• helenslunch@feddit.nl
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    3 days ago

    2 ways to go back:

    1. Corporations become less greedy.

    2. Consumers and businesses stop tolerating abuse and consider other options that will temporarily inconvenience them.

    Neither one seems likely. If it were we simply wouldn’t be here in the first place.

    • Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world
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      3 days ago

      I’ve said before and I’ll say again. I would use the option on amazon for shipping that says “let your employees pee”. I get my package 2-3 days later. Oh well. I don’t give a shit. I’d rather normalize companies treating people like people. And if I get my limited edition pez dispenser 3 days later, so be it.

      Not like it’s an oxygen tank.

    • MajorHavoc@programming.dev
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      3 days ago

      History tells us there’s also a release valve of a swift brick to the side of the head, one brick per billionaire.

      It sounds messier than paying taxes, to me. But I’m not a billionaire, so I can’t say I understand their motives.

    • chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      It isn’t just corporations that have ruined everything, it’s spammers and scammers and cybercriminals too. Searching any topic these days is a crapshoot, with a high likelihood of falling into a spammer’s tarpit.

      To me it feels like the internet is evolving into a virtual Dark Forest. We float around in these little bubbles of sanity, hiding amid a yawning expanse of seething chaos.

      • trainsaresexy@lemmy.world
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        2 days ago

        As long as people need money other people will try to find opportunities to make it, not everyone has the same moral boundaries.

        People have talked about this for a long time it doesn’t seem like there is an idea driven way out. This is the road.

      • helenslunch@feddit.nl
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        3 days ago

        That’s great but it takes more than 1, or even 1M people. It has to be enough people that anti-consumer shitfuckery is no longer profitable.

    • SkyNTP@lemmy.ml
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      3 days ago

      1 can be solved with regulation or nationalization. Services online should be public services. Like school, police, roads. You can still have private alternatives too.

        • Drusenija@lemmy.world
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          2 days ago

          I’d argue there’s enough difference there to flag them separately. The original number two is more about personal responsibility; choose a different retailer, go to a different place, etc. Voting with your wallet so to speak.

          Government regulation, while it’s still about people pushing back against companies, with the state of most western governments at the moment you can’t assume they will automatically have the public’s back. So there’s a tie in to the personal responsibility aspect by electing representatives who represent your interests, but given that’s not always feasible (either because not enough people share that view to get someone elected or because there isn’t a suitable candidate available to support) I would argue it’s distinct enough to warrant its own category.

          Regulations and anti trust laws would both fall under a government intervention category though I think.

        • azertyfun@sh.itjust.works
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          2 days ago

          You are conflating Consumers with Citizens, a classic pitfall of modern neoliberal democracies.

          Just because people willingly Consume a Product does not mean they think The Product is good or even that it should exist at all. Neoliberalism is unable to acknowledge that, because Everything is a Market and the Market is Infallible.

          In reality, the game theory is such that individuals may not have the means to get out of the local minimum they found themselves stuck in. Prisoner’s dilemma and all that. That’s what representative democracy is supposed to solve, when it isn’t captured by ideology and corporate interests.

          • helenslunch@feddit.nl
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            2 days ago

            You are conflating Consumers with Citizens

            I’m actually not, and my word choice was intentional. If you’re not consuming these goods then you hold no leverage, and probably don’t care.

            • azertyfun@sh.itjust.works
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              2 days ago

              Do you not consume a single Google/Meta/Microsoft product or do you not care about their abhorrent business practices?

                • azertyfun@sh.itjust.works
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                  1 day ago

                  Then you’re knowingly engaging in the consumption of abusive products? Do you not see how you have literally no leverage whatsoever as a consumer?

  • FlashMobOfOne@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    The Fediverse is as close as I’ve gotten to Internet the way it used to be, and I donate to the instances I use in order to keep it that way. I wish everyone would.

  • jj4211@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    To a large degree, the same internet that used to be, still is.

    Keep in mind that in the era they are nostalgic for, the internet involved roughly 4% of the world’s population. As big in the public conciousness was, it was a relatively small thing.

    For example, most people see Lemmy as pretty small and much slower content coming at you than reddit. However Lemmy is still way bigger than what a mid 90s experience with the internet would be. I can still connect to play BBS Door games and there’s barely anyone there, but there were barely any people there back then either. The “old” internet is still there, it’s just small compared to the vast majority of the internet that came about later.

    Some things are gone, but replaced. For example Geocities now has neocities, which is niche by today’s standards, but wouldn’t be shocked if neocities technically is bigger than geocities ever was in absolute terms.

    Some things are gone and won’t come back. The late 2000s saw a really nice and stable all-you-can-watch streaming experience from Netflix, and their success brought about maddening licensing deals where material randomly appears, moves, and disappears and where a lot of material demands more to “rent” than buying an actual Blu Ray disc of it would cost (have gone back to buying discs as of late because it’s cheaper than streaming).

    • aesthelete@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      However Lemmy is still way bigger than what a mid 90s experience with the internet would be.

      IRC was a ghost town the last time I checked in on it. In the mid-90s there were constantly thousands of people on it.

      • jj4211@lemmy.world
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        1 day ago

        A bit more of a direct comparison would be IRC to, say, Matrix. Last year I see an article announcing Matrix user count and it was more than all the internet users combined in 1997. This is a near-nothing number in modern internet scale, not even 4% of Facebook userbase, but I’d say that Matrix is about as close as I can conceive of “IRC-like” mindset applied with more modern principles in play. Yes you have billions in more popular social networking and communication networks, but there remains many millions of people’s worth of “internet” that resembles the 90s in some structural ways, which is how many people we had on the internet total in the 90s.

        One huge difference is of course that no longer does a wider populace see those folks as potential pathfinders for others to join, but their own little weird niche not playing the same way as everyone else, with no advantage that they can understand in play.

        • aesthelete@lemmy.world
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          1 day ago

          Yes, I understand your point and agree with you for the most part.

          I feel like there was a turning point in the Internet though, where the federation of user identities basically ended for most Internet users. I track it to the advent of MySpace and Facebook. People started using their actual identities on these sites (most likely, at first, to attempt to get laid), and our privacy began being flushed down the toilet then. I also think the creation of Google Chrome with Google’s all-consuming want for private data and to tie all of your Internet activity to a real person had a big hand in this as well. The modern Internet is a surveillance Internet.

          As the article states, it’s no longer true that “on the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog”. They hook you to your actual physical identity the instant you do anything on your phone, search using a logged in account, browse one of their sites with your logged in cookie, or generally browse anything after you’ve touched any of the major social media sites because they added trackers to everything.

          In some ways, this is beneficial because many cannot handle anonymity, but the bad parts of the Internet have largely drowned out the good. As the Internet has scaled, more and more of the bad side of humanity is reflected digitally. To add to that mix, the major sites in their fun house mirror algorithms supposedly designed to amplify engagement (or “enragement algorithms” as I sometimes say) constantly amplify items posted by the most degenerate among us.

    • Leminator@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      True. Heck, even ol’ Slashdot is still kicking around and I think it was the first website discussion board I’d encountered (or maybe that was Fark? which is also kicking around still!)

      • jj4211@lemmy.world
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        1 day ago

        Yeah, and the ol’ “slashdot effect” is hardly a concern anymore because things have gotten so much more capable as slashdot didn’t grow.

        I’m sitting at a laptop with 8-way 2.3 ghz, 32GB of RAM, a way faster NVME storage than any datacenter array would deliver in that era with a gigabit internet connection from my house. Way outclassing any hosting demands from the 90s for the most severe “slashdotting” that slashdot ever could inflict back then.

        To deal with ‘modern internet scale’, you have to resort to more resources, but to keep up with the ‘like 90s subset’, little old rasberry pis can even keep pace.

        • ✺roguetrick✺@lemmy.world
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          1 day ago

          The Fediverse effect is much more entertaining. When every instance trys to retrieve a thumbnail and description of a link at the same time. Nobody even has to interact with said post to just give the place a DDOS flood.

      • jj4211@lemmy.world
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        1 day ago

        I would say internet “in kind”, not necesarily verbatim the content from back then. I think if someone inventoried the subset of the internet that was “like the good old days” more or less that it would probably match in scale 1997 internet or so, or be larger. Styles may change and content, but the general spirit and approaches persist, just as a now minority in a much bigger sea of crap that came to join it.

  • jordanlund@lemmy.world
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    3 days ago

    Quality through obfuscation… make it harder to use. If the dimwits can’t figure out how to use it…

    • rottingleaf@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      Globalization ruined it.

      Not like in politics (though similar), but in the sense that instead of a space of generally sane people where you don’t have to follow any conventions of fashion or social expectations of idiots, like a park where people sit in grass and eat sandwiches, it has turned into something like a mall built in place of that park, with guards, ads, bullshit and shopping apes.

      There definitely was trash. You just didn’t have to see it. You’d not go to a central recommendations system, like in social nets or search engines. You’d go to web directories and your friends. Like for many things you still do.

      Now there’s the fake social pressure of being on corporate platforms. Why fake? Because you still really need and talk to the same amount people you would back then, even fewer.

      That fake social pressure was their killer invention. Human psychology is unprepared for critically evaluating the emotions from being able to scroll through half the world of other people right now. They don’t generally use that seemingly easy ability to reach anyone anywhere, while when it was a bit harder, they would, but the fake feeling of having it is very strong.

      It’s a mouse trap.

    • bruhduh@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      Yes, selfhost most essential services like mail, messengers, web search, piped frontend, vpn, and other things like gitea/forgejo and jellyfin, web 3.0 will be federated network

        • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
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          2 days ago

          You can get pretty far with setting up DNS entries properly. I just moved most of my accounts to my custom domain (hosting is at Tuta), and I haven’t had any issues yet. I find value in paying for hosting, but I think I could self-host if I needed to.

        • Gsus4@mander.xyz
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          1 day ago

          Web 4.0: I can actually safely tip every dude who made a useful video/website 0.01 cents and neither side will have to pay any extra fees so it is actually worth to tip, it will just be p2p money using the processing power of the sender and the receiver without buttcoin vultures trying to fuck with it. That was what web 3.0 was supposed to have been 13 years ago, but between the technical limitations and those web3 shitasses’ greed, we’re left almost where we started…

        • xor@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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          2 days ago

          I think in general it’s supposed to be about decentralisation, but god knows scammers will hop straight onto anything with “point-oh” in the name

          • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
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            2 days ago

            Exactly. Blockchain is decentralized, so a lot of people have jumped to that, but it really doesn’t have to be. I’m interested in distributed projects, which goes a step further than federation, and I think that is the gold standard for an open internet.

  • anticurrent@sh.itjust.works
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    2 days ago

    Corporations and commercial interests taking over the internet is inevitable. the only free corners left are the darknets with tor/i2p. but because the normies can’t bother use that isn’t falshy and trendy, there might not be any other chance to replace this decrepit boring dystopia.

  • fmstrat@lemmy.nowsci.com
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    2 days ago

    Go back to site directories.

    Curate your news feed.

    Stop using a single corporate search engine.

    Participate in online social communities, not in social media.

  • stoly@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    I disagree with the idea that the internet is worse than it used to be. Back in the day, you went into a forum and people were MEAN for no particular reason. People do that now over politics more than anything. Before, that’s just how people were.

    • trainsaresexy@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      I had one forum I went to and people trolled but they were community members and if it ever got out of hand they were banned. Nowadays people seem much more vicious, the more personal and the more it stings better.

    • Yaztromo@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      Depends on what you mean by “back in the day”. So far as I know you could be ~30, and “back in the day” for you is the 2005 era.

      For some of us “back in the day” is more like the early 90’s (and even earlier than that if we want to include other online services, like BBS’s) — and the difference since Eternal September is pretty stark (in both good and bad ways).

    • schizo@forum.uncomfortable.business
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      2 days ago

      Yeah, now you get mean people, a drive-by malware installer, AI generated ads, and 4mb of JS that tries to scrape every detail about you so they can make a profile they can sell to (dis)information brokers.

      Truly, an improvement.

      (People have always sucked, the Internet just lets you interact with more people so…)

      • Laser@feddit.org
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        1 day ago

        I don’t really know. For text based discussion, I prefer something like Lemmy, also due to better moderation tools etc. It’s a cool early thread-based discussion tool, but mostly outdated.

        Unfortunately, there is absolutely zero other use for it, and nobody should ever bother, it’s wasted time.

        • Petter1@lemm.ee
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          1 day ago

          😁there are now binary files to be found there as well 😉

          • Laser@feddit.org
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            1 day ago

            No, there is nothing, and any investigation by copyright holders wouldn’t lead to anything. Trying to get anything out of usenet today is futile.

  • Lettuce eat lettuce@lemmy.ml
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    2 days ago

    Not sure this has been said yet, but Neocities is a pretty great throwback to GeoCities and the early 2000’s web.

    All a bunch of small, handcrafted websites and personal blogs by individuals and small groups.

    Exploring feels like I remember back in the early 2000’s as a teen. Crazy and weird sites, hidden links and easter eggs, ARGs, random annon comments you can post to a wall, .gifs all over, pixel art, hacker manifestos, links to other similar sites, etc.

    The Fediverse is pretty great too.

    I wish there were more site directories curated by communities, that would reduce my reliance on search engines for sure. RSS is great, I’ve been using that to help build my personal content feed.

  • Etterra@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    When you remove the barriers to entry, the average quality users decreases, leading to an increase of corporate interest in an attempt to market to them all. These corporations do not care about the environment, and they run what the masses haven’t yet trashed in order to commodify it for maximum profit.

    First the planet, then the Internet, next who knows? Maybe the entire human genome. Soon everyone will have to pay to remove dream ads and there will be a paywall inhibiting serotonin production without a subscription.

    • namingthingsiseasy@programming.dev
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      2 days ago

      Indeed, Reddit was a great example of this. All of the stupid things they tried to pull off in the past few years (selling user data, turning off the API, insulting their users, VPN blocking, to name a few) would have not worked when they were a growing website. Now that they have so many low quality users, they can do that successfully because they know that said users are too dumb to realize how they’re being abused. Even larger websites like Twitter and Facebook operate this way.

      The takeaway here is: don’t focus on having many users, focus on having good users. All relationships are a two-way street, and if you’re on the side of the street with too many people, you don’t have any personal leverage on your own. It’s in your best interests to get out of that relationship.

  • barsquid@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    How did we get here? Adtech, tracking, monetization.

    Can we go back? By removing the ubiquitous affiliate marketing financial incentives, so no.

    • sverit@lemmy.ml
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      2 days ago

      Yeah man. Last time YouTube was good was when people were making videos just for fun, not for clout.

    • DragonTypeWyvern@midwest.social
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      2 days ago

      Don’t be silly, the proletariat just needs to unite, seize the nuclear stockpiles of at least two nations capable of destroying all life on earth in defense of the oligarchy’s hoards, and then decentralize ownership of the global communication infrastructure.

      Easy.

      • rottingleaf@lemmy.world
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        1 day ago

        Nukes are an option, yes.

        But as the recent event with exploding pagers has reminded us, global logistics and also systems’ complexity allow for many funny things.