrastructure costs to back your YouTube alternative (read competitor) without a plan to extract money from someone. Not even to break even, but to turn a profit.
  It would be nice if there was public money to create these alternatives - that was m way you wouldn't have to worry about profit, just whether your solution is meeting the public need.
  
  That said I'm with you. I try to avoid YouTube whenever I can. Wish more people would do the same
  
  I don't know how much it costs to run or how ads fully function on the service, but we do have Odysee. I have yet to have seen a single ad from my collection in the app outside of creators whose vid that's also up on yt having a sponsored segment.
  Edit:
  Just booted up the app for the first time in a while and they have some minor things. Noticed a little bar at the top with a list of channels and scrolled down to find a featured section.

Worse than what? Paying Atlantic for a subscription?
- Whether we like the Atlantic or not, I feel like at some point if we want quality journalism we need to fund it.
  
  I agree, but
  They did it to themselves by starting out with free journalism everywhere on the net. And then it took them far too long to finally realize that ads alone weren't going to pay the bills. If they had stuck with the magazine rack style from the get go (pay for it + ads) it wouldn't be an issue.
  If you give everything away for free for thirty years, Then make it worse, and then suddenly charge for it, you're going to have a hard time getting money.
  
  But do paywalls actually encourage people to pay? I would point out that NPR/PBS and The Guardian are at least partially funded by the people but still offer news for free and it seems to work.
  
  Regulation would be a better way to improve the quality of journalism, IMO.
- Fair point. I don't mean to suggest that authors don't deserve to be paid for their work. And while the article discusses Google and Amazon's attempts to manipulate online behavior to drive up their profits, I remember a time when paywalls were a rare exception rather than the rule while reading articles online.
  
  That's because there was a time when everyone had print subscriptions that were healthy, and the internet just gave them extra money for ads. When you start losing subscribers because everyone is looking at your shit online for free, you learn you need to charge for it.
- Worse than it had been previously.
- Oh the irony

It's called enshittification.
- Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
  enshittification
  Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
  I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
- Dead on.

Simple, capitalism found a new promised land. The next space to fill up. And manifest destiny within.
Unfortunately but fortunately as well, it's an infinite space. Early money has built large infrastructure within it. It's been built over time and now is so massive it's hard to comprehend in the real world. It's nearly impossible to compete with them other than them tearing themselves down, but the space is still nearly infinitely large and competitors can still rise in the fringe and who knows after decades maybe rise to the same kinda massive company
So now we must limit the infinite. Cull all of it to the finite they can control. The virtual world is real, the metaverse is already upon us, and unfortunately it's already starting to look like the late capitalism asphalt shopping plazas.
So it's worse cause it's built for the investors and being limited for them too. It's why people beg for the next BIG thing, so that they can find new land or new ways to control this 4th space.
- so that they can find new land or new ways to control this 4th space. Pretty sure that Meta was meant to be the next big market space.
  I think Zuckerberg was expecting all of us to sit in a chair with VR headsets on all day and buy buy buy.
  I personally feel like it's a total invasion of my privacy because it learns "me" and then tries to influence my every move a lot more intimately than cookies in a browser does.
  
  100% absolute control over your life to sell you as much as possible.. And people consider that a utopia and not a problem
  
  It also shows how detached some of these billionaires really are. A VR system is not yet affordable for the majority of Americans, and the technology has much more development to do before it's as widespread as video game consoles, never mind PCs.
- Yah don't see a small player coming around anytime soon. People don't realise how uterlu massive these tech companies are.
  
  Yeah no. Not a chance we see valid competitors until cracks really start forming in the services these monopolies can offer. It's gotta get worse before there can be competition and so they can t just buy them and aquire it to break immediately. I mean we can see some monopolies having their fun ruined look at Twitter; but Facebook, Amazon and Google have money in reserve and an ad system (or AWS) that pays all the bills still.
  But yeah people don't comprehend that these massive online companies are all the Nestle of their space and people can't even comprehend what being the Nestle of Nestle is, and the power they wield.
- The virtual world is real, the metaverse is already upon us, and unfortunately it’s already starting to look like the late capitalism asphalt shopping plazas.
  Poetry

Take me back to the days of FFVII's Aerith Theme midi playing in the background of someone's Geocities site dedicated to Chrono Trigger. The non-consumer driven Web...
- Or give me the joy of discovering a webforum dedicated to some niche community you were interested in, and making actual, real-life friends with the people you met there. Can't say that I've made a connection like that since, oh, Burning Crusade-era WoW at the latest.
- That was nice but early reddit days, before subreddits, were the best days of the Internet.

Tell me no one actually needed to be told that. Please. For my sanity.
- Hold on let me Google it....
  Sorry, just seven pages of ads about vacuums because I bought one six months ago and links that all go to the same regurgitated article that only vaguely mentions it 🙃
- Please tell me no one thinks that evidence < anecdotes? Please, for my sanity...
  The sad state of knowledge & logic aside:
  There is SIGNIFICANT value to proving something we all think is true. This means action can be taken, it can be cited in argument, and is actually credible as opposed to a "feeling" that's it's worse.
  Sure, we "know" it's worse. I've experienced search results getting worse and worse for what seems like nearly 10 years now. But I have no proof of this, as such it's an anecdote.

Its time to 'AT&T' Alphabet/Google/YouTube.

Trust corporations to ruin something people enjoy.

Funny, but this isn't the best example. The Atlantic has been a subscription magazine for coming on 200 years now. It's also one of the few places you can get non click bait articles without ads.

12ft.io is your friend
- Or disabling js. Most of you use ublock origin. Ublock has a setting to disable JavaScript and you can whitelist sites you want js
  
  Disabling js does not bypass these article limits, idk why this is being upvoted.
- True, but that's yet another step every time I want to read an article. Personally i just use ublock origin and add this custom filter list.
  And yeah, you can also turn off JS to accomplish a lot while browsing the internet.
- They're not asking to get around it, they're pointing out shitty practices that are common now.
  
  People don't want to pay, but they also don't want to see ads. How does everyone think these companies are going to afford to operate?

https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theatlantic.com%2Ftechnology%2Farchive%2F2023%2F10%2Fbig-tech-algorithmic-influence-antitrust-litigation%2F675575%2F

Well, it definitely gets the point across lol

I thought this was the joke

Good old atlantic coming to the correct conclusion for the wrong reasons.

I believe what you meant to write is "The internet IS worse"

I would get off google if I were you
- I strangely feel very conflicted over Google. I have a Pixel phone which supports the security hardened GrapheneOS.
  Were it not for Google allowing their phones to be so easily rooted, I'd probably be with Apple, who have their own egregious privacy invading practices.
  Google also left rss feeds available on Youtube, which essentially allowed me to easily move my subscriptions to my rss feeder instead of outright subscribing. Then, thanks to Invidious, I just use an extension to reroute any time I visit that channel/video.
  Grant you, Google could easily remove these features that strangely enough allow for easy migration away from their platform, and I can definitely see a future where they do just that.
  It just is such a strange thing for a company to have these built in aspects to their products that literally allow you to migrate away from their platform.
  To be clear, I'm not suggesting that this gives Google some sort of pass to do as they please. I haven't used Google search regularly in a very long time. I still use their email and calendar solely because my current job team uses it as one of their main scheduling tools, but would prefer if we used something like a NextCloud instance.
  In short, I have done some things to get away from Google's suite of software and will continue to do so, but these strange loopholes, especially the interesting relationship Pixel/GrapheneOS has, make me wonder about how Google could still make certain products and remain a smaller, much more regulated, part of the Internet as a whole...
  
  The amount of people who would do that, like you, me and possibly most of the Lemmy users, are so small that the good PR is worth it. Guaranteed, if there's a mass exodus those options will disappear.
- Chrome browser is cancer, but also this has nothing to do with Google.

Capitalism does not work well when companies are too big. No one can compete unless you are already very rich. That sucks.

Well... you gotta hand it to them, that's a succinct summary.

If people are actually acknowledging this maybe we could do something about it.
Google should have been (should be?) nationalized. Or maybe stick it under the USPS. (If only people weren't constantly trying to kill the USPS...)
- This is an interesting idea! I've never heard something like this suggested before.

The FTC’s lawsuit against Amazon is actually insane. It’s like they have a cheat code for printing money. Google is definitely just as bad, worse even as they control much of the internet, right down to the architecture.

Actor de metodo

/c/mildlyalarming

God forbid you pay someone.