Here's a rant from Stephen Moore that I strongly agree with...
Something has changed.
I feel no sense of joy using the internet. No curiosity. No intrigue. No excitement. That feeling of tapping into an endless world of possibilities is gone, replaced with a begrudging realization that I’ll have to enter it again and battle to find what I need, trudging through ads, paywalls, vitriol, disinformation, and more.
I’ve come to the realization that I kinda hate the internet now.
It's polluted with ads of every form, type and size — popups, banners, baked-in ads on videos, sponsored posts — and they are now invasive to the point that they have harmed the internet experience. They are everywhere.
Worse, we’re tracked around the internet (thank you cookies) in an attempt to make these ads more ‘relevant’; instead, they’re just creepy and have convinced huge swathes of the internet-using population that their computers are listening to them.
Thanks in part to these ads, most websites are bordering on unusable. Huge areas of white space that are really video ads struggling to load. Then, a chatbot pops up to ask if you need help (and if you engage with them, the advice is the opposite of helpful). Then popup windows offering you shitty PDF guides in return for your email address.
I used to be GOOD at using search engines. I'd sculpt my terms with booleans and quotes, subtly tweaking and ahhhh there it is what I was looking for...
Now, it's everything I WASN'T looking for, flooding in to drown out anything good. Bullshit, and bullshit, and scams, and botshit, and actual human content made by people who give an actual damn about what they're saying just vanishes under the clamoring sewage.
I hate it. I hate it so much.
It was so beautiful, when it actually worked. Now it's lost. Eaten. Cannibalized. Infested. Shambling. Coming for our brains.
I feel like Moore's whole point used to be true as of 3-4 years ago, but as of right now, the old internet is coming back. It's not really a replacement for the rotting corpse that is the majority of the "main" internet right now -- not yet -- but it's clearly positioned to be able to grow into one, if all continues on its current trajectory.
@breadandcircuses AdBlock, Ghostery, Pi-Hole, and other tools can stop the cesspool of ads. Not all of it, but enough of it to not overwhelm your experience.
@breadandcircuses Loved this essay, I feel pretty much the same and I'm so glad to have found an essay that expressed something that I've been wanting to express for the past years. Thank you so much for sharing!
@breadandcircuses this is called The Great Enshittification. Late Stage Capitalism squeezing the last few drops of surplus from everywhere they can (margins are getting thinner) until it collapses and resets, probably with a global scale war, fascism and the like.
So, you know, let's stay optimistic.
I just wanted to get dimensions for a particular device. I've done similar searches since the late 1990s. Usually the manufacturer's site would have it or no one would.
Now, the first search page is all SEO garbage. Navigate to the manufacturer's site, which wasn't on the first search page, and they want you to log in to an account. Of course they won't confirm that the information would actually be available.
It's bullshit.
We've discussed going back to requesting paper catalogues from suppliers in order to speed up the design process due to the amount of time it's now taking for some information.
I wish I could teach what I've done to shield myself from the things he describes. I see advertising ONCE: if it gets my notice, it doesn't ever again. The same goes for anything not advertising that distracts from my workflow. If I see it at all, I see it ONCE and never again. There are exceptions that may over time become the rule, but I hope not.
Anyone can duplicate what I've done, but it demands a little routine diligence and not without some hiccups.
@breadandcircuses The willful obfuscation of a vital source of information by a small group of people scared shitless of an informed public. The excuse that this is to make sure a company can survive by increasing their profits is beyond a joke at this point.
They don’t want curiosity, a sense of wonder at learning something new, fact checking, on and on.
Bottom line is peoples welfare is of no concern & any true access to information needs to be controlled & manipulated.
@breadandcircuses Did we fall off 'The Cluetrain'? When did The Internet stop being "a conversation" that enabled us and become a big argument about nonsense, which disables meaningful interactions between real people?
@breadandcircuses@PaxAsteriae I'm also old enough to remember the internet when it was as-designed: An open community intended for the free exchange of ideas, information, & research.
The most hateful, obscene word to have arisen in the last few decades is “monetize”