Asklemmy

Needless complexity in software is something that gets on my nerves, especially on the web. We went from simple HTML to such a bloated mess that only like 2 web browsers can manage to keep up with it. I mean, does a web browser really need to do everything? Why use an office suite written in JavaScript in a web browser when there are native programs you could use?

The loss of the actual internet + The loss of actual search engines.

Let me explain. The internet used to be an open playground where anyone could post a website dedicated to their interests, and did so. There were websites about octopuses and electomagnets and all sorts of obscure niche interests. Free website space with plentiful, and everybody used it. You could see 50 pages of information about someone's dog Fifi, just because they wanted to put it out there. Or hand loading ammunition if that was their bag. Or why the Communist manifesto was a better document than the declaration of Independence. Anything went on your own web page.

And it became massive; so big that we needed search engines to find the exact thing we were looking for. When we wanted to find information about octopuses, we needed to search through all those obscure websites and find what we needed to find about octopuses.

So the search engine wars began.

We also had things like stumble upon, where you could be surprised by some interesting site, and there were rings, where interesting sites of the same genre linked together so you could follow a threat of interest through a bunch of obscure sites.

None of this was forced on you.

Now we have possibly 20 to 30 large websites that account for 95% of all the traffic on the internet? We have search engines that show us what they think we meant by our question, but not the exact answer to our question.

It's gone. We wondered how they were possibly going to tame the internet how they were going to close Pandora's box.

It's all gone.

I just moved into a new student dorm today and every single thing is done by a different app run by a different company and the “help desk” only say “use the app” whenever you have an issue. Only problem is I can barely even download the thing because the wifi is broken and I can’t report that I can’t connect to it because I can’t download the app to report it.

Another one that gets me: buying things but not actually owning them. You buy a game but you don't actually own the game, you own a license to play a game on a service that might shut down sometime in the future or change their mind about the license they sold you. You buy an e-book but the storefront you bought it from might change or remove it, and then forcibly update or remove any copies you have on e-readers. Most people don't even buy movies or TV shows, they just subscribe to some streaming service, and if they do "buy" an electronic copy it's the same issue as e-books.

At least physical copies of movies and tv shows and books are still a thing, but even then we're heading towards a future where physical media may require phoning in before it'll play.

Noise pollution and how comfortable people feel contributing to it. I’m mostly talking about people playing videos and listening to music in public (bars, restaurants, etc), but also the new “stereos” on motorcycles that are essentially just PA systems. Sometimes it feels like nowhere’s quiet anymore.

The proliferation of tiktok and other extremely short-form content, and parents being comfortable with their kids using it.

Baseball is unwatchable to me anymore because of ads the announcers read during innings.

Everyone hates advertising, but it's an unavoidable part of life and it's never bothered me when there's a 3 minute commercial break. I'll mute it until the show comes back on and look at my phone or get up or something. Or I'll fast forward if I have a buffer.

But baseball TV and radio announcers reading frequent quick ads between pitches or between at bats can't be skipped/muted and it's like fingernails on a blackboard for me. After 30+ years watching baseball, I'm essentially done with it now.

Everyone complains about ads but I seem to be the only one who thinks real TV with its easily skippable commercials is the least bad option. Streaming services aren't going to let us control the video stream the way DVRs do.

Ridiculously bright headlights on cars, in particular those the driver cannot control when they dim. I can't fucking see when driving at night against incoming traffic. Yet the majority of people seem to love them somehow.

The centralisation of all web browsing in the hands of a handful of aggregated front ends that basically monopolise on content provided by other people. Goodbye websites and independent communities.

Hello auto generated websites that exist to push ads and optimise SEO.

Microplastics showing up in our organ tissue and managing to pass the blood brain barrier. We're going to cure Alzhemers just in time for Plazhemer's to take us down.

The expanding prevalence of loneliness

I'm with OP on this one, I can't stand that everything needs an app to do simple tasks either. And subscriptions are getting way out of hand, the whole technological scope seems way more intrusive then it needs to be.

Capitalism is growing, it has successfully seeped through every aspect of our life, creating consensus and effectively becoming more and more the norm in the social fabric. Right now there are many opinions against capitalism that are beginning to become almost taboo.

• It has taken our privacy: it is almost mandatory nowdays to use things like social media and operating systems that track you. You can't opt out without being a social outcast. As much as I wish I could live with pure Linux on every single device I use (including my phone) and without touching any proprietary software (except games and professional software with no privacy - invading tracking, but that doesn't work well financially with a FOSS business model) belive me I would. But I would have to give up so much, it becomes almost impossible.
• It's beginning normal to defend profit and condone terrible things for profit. Everybody knows about how the supply chain relies on several human rights violations to continue, but it's considered normal.
• It has instilled the idea that everything you do must be useful. I'm seeing the idea that your hobbies must be "productive" in some kind of tangible way in your life spread around more and more, and it is making us appreciate life less, as "doing it for the sake of doing it" is beginning to be shunned as an useless waste of time.
• Relationships are becoming molded by capitalism. Think about the dating apps culture, swiping left and right on people who basically sell themselves as products on a market. It is becoming normal to see different people in parallel and then just committing to the one you like best - as if you were trying a bunch of laptops in an electronics store. Relationships themselves are less committed and more transactional, as we are normalizing stuff that makes me raise both eyebrows at once. People are starting to become scared of commitment and scared of committing to one person. More and more people are not only opting out of monogamy, but shunning those who choose to practice it as some kind of close - minded conservatives. There is more and more pushing and popularity in something like fluid and open relationships - which allows you to be in a relationship but still be on the market, never fully commit to a person, always keep looking for something better to jump onto, and have a normalized free trial with your partner's consent. While it does work for some people and I don't put that in doubt, I feel like at large this is being used to commodify relationships, sell ourselves as products on a market, lose our ability to commit to another human and get used to returning people like an Amazon package. It's literally treating relationships as products. People want to live in the comfort that, if they decide to try a MacBook Pro M2 and later a more powerful M3-based iteration comes out, they can smoothly transition to the newer model - but for relationships - which is, in turn, damaging the very idea of a serious long-term relationship.
• Likewise, we are becoming all too trigger-happy in throwing people away from our lives like yesterday's trash. Is your relationship or friendship hitting a rough spot? Nuanced opinions are getting more and more rare. "They're a narcisist and you need to cut them out", "they're gaslighting or manipulating you", "They don't deserve you, you should leave immediately". It's super good that we are finally starting to take mental health seriously, thank goodness this is one of the things where I think the present is much better than the past at, but people we are overdoing it and using it out of context. In a world where people are commodified, they are too considered as disposable as products, and as such, easy to throw away and replace. The tendency to do real and actual work to work on a relationship or friendship with a person you love is starting to go out of fashion.
• We are making people work several jobs at once and completely drain themselves to even be able to afford their rent and basic survival. Everyone is becoming lonelier. Real friendships and relationships are being replaced with parasocial ones - only accessible through proprietary software with Draconian privacy policies that you would be very hesitant to accept if you took the time to actually read them, of course. There is a push to get part of our social need met by watching "stories" and social media updates by friends, mistaking a few reactions and comments here and there for actual interaction, and parasocial romantic relationships are actively being sold on platforms like Onlyfans, where not only creators sell their content (which I think it's fair - content is content and everybody should be free to distribute it and sell it as they want and take profit for it), but also chat (or, more often and more unethically, hire someone else to chat with) lonely people who pay them to have someone to talk to and a semblance of a connection, one they cannot get in today's hyper capitalist lives with low energy and low free time
• The rise of the right. Have you noticed that, right around when capitalism has gotten this intense, it has become almost acceptable once again to be openly fascist, without euphemisms? Have you noticed the sudden rise in far-right leaders in elections worldwide? It's not just you, this is happening, the far right is making a huge comeback.

I absolutely look like a boomer typing this, and I am fully aware of this. I hate absolutely everything about contemporary culture, except for the much higher attention to mental health, broader acceptance of the LGBTQ+ community, more attention on the problems of feminism and a few other things that I think are a net positive to out society. I think capitalism is fully to blame for most of the things that are going to shit right now.

Subscriptions. Why is everything a sub now?

I understand the need for some subscriptions and their benefits when there is ongoing content added to a platform.

However i'm not paying a subscription for software I could just buy and own forever, i'm not paying a £6.99 subscription to get some shitty cloud features in an app that is costing several cents a month to host. I get hundreds of gigabytes a month for less than that with Backblaze.

I'm not paying a subscription to read every second news website. I'm not paying a sub to access remote features of my car. I'm not paying a subscription to remove ads in an app, just let me pay once.

Temu, Shein, Alibaba and even Amazon are full of unsafe products not manufactured under sufficient quality standards.

Recently we bought some plates for a party that had gold metallic polka dots on them. I was able to use a plastic fork to scrape off these polka dots. People were eating cake off these plates. The metallic paint was going into people's mouths.

Also, many of these products are only designed to last for a short time before they break, so we are literally filling landfills with this plastic junk we get sent over to us from China by the shipping container load.

Might be a controversial take, but I'm concerned about people letting themselves shape sweeping, negative views on things that are (keyword: relatively) minor or just don't fully know the story behind. For example, EA was voted "Worst Company in America" multiple years in a row, when it's really just a software company whose worst sins would probably amount to gross overworking/general poor treatment of their employees. That's bad, but I feel like it's pretty inarguably better than chocolate companies who use child labor to harvest cocoa beans.

It's especially concerning when it extends to global/political issues (this is why I said this might be controversial). We don't tend to realize that we share much more in common with people in other countries than we realize, probably helped by the fact that most news sites tend to leave out details or exaggerate bad parts when talking about governments other than their own (a notorious example is the reporting on North Korea . Here's a good vid about it (CW: very graphic) Not saying it's a wonderful place to live, just that it's exaggerated.) Part of the reason political conversations feel so toxic is because so many of us just don't know a lot of what's going on or what each other is talking about, so we're rarely on the same page. Reading a quick Wikipedia summary and/or article can go a long way

Digital billboards. It's annoying that they have to cram more ads on the side of the road, but the worst part is that they're too damn bright and can be blinding at night and it feels like they make driving more dangerous because of this.

Lack of computer literacy. When I was in school, we had computer classes that taught us how to use Word, Excel, even Photoshop and Illustrator, etc. And also things like proper netiquette. It seems like students nowadays are just expected to have computer literacy, and it's either not being taught anymore or is being taught in a severely diminished way. I'm extremely concerned by the number of younger students who don't know how to use Excel (or, frankly, anything that's not a social media website/app). Likewise, I believe the fact that young people are no longer taught to be wary of privacy on the internet (and are in fact encouraged to share their personal lives on the internet) is an oversight in education that will harm these people, as well as society, in the future

Im still pissed off LAN was removed from every video game and that even single player only games require an internet connection.

putting massive touchscreens in cars

Not exactly a trend, but I'm really worried about this next generation of kids that's coming up. During COVID they were locked down for a bit, which I think has caused some of them some socialization problems, and then they were just dumped back into school and there were no vaccines for kids so a lot of them just sort of got COVID freely.

We still have no idea what's going on with long COVID (and it seems to sometimes do something to the brain - people losing their taste and smell, brain fog etc.) so between missing out on key social milestones and a potential plethora of long-term and poorly understood health issues, I'm worried we're gonna have a really weird generation of people coming up in the next couple of decades.

Anti-space/science rhetoric on the left.

A lot of it comes from people who are anti-Elon and are against everything he touches. So they become anti SpaceX. Then they become anti-aerospace.

They don't understand, or even want to understand, the science and importance behind it's advances. The thought process just goes Musk Bad>SpaceX Bad>Aerospace Bad.

Remember how in Interstellar, there's that teacher who was casually teaching that the moon landings were fake? Like, society had reached a point where they cared so little for space, that they actively turned a blind eye towards its accomplishments or just straight up dismissed them? I feel like that's the path we're on. Because of people's blind hatred towards a rich douche, an entire EXTREMELY IMPORTANT industry is becoming reviled through sheer ignorance.

Most people in my media classes seem to be so obssessed with the content of social media as opposed to the systems of social media. A lot of other students and professors are only interested in alternative content rather than alternative systems. They talk about the "algorithm" as some kind of sentient being instead of something programmed by people. It's a weird shift in media studies going from concerns over systems to content.

Another one is how people will only watch things that are on Netflix or whatever the popular streaming app is now. Some people have asked me for film suggestions but when they find out that it's not on Netflix, they lose interest even if I provide them with a link to it from archive.org or other very special places.

The increasing inability for what was once considered "high earners" in the six figure range to even have enough to have a family or hobbies. Less than a decade ago, 100k was seen as upper class and now its becoming closer to middle class for a generation of professionals as rent and food costs increase. It's certainly not as bad as anyone trying to make less than 50k in this day and age, but I feel like everyone in the working classes blue and white are being squeezed. If we can't afford enough for our creature comforts and the things we like to do, what does that mean for personal growth at all income levels?

Children dying as a result of right wing extremist parenting.

Here are a couple of examples: children murdered by Qanon dad (https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/matthew-taylor-coleman-qanon-children-killing-1239151/), child murdered by antivaxxer father (https://magazine.atavist.com/sins-of-the-father-san-francisco-vaccines-murder-suicide/?fbclid=IwAR0OBzNIqVkbPa47epDcffhw-aw61QhAGk5_IvNX3KN1AGIMRy4lhs-Suyk), Qanon dad kills family (https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/09/12/igor-lanis-murder/).

There is no help for kids whose parents are caught in right wing conspiracy theories and CPS seems to be very hands off with such parents. As far as I'm concerned if you're an antivaxxer and homeschooling your kids should be apprehended for their safety.

How people perceive science and how they behave with scientists. Especially since covid, people see scientists as evil mustache twirling assholes. People are completely lost on the fact that everything good in their lives comes from science. Granted, all bad stuff too, but scientists are not out there to come up with bad things to ruin your lives. That's what we have politicians for.

Doorbell cameras.

Let's turn the whole fucking planet into a surveillance state because some people like to jerk themselves off about (typically racialised) fears of petty urban crime.

Cars (like most tech these days) is over engineering.

Ooooh, I could give you a while list of things, but I am not one to set fires intentionally.

I will say that a lot of people have been trained to use their feelings as a moral compass before letting logic and reason do the talking. This includes "treating the symptoms" of a problem and not digging down to the root cause. A lot of root causes are byproducts of the industrializaton of the modern era, but it's an unforgiveable sin to produce research that makes a company look bad.

IRL? Climate change. No one around me seem's to GAF. Of course, I know places like here share in my belief.

However, kid me when I first learned about the concept of evolution and now worry about how the reliance on industrialization will negatively impact our evolution if we overly rely on technology to do everything for us. I worry about "inventing ourselves to extinction" basically and that's more or less my pet concern.

Smart TVs, and advertising as a whole

50 years ago, a TV was a device that you plugged an antenna into to watch shows. 20 years ago a TV was a device that you plugged some component cords into to watch shows. 10 years ago, a TV was a device that you plugged an HDMI cord into to watch shows. Today, a TV is a device that you hook up to the internet so it can serve you ads while it can track what you watch, while a corporation profits off of the data it harvests from you watching shows.

In 10 years, a TV will be a device that lets you watch shows occasionally, in between ads. There's already a service that gives you a free TV in exchange for watching ads. How long will it be until offline TVs become as rare as headphone jacks in phones?

I hear you man, I'm starting to push back on digitally downloading stuff and opting for the hard copy for like video games (go gamestop). Streaming is cool, but subscriptions are a bit inflated. Everything is 9.99 a month. I feel like some are worth like .99 cents a month max so I feel priced out of many things that I might otherwise be inclined to actually subscribe. Or perhaps we are all just really feeling how bad the current wealth inequality actually is.

Cars. Not only are they getting bigger, with both higher weight and worse blind spots making them more dangerous, but the new technologies they are coming with make me uneasy. The touch screens to control everything from climate control to radio are bad enough, but now they even have social media apps installed! Plus all of the driving aids like lane departure assist up to "autonomous" driving means drivers are paying less and less attention to the road.

Manufacturers and vendors in general increasingly removing choice from both hardware and software.

Examples:

• Manufacturers removing the headphone jack
• Laptop manufacturers removing options from the BIOS (Surface laptops)
• Laptop manufacturers getting rid of extra ports
• Microsoft getting rid of many customisation options from Windows (such as missing taskbar options in Win 11, or the window color options that was dropped a few years ago, or the old Mail app)
• Apple removing more and more features, from macOS such as the ability to quickly switch between different sets of Wi-Fi, Ethernet and other network settings depending on the location
• Google removing features from Android and locking down the OS with each new release (such as removing the ability to use custom CA certificates, which impacts ad blockers and network monitoring tools; moving more features from AOSP into proprietary Goole Play Services, thereby impacting de-Googled ROM users)
• Google progressively locking down the web by introducing unwanted features in Chrome, such as Manifest V3 and Web Environment Integrity.

Autonomous driving vehicles. I've worked in software for over a decade and if their internal processes are anything like the places I've worked then no thanks