Current Events > The entire internet is dogshit now.

(+) Yeah! (+)

Look at how objectively worse everything is.

Cable cutting doesn't exist anymore. You used to pay X for cable, now you pay that same X for various streaming services, which requires managing a half dozen different platforms simultaneously. So I guess it's neat that you don't have a $80 cable bill now, you just have 7x$12 bills. The old problem of "never anything on to watch when you want to watch it" is replaced with "the things you actually want to watch are not covered by your subscription"

Everything is monetized and less and less people are just contributing for the community. You're either paying a premium for what you used to get for free or you're being assaulted with eye-watering ads in every bit of visual real estate.

Pointing out the above fact will have dorks on gamefaqs.gamespot.com tell you that you should be using various adblockers, missing the point altogether

Forums are dying and reddit is taking over. do you want to discuss anything, or do you just want a community of clueless morons updooting content that they think is good? Because that's what you're getting.

If you're in the EU, I hope you enjoy getting a pop up to accept or reject cookies on literally every website you click on, only for that consent to be completely ignored later on.

Even porn sites have taken a hit. Is amateur porn even a thing anymore? Everyone is an influencer. All porn content is curated for search engine algorithms.

You want a game guide? I hope you like it split up into separate webpages for every item you want to collect which link to individual youtube videos that you still need to read anyway.

Searching for things on search engines is a mess of ads. You want to find the best gaming monitor? Well here's a bunch of companies that paid google to advertise their monitors, that's what you wanted right?

What the fuck is up with Amazon product names? Why is the actual product name a continuous string of keywords? comfortable chair ergonomic gaming chair back support pediatric gaming chair customizable chair for gaming

Every article on every website is designed for algorithms to read rather than human beings. Oh you want help with photoshop to fix your picture? I think the answer you were looking for is "Photoshop is a tool that lets you edit images..."

Who can tell what the good and useful content on youtube is anymore? You don't get to see the things you subscribe to, you don't get to see how many downvotes something got. Have an automotive issue? Need help fixing your oil filter? Well I guess you just need to watch the video that was primarily designed with the goal of making the most people click on it. "Pro Mechanic can't BELIEVE what this CLUELESS customer did to his Bugatti Veyron". Just take this content and eat it bitch.

Welcome to the real world. Happiness and positivity is just a corporate illusion to make us pay for more money. We're always screwed over no matter what we do and then we eventually die and be forgotten.

This is the real world.

Corporations are more powerful than ever

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Even sailing the seas is more annoying than it used to be. I honestly don't even really know how to be a good sailor anymore.

You can yar har for streaming content and it's never been easier to do so.

Trumpo posted...

You can yar har for streaming content and it's never been easier to do so.

ISPs keep an eye on you and can go at your throat if you do that and many sites(Obviously won't mention specifics) keep getting shut down by the government. So it is a lot more difficult than you think.

If you don't torrent, they can't do jack shit.

Clickbait and dumb AI articles bother me. I only use like 4 streaming services so it's still significantly cheaper than current cable plans.

Trumpo posted...

If you don't torrent, they can't do jack shit.

Is this an US only thing? I used to torrent like crazy and still do from time to time and my ISP couldn't care less

What a depressingly accurate topic. Ugh. Almost everything sucks.

i want to ask if you've tried the sound of running water or crickets for your tinnitus.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZYT7rN3VaGk

i was looking for background noise for myself and noticed that i could still hear the eeeeeeee over the singing crystal bowls that were on concert. so i searched specifically for tinnitus relief. i just really wanted to run this by you.

Yup, early 2010s internet was where it was at. Tech giants were still vying for everyones business. What we have now is the reason I still post on this dying websight. Its not good but we can sort of congregate here with ad blockers

boomgetchopped3 posted...

Yup, early 2010s internet was where it was at. Tech giants were still vying for everyones business. What we have now is the reason I still post on this dying websight. Its not good but we can sort of congregate here with ad blockers

The 2000s is where it was at. Before everyone and their goddamn mother was on the Internet. Nerd culture ruled back then.

But, yes. This happens to any medium. Things initially start out as a fun thing people enjoy with care behind it, then becomes a corporatized, bastardized version of itself.

How could I forget social media? Where to start an end on that one?

Maybe the worst part is how AI has galvanised AI into being mass propaganda machines for sinister foreign powers.

Or how it has given everyone a voice on every issue, and allowed them to shout and drown out the voices that actually have a stake or expertise.

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You may tag me and mock me but the truth of the matter is this is how society is. This is how the real world is. There is absolutely nothing worth it these days.

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It's pretty on the ball tbh.
Talking of social medias, gonna add the way I treat nothing on the Internet super seriously is how I enjoy it more than others who are stressing over dumb opinions, not being noticed (people on twittex and yt complaining about the amount of views they get on posts i sympathise with some but sometimes the peoples posts they make are repeated opinions or uninteresting so what are they expecting?)
Some people harm theirself cos of a toxic comment a child made, take a step back its just a bored person saying, that their opinion holds no value focus on more important things and the positive comments for your health. I was gonna say more but I can not be bothered

I miss the old internet.

It was a time of heroes. Of myths and legends.

Nah it's not. You're just on shitty websites, or watching shitty videos, or aren't touching grass enough.

pinky0926 posted...

If you're in the EU, I hope you enjoy getting a pop up to accept or reject cookies on literally every website you click on, only for that consent to be completely ignored later on.

Explain more about the last part. That feels like it would violate EU laws if they suddenly rescinded whatever consent you granted for something else.

How does that sinister trick get pulled off?

DnDer posted...

Explain more about the last part. That feels like it would violate EU laws if they suddenly rescinded whatever consent you granted for something else.

How does that sinister trick get pulled off?

You're saying you don't want that website to track cookies directly, but consider how many other agreements you've already unwittingly accepted by that point, how many ways your privacy is being completely trampled on by every device you own and all the accounts you've signed up to. You're saying I don't want this website to store a cookie so that it remembers what I did on that website specifically, but by all means google can continuously record everything I say and do and my location and curate advertising for me based on this absolutely disgustingly large body of information it's been collecting.

That's an absolute best case scenario, btw. That assumes these websites are engaging in good faith and that the cookie rejection button actually does anything, and clearly many of them don't.

The entire GDPR thing was a total disaster. The net affect it had was make websites more annoying to use.

pinky0926 posted...

Forums are dying and reddit is taking over. do you want to discuss anything, or do you just want a community of clueless morons updooting content that they think is good? Because that's what you're getting.

Now that reddit is public just wait and see what wonderful changes will get made in the name of increasing shareholder value!

pinky0926 posted...

Pointing out the above fact will have dorks on gamefaqs.gamespot.com tell you that you should be using various adblockers, missing the point altogether

I mean... you have the solution right there, and if you're not using it you only have yourself to blame

ads are basically the casinos of the internet: a tax on less-educated people in order to help fund everyone else, and almost certainly everyone who designs / makes them does not ever see or interact with thrm

If you would've told my 15-year-old self that by 30 I would become a Luddite, I would have laughed at you and probably spit at you too. Alas, the golden era of the internet is long gone, and the ways we interact with technology now are horrid.

kirbymuncher posted...

I mean... you have the solution right there, and if you're not using it you only have yourself to blame

I already use several adblockers and have tweaked and optimised them for the best experience on sites I care about, and I still fucking hate that this is even a thing

If some motherfucker is shooting at you for no reason other than to rob you and you're sitting there safe in a bulletproof car, maybe it's still alright for you to conversationally be like "you know, this is kinda shit right?"

The internet and connected devices becoming affordable was arguably one of the worst things to happen to society but nobody wants to have this conversation

Boomers miss the old days for when you could call people racial slurs without repercussions, a house was 25K, & one person could work a job providing for a family while women had no rights & had to stay at home while doing everything & we just came out of a war economy winning WW2.

We want the old days when the Game Boy Color has just come out, Internet forums had small communities & it wasn't all centralized & was in its infancy, we saw tech make leaps & bounds in a short period, several of the largest world events happened as we grew up through it, & the Internet wasn't just a swamp for the dumbest people to drop their shitty takes on Facebook & Twitter all owned by the same company or similar interests

Bro if you subscribe to a streaming service and say you have nothing left to watch, go touch grass. Any single one has more than enough TV for a human being.

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This

The big thing I really hate is all the greed, hardly anyone does shit because they're truly passionate about it anymore, they want to get paid. Which yeah I get it, you need money to live and the cost of living is too damn high so hobbies that were done for fun now need to be done for money just so people can get by.

I don't really mind the streaming services vs cable thing though. Only services I pay for are Netflix, Showtime, and HBO Max, which comes up to like $35 a month. Hulu, Peacock, Paramount+, Disney+, and a few others are all free because of bundles or deals with other services I have. Then there's a bunch of the truly free streaming apps like Tubi and Roku Channel where you just have to deal with ads. Having access to whatever I want to watch whenever I want to watch it is nicer than having to wait for that specific episode of a show to come on cable. Very rarely have I not been able to stream something I wanted to watch because it wasn't available on one of the apps

pinky0926 posted...

If some motherfucker is shooting at you for no reason other than to rob you and you're sitting there safe in a bulletproof car, maybe it's still alright for you to conversationally be like "you know, this is kinda shit right?"

well, true, I can't say I really like that state of things either. But from a personal level it allows me to access a wide variety of sites without spending money on them, so it's hard to get too annoyed. Like, I dunno what other options there really are for sites funding to support themselves at scale -

charging money: no one wants to pay for things. That includes me. If a news site has a paywall I'm hitting that back button sooo fast
donations: see above
government grants: honestly the government could afford it but I don't like the implied aspect of control that comes along with it + only the biggest names would get any
selling other related things: I could imagine a site for something that funds by selling t-shirts or something but it sounds logistically challenging and again the small guys can't really do this

When you Google "When is x game coming out?"

You click the first article that is titled "X release date revealed". A thousand ads pop up. You close them out and scroll through a bunch of low effort text about the basics of the game franchise. The last paragraph reads, "In conclusion we do not know when the game is being released."

REEEEEEEEE

Rose-colored glasses about the old internet is running wild again.