this post was submitted on 05 Jun 2023
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Technology

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (5 children)

We have made mistakes.

We wanted it all to be free. It was free. I remember the early days of the internet, the webforums, the IRC, it was mostly sites run by enthusiasts. A few companies showing their products to would-be customers. It was awesome and it was all free.

And then it got popular, it got mainstream. Running servers got expensive and the webmasters were looking for funding. And we resisted paywalls. The internet is free, that's how it's supposed to work!

They turned to advertising. That's fair, a few banners, no big deal, we can live with that. It worked for television! And for a while that was OK.

Where did it all go sideways? Well, it was much too much effort to negotiate advertisement deals between websites and advertisers one website at a time, so the advertisement networks were born. Sign up for funding, embed a small script and you're done. Advertisers can book ad space with the network and their banner appears on thousands of websites. Then they figured out they can monitor individual user's interests, and show them more "relevant" ads, and make more money for more effective ad campaigns.

And now we have no privacy online. Which caused regulators like the EU to step in and try to limit user data harvesting. With mixed results as we all know. For one it doesn't seem to get enforced enough so a lot of companies just get away with. But also the consent banners are just clumsy and annoying.

And now we're swamped with ads, and sponsored content written by AI, because capitalism's gonna capitalism and squeeze as much profit as they can, until an equilibrium is reached between maximum revenue and user tolerance for BS. Look up "enshittification"

I wonder how the web would look like if we had not resisted paid content back then. There were attempts to do things differently. flattr was one thing for a while. Patreon, ko-fi and others are awesome for small creators. Gives them independence and freedom to do their thing and not depend on big platforms or corporations. The fediverse and open source are awesome.

There's still a lot of great stuff out there for those of us who know where to look. But large parts of the internet are atrocious.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Sure, servers are cheaper now. Domains are cheap now. TLS certs are free now. But that happened after the advertising business model became dominant.

For a while, server power was barely keeping up with the rise in demand, and you couldn't just add another cloud server or bump up the RAM allocation on the one you have, you had to physically install new hardware. That took a larger chunk of money than adding $5 to your hosting plan, and time to set up the hardware.

By the time the tech stack got significantly cheaper (between faster hardware and virtualization, not to mention Let's Encrypt), advertising was already entrenched and starting to coalesce around a handful of big networks.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (5 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (5 children)

The comment was getting long and I didn't want to get into socioeconomic side effects, mobile, or other factors.

It's not all bleak. The internet is still built on a foundation of free and open technology. HTML, CSS, and JavaScript (aka ECMAScript), TCP/IP and DNS …

The best thing we can do is teach those things. Keep them accessible to as many people as possible and make sure they don't become forgotten arcane voodoo knowledge. Anyone can set up a website and share it with others. We don't have to depend on big social networks.

The biggest challenge is how do you get people to be curious about this stuff? Back in the day, we had to learn, we had to look under the hood, because half the time stuff just didn't work and we needed to figure out how to fix it. But today everything is hidden behind a shiny UI and most things just work. There's no need to look under the hood (if you even still can, and it's not some encrypted blob or compiled binary webASM nonsense).

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

@Skimmer5728 I think what we're doing right here in the fediverse is a good solution. We're just building a parallel infrastructure to their dumb web3.0 garbage. Those who want a better Internet can come over here and those who want to stick with garbage can stick with it.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

well said, i agree, the fediverse is definitely a good approach.

i think the only concern will be getting more people to move here and adopt it, it'll be harder to convince and appeal to more mainstream people. but i guess that'll be easier and easier as the web goes to shit and gets worse and worse over time than it already is, lol.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

The "web3.0" is also an attempt to escape the nightmare that "web2.0" has become, just centered on Blockchains and the technologies they allow. Technically, the web3.0 is not at odds with the fediverse, it might even be that some day both might end up working together.

For example, one of the alternatives to Reddit that's being worked on, is a Blockchain + IPFS solution that already has some features like user migration between instances. It's a bit hard to expect to onboard the average user to a full crypto experience, but things like Lemmy could be the "base service", while someone looking for something more could look into integrations with other solutions.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

There was the original idea of microtransactions, where you could buy some credit, say $10, and every time you read an article, the author would get fraction of a cent. Or you'd need to manually approve it, such as with a like.

Of course companies saw a good idea and ran it into the ground, so now microtransactions mean something very different, and in their stead there are subscriptions for everything.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Nobody was complaining about small banner ads.

Everybody hated banner ads. The first adblockers were targeting banner ads, and they were the beginning of the arms race. Advertising? On the Internet? Not a chance!

How little we knew back then...

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I use uBlock Origin in Firefox, with all the boxes ticked. It's not only adds it blocks also plentiful of trackers. Just to make my visits on today's web usable. As a result, my laptops / smartphone resources are saved up, more battery time or cooler device as example.

Personally I like ads, totally ok for it - if informative, sharing some kind of relevant value with greater good. Companies should let the product or service itself advertise, not throw these on people constantly.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

This is why I whitelist duckduckgo in firefox in my ublock extension. I will gladly look at the relevant ads at the top of the list, knowing they are just that. I glance at them, most of the time it's a sales pitch, I go "not interested" and just move down the page to the results. 100% fine with that.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I don't know if it's the theme I use on DDG or what, but I've seen ads barely marked as such in the search results.

I'm all for non-intrusive (video/sound) ads, but I think not making text ads obvious is not good behavior. Especially if they call themselves an alternative to the ad-addicted search engines.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (7 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (4 children)

I always forget how many intrusive ads are on the internet. One time I shared a link to one of my family members and they almost got a virus because of a pop-up ad. The web is actually unusable without uBlock Origin.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (3 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Firefox + uBlock Origin + Reader View

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Reader view is pretty good at decluttering the web and uses less power on laptop and phone as well.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Road to hell being paved with good intentions and all, I guess. 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. Prior to that dialog, they'd just store/read the cookies without permission (though lots of people would proactively sandbox browsers to make it a non-issue). I honestly can't decide which is worse, at this point.

I like the ones that show the prompt for "we've detected an ad-blocker" with the option you can click for "continue without disabling and not supporting us". Guilt trips work in human to human interactions, but not for random Internet prompts.

Of course I'd prefer the web simply not using cookies on every single site I visit (therefore not needing the prompt), but that's not going to happen. Sites have to monetize somehow to stay alive.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (3 children)
[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago
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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (5 children)

hey how to upload pic on comments section?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Alternatively upload the Image to an extern Imagesharer/host, vgy.me works fine, and insert the url with Markdown

![](imageURL)

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

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

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

"Let us demonstrate"

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (5 children)

I think we have 10-15 years or so left before the internet becomes totally unusable due to ads, paywalls and general bad design all over the place.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Oh the irony.

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