The internet is kind of a predatory cesspit now

Everything is kind of a predatory cesspit now

maybe the physical world is the moderator of the dream world. In the absence of the physical world the dream world runs rampant.

with no empirical reference, truth becomes a matter of popularity or the loudest argument.

with no space, everybody lives next door to a thousand assholes.

If you go to doomer places on the internet (this thread included), you will see the internet as doomed

A billion hungry discorporate souls, roaming a vast non-space, looking to feed their hunger, looking to eat each other. Some call that hell.

Sadly, one of the contributors to this are the "Little" Tech Bros. They have drunk the kool aid at work. A bit libertarian or right wing in nature, they salivate at the latest Full Self Driving (supervised) lie, or AI hype, or crypto when it first came out. Some intricate new feature or language puts them into paroxysms of joy. In their view, any attempt to regulate or draw boundaries around "tech" equates to communism, marxism, and attempts to curtail so called freedom of speech. Don't use it if you don't like it, they say.

By Little Tech Bros i mean developers with lots of technical skills, but who haven't been lucky enough to be in the right spot at the right time with an IPO. They keep evangelizing hoping megabucks lightning will hit them the next time. It won't. More likely, a layoff notice. Because Big Tech Bro figured out how to grab all the money from their excess productivity.

you forgot to add "slow" to predatory cesspit, or with 4 pages open and 880meg doing who knows what while everything bogs down, the though of closeing the browser and clearing the cache becomes the simpler more pragmatic option, though this dependent on the OS still responding

This is a little premature - I'm about a month away from a really good launch date, but the sentiment here is too good a match to miss...

A long time ago, when dinosaurs roamed the Earth, I set up my first webserver. In those halcyon days you had to email CERN to get your website added to the list of websites in the world; a list people downloaded as the sum total of what the web was and where they could visit.

Things have come a long way since then, but maybe not always for the better. The ad-companies have wormed their way into just about everything on the web, and the tech billionaires have funded it because they can make even more money at the general public's expense.

I recently got very fed up with Reddit's anti-user policies, and decided 'screw it, there's not that much special here'. As a result, Blewit[1] came into existence: it's an experiment - can an old-style just-for-the-good-of-the-community-it-represents website still function in today's modern world? We'll see...

Blewit takes no user information other than a username/password. We're forced to accept cloudflare's country-code so we can be compliant with the Online Safety Act, but we deliberately don't even ask for an email address.

We don't track. We don't have ads that are other ways to track. We don't have algorithms that force engagement along the most-outrageous pathway. We don't have analytics to sell you stuff. We don't put tracking pixels in our site, and when you upload an image, we strip it of all the EXIF/Location data so it can't be used to track you by proxy.

More bluntly, all the dark patterns are missing. By design. It hearkens back to a simpler time, where people did things simply because they thought it was cool, and others might like it too.

So it'll be interesting to see if something like Reddit (I think it's better, but I'm biased) can survive in the far-more-predatory world that we live in, than when I first started using the web. The site is deliberately lean-and-mean, and I think I can give it the on-ramp it needs to become successful if it gets the engagement of sufficient people. Again, I guess we'll see :)

Enjoy.

1: https://blewit.uk/

I don't doubt that there are very large communities of grifters, but to say that they are "the Internet" seems a bit much. If you see grifting as the central core of the Internet, maybe that's a problem with your filter bubble. You need to filter that stuff out.

Fully AI generated article complaining about the state of the internet.

The sheer irony of the word "grift" being used 13 times within it...

Now, for the last 20 years.

Now?

I’m sorry but I’m sick to death of all this rose tinted glasses crap about the history of the Internet

I got on the Internet in 1993 and it is always been a cesspit of bullshit. You could easily find child pornography online in the 90s and there were all kinds of scams constantly being tried

> I still remember the early internet. It was slow, ugly, unreliable, and full of cranks, a strange world of wheezing dial-up modems, Usenet flamewars, <marquee> tags, and dancing babies.

I remember the 1990s and this guy's "description" is massively biased.

I remember oldschool browser games in the 1990s - AM Mari (Archmage, from a korean company), or even Java Applets such as Dragonquest or whatever was the name. Or Joe Cartoon - may be a bit after 1990s too. Either way, many such things were not a problem here. I never used a dial-modem, for instance, even in the 1990s had fast flat-rate cable connections that was surprisingly cheap. Still kind of is cheap, for the net-value I get from the world wide web, though I agree it has gone down in quality, for many reasons. One reason is ... Google. And other mega-corporations. These try to destroy the internet. Or rather they want to control more of it.

> The scammer once had to find a victim. The platform now finds one, profiles the weakness, optimises the pitch, processes the payment, and recommends the next scam. What was once an aberration has become the norm.

Not incorrect indeed. The private companies here abuse the people. The problem is: what to do about that? Google de-facto controls the internet via its evil adChrome empire. All the ad-money revenue goes through this. It's kind of like a giant mafia system established here. Didn't the free market philosophy once claim that monopolies should be avoided? Why did the USA establish these monopolies?

> Each feeling arrives with something to buy.

Not sure what the guy means. Ublock origin blocks almost all ads. I don't buy anything advertised; I don't even notice it because it does not show up.

Not everyone uses the internet in the same way.

> People doomscroll until they acquire the anxiety that the next influencer will monetise.

Doomscrolling is indeed addictive; I do that on youtube shorts. The shorts are progressively getting worse though and also AI slop spams fake in, which invalidates any time I spend on these too. I usually close the tab after 10 downwards scrolls or so. I am accessing the internet on the desktop though; on smartphones this is probably a more default-y behaviour to swipe.

> The system is dopaminergic in the most banal and mechanical sense. It runs on anticipation, uncertainty, and variable reward.

Ok, I stopped reading there. The guy thinks that humans are simple systems based on biochemistry. I fail to see how I would fit into that scheme at all. And I understand biochemistry. I'd wish he would have spoken more about who ruined the internet, not what the thing today called the internet is about. We need to isolate and counter those who ruined the internet. Google is a huge factor here but not the only one.

AI slop.

This post is one long strawman argument.

Everything on the Internet is designed to enrage or sexually arouse you as quickly as possible, including this article.

I have only one agenda - my own. People hate that I think nowadays.

You need to be in some kind of camp, even for something so minor as skincare brand or fanfiction.

I think that it was fine until the internet started to influence the real life way too much. You used to be able to log out and gain distance to the bullshit on the web.

Now the bullshit has permeated into the mainstream and you need very drastic measures and personality to reject it.

You will lose some people for this but there are still some older folks that can talk about anything and will never get offended. Never conform but also don't become a contrarian for the sake of it.

The modern life is an art how to stay weird in a world that wants to squash you into some kind of label. How to stay genuine

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So ...it's the same social dumpster fire humanity has always been?

Cast aside the syntax and semantics of religion for financially engineered beliefs; buy low, sell high or you'll be "left behind!"

Small step forward from "believe in my take on Christianity or your soul will be eternally damned!"

Mirror neurons fostering same flock building via corps people used to build via scripture.

Just more lazy people who want zero responsibility to themselves and everyone else to have responsibility for them.