Technology

honestly heartbreaking in a lot of ways to see the current turn of events and how the web is today.

but what could we have done to prevent it? im not sure paywalls would've been feasible, i feel like most people would refuse to pay or just avoid your website all together. maybe a paywall network of websites of some kind could've worked? but its really hard to say.

i don't even have a problem with ads on sites to an extent, as long as they aren't overly obnoxious and don't spy on you and track your every move. that shouldn't be too much to ask, right? but alas, i guess it is in 2023. 🤷‍♀️

just such a sad state of things. the web is currently unusable without a content blocker or protection of some kind, which is insane to think about. this all really only scratches the surface too of the modern web's issues. in general a lot of the individuality and freedom of the internet is just... gone. all completely corporate and shall now, so much seo spam and clickbait and other garbage, just for the most clicks or revenue possible. there's little quality left for sure.

feels like we lost the internet in a lot of ways. i wonder what the solution is, if there even is one. i guess we just can't give up fighting.

Running servers got expensive

No it didn't. Running a server today is dirt cheap compared to the bad old days. So is registering a domain. Getting a TLS certificate doesn't cost anything at all.

However, there are a lot more people here now. It used to be you could feasibly run a moderately popular website off a single server and it'd be fine. Now, with billions of people on the Internet, you need an army of servers distributed around the world if your site gets even remotely popular.

But also the consent banners are just clumsy and annoying.

That's a feature, not a bug. Consent banners were manufactured as a way to turn public opinion against GDPR and generate political pressure to repeal it. “Look at how those Europeans ruined the web!” GDPR was supposed to pressure these unscrupulous advertisers into giving up their spooky tracking, but they did this instead. And it's working—most people blame GDPR for ruining the web, not the sleazeballs who actually ruined it.

I feel like that's where online payment systems really let us down. If there was an easy universal way to pay a few cents to view content and it wasn't a privacy and fee nightmare, I'm sure people would have no problem doing that. Digicash systems come to mind, I hope they could make a comeback one day.

But I also fear a lot of the damage could've been done already, kids who grow up with the internet now will probably only remember big tech platforms and may not be very eager to try out something more complicated.

Great comment. I made a community called !oldweb today to share and discuss old style websites and sites that aren't just the top social media sites. So things like quirky personal websites, webrings, website lists made by others etc.

The first big problem was malware in ads (and web in general). This has caused people to install adblocks on their parents' and friends' devices.

Then there were the annoying ads: autoplaying videos, popups and other shit. This has caused a lot of normies to install adblockers themselves.

Then the privacy concerns, where even basic users notice that they look at a product on one store and now the recommendations follow them everywhere.

But the marketing companies keep pushing, and the OS providers like Google, MS and Apple keep restricting what you can install on your machine, this is a full-on war between users and the big tech.

Nobody was complaining about small banner ads. But they just have to keep pushing and break things. It's like with banks, or mythological creatures - insatiable.

It reminds me when Jaron Lanier said in today's world, anytime two people come together on the Internet, that arrangement is financed by a third party, that believes he can manipulate the first two. I really miss the good old days when the Internet was still a dirt road you could meet fellow travelers on, and have fun exploring it.

It was free, as long as we paid for every minute of phone line use.

I shared a link from a movie streaming site not knowing that without uBlock Origin the page was covered in nearly pornographic mobile game ads.

this is the #1 reason, #2 being the initial reason I started using adblockers in 2010, ads with audio

ublock origin is the best! I currently use it to filter out all twitter blue users :)

This is heavy metal irony.

"Allow me to demonstrate! No hesitation!"

Lemmy feels like the old internet IMO and I'm really enjoying it so far! :)

hey how to upload pic on comments section?

The easy route to Exclusivity is Manufactured FOMO (fear of missing out).

Visuals that give people a sense of "I'm better than you" are a huge potential moneymaker even if they do nothing functionally. We will see if we need these, but honestly even these changes start to alter the landscape of the community in I view to be negative ways.

I upvoted and chuckled, but please use Imgur or similar links while the entire ecosystem is being hit by the Reddit hug of death :)

Excellent post, and I love your sites minimal, old school design. I finally found the right corner of the internet where people actually think about this kind of thing! It's so frustrating how over the years search engine results just give you bloated, pointless articles that exist only to rank high in SEO and get ad revenue.

I too have been using the site:reddit.com method, but it sucks to essentially only have one for-profit website as the one I use to research things.

The reason sites all have the cookie permission dialog now is because of the GDPR, which has the right idea on data privacy, but the implementation wound up being so terrible that it winds up doing this.

GDPR is not at fault here though, since it does not require asking for consent if the processed data is necessary for the purpose of the provided service. For example, a web shop usually wouldn't have to ask for permission to store items in the shopping part because that is a necessary part of the online shopping process. In that sense, requiring the consent dialog for all unnecessary purposes is better as you can at least see who's trying to screw you over. Don't kill the messenger here.

I think it's also important to remember that websites can only get away with these annoyances because it a) is easily automatable and b) has been the default mode of operation for decades. If restaurant waiters today started asking guests if they could sell info on what and when you ate, who you were with, and what you looked like, everyone would be creeped out. Before GDPR, it was pretty much normalized to do the same thing on the internet without even asking for consent.

The internet is fine, you're just using the wrong parts of it.

Yet I am somewhat optimistic that we can build our own communities that may work beyond this crap.