Dirt_Owl [comrade/them, they/them] @hexbear.net

1y ago

Most of the modern internet is indistinguishable from what we used to call malware

Every site is trying to pull a Bonzai Buddy now.

"We need all your info for advertising, not you can't opt out unless you make an account and give us your email. Oops, looks like I hid the opt-out under a subheader. Amazon is now profiling you."

WE USED TO CALL THAT SHIT A VIRUS.

ITS EVERY. FUCKING. WEBSITE. NOW

"Hi I'm going to block this entire site until you give me your info, this is very cool and normal."

Capitalism ruined the internet. The whole thing is malware now.

163 comments

I miss the internet. I miss personally maintained websites, bulletin board forums, link pages, sprite comics whatever. It was sooooo much more fun. There was new stuff everywhere and in infinite variety. Now it's instagram
- It's so sad and disgusting. And the old internet, if it's not gone, is impossible to find anymore. SEO has buried everything. : (
  
  It's such a bummer. Whenever I'm bored with an internet connection it reminds me of that. It used to be I'd think of something I don't know, Google it and look at all the pages different people made on the subject, whatever it may be from quicksand to medabots, you could find like a dozen at minimum websites made by just like...people who liked thst shit enough to make a website. They all had their style and voice. It felt truly limitless and like there was alway something out there waiting that you'd really be able to dig into.
  
  search.marginalia.nu
  http://wiby.me
  http://ooh.directory
- What we're seeing is the Wal-Martification inherent to capitalism.
  I don't mean this to offend but your instinct here, which is entirely relatable, is paralleled by the people whose political inclination is to try and wind back the clock to the 1950s or the Wild West or "before corporatism" (whatever the hell that's supposed to mean) etc.
  Obviously the huge distinction here is that you haven't crafted your entire political analysis based on achieving a return to what was and you've accurately identified the political and economic forces at play that have caused things to develop in this way and you have a viable solution for the problem you've diagnosed. On the other hand, those groups have none.
  The way that individual production and small-scale local production with small marketplaces that brought together groups with similar interests and some larger agora-like regional hubs gradually turned into increasingly larger corporate entities that vacuumed up all the small production, distribution, and exchange until all we're left with is tiny little farmer's markets existing within the margins between massive operations like Amazon, Wal-Mart, Costco etc. that are pretty much unavoidable today is nearly a 1:1 analogy for how the internet started and how it's going, except in classic internet fashion of course this was done as a speedrun.
  
  Yeah, I kmow

Thank God I can come home to all my dear bots and feds here at chapo dot chat
- Do Tankies Dream of Electric Sheeple?
  
  Today I was informed that it's tankies, not neoliberals, who want to abandon the ROC, and the neolibs definitely won't pull out of Taiwan the instant the US has chip parity. Gosh durned tankies.
- Sorry, boss said you have to stay late at the office tonight
  
  from each according to his ability wink wink am I getting the lingo right
- I feel safe on this website. I know there's no point to all of you being feds because they already have microphones in my walls.
  
  This is related to a bigger problem, which is that you can't really even trust newer communities to even have real people anymore.
  Hexbear/Chapo.chat was kinda okay because it came about around 2020? I think? Which was still before AI became massive
  but 4 years of AI evolution is huge, and I think that in another 3 years' time it'll be impossible to know if literally anything on the internet is even real, with the exception of stuff that's dated to the "before-fore times"
  The fake pictures and fake text are already extremely realistic, and videos should reach the same point in a few years time

What percentage of processing power is used just to run tracking cookies, ads, and other pop-up bullshit. God help you if you're on limited mobile data when every website wants to auto-load video ads.
Definitely ThE mOsT rAtIoNaL sYsTeM
- what about when the advert will load but the content will not
  whoever made that possible should be placed in the advertisement torture nexus
  microchip on brain loaded with petabytes of adverts

This reminds me of a particularly cursed enshittification dream I had where I was in a bar restroom and the soap dispenser was blocked unless you downloaded their app and created an account.
- Step back from the lathe RIGHT NOW
  
  Too late, it’s real. I tried to use a public toilet in Sweden once with QR code payment lock on the door. I couldn’t get the fucking thing to work while I was in the middle of doing the gotta go dance so I ran up the street and found another public toilet at a place that still had an actual human person taking coins.
- I visited a cousin recently and he took me to his gym for a workout, and according to him they replaced half the mechanical weights with DIGITAL WEIGHTS. That you need a special band AND an account for. Because why? Novelty? It's not like anyone reads the spam emails we're all forced to slog through to even participate in society.

Yeah it fucking sucks. Every ad man gets the wall.
- Don Draper's sole redeeming action was his brave attack against an American outpost during the Korean War
- Bill Hicks had it right
  CW: suicide
  
  And may he rest in peace

It’s not that bad for me, but then I’ve got eight finely tuned anti-bullshit browser extensions and a DNS sinkhole. No one should have to construct a whole elaborate tower defense like this just to get on the web.
- eight finely tuned anti-bullshit browser extensions
  Drop your mixtape bro.
  
  https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/adnauseam/ or https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock-origin/ blocks ads
  https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/behind_the_overlay/ gives you a universal button that closes popups
  https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/i-dont-care-about-cookies/ removes cookie banners/popups
  https://gitlab.com/magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-chrome-clean removes paywalls on news sites
  https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/view-page-archive/ shows you webpage archives
  
  https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock
  https://gitlab.com/magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-firefox-clean
  https://github.com/kkapsner/CanvasBlocker/
  https://decentraleyes.org/
  https://github.com/mozilla/multi-account-containers
  https://github.com/stoically/temporary-containers
  https://docs.clearurls.xyz/
  https://noscript.net/
  https://www.daniel.priv.no/web-extensions/amp2html.html
  https://nextdns.io/
- DNS sinkhole
  Hell yeah, comrade. I'm running a IDS along with a sinkhole myself.
- Thoughts on no script?
  
  These days I seldom enable NoScript. It’s useful on rare occasions. Once upon a time I tried working with it from a block-by-default starting position, but eventually the tediousness of managing the filters wore me down.

It's also been so thoroughly enshitfied by big tech that the useable internet is a handful of social media sites.
- for really generous definitions of "usable"

I personally find that the most tragic thing about the internet is how if you looked at the way it was made you'd almost think it was the product of a socialist state. It is a product of intensive collaboration between different researchers, fully subsidized by the state every step of the way and the end result effectively given away for free to the public. Now it is rendered a wasteland, carved up and privatized, and with LLMs and image generators it can only get worse as everything gets filled up with computer generated slop.
However, let's take a moment to think about how much good such technology could do if it was subservient to the needs of a socialist state, search engines that actually give you what you want, central planning networks with unparalleled efficiency, social media that prevents the reproduction of reactionary thought, a free, fully organized and easy to access centralized digital library of all academic resources. I can't help but be hopeful for whatever society comes out of this capitalist hell.
- I think this is a very common pattern. Some new social or technological space opens up that allows people to collaborate and create something actually valuable together, and then hordes of capitalistic parasites come storming in to set up as many fences as possible so they can charge tolls and harness the new kinds of art and tech that was created for advertising, extraction, and rentierism.
  
  Humans create value by organizing and capitalists are privatizing the means by which we organize. This is true of third spaces IRL and it’s true of social media.
- You are by far not the only person to think that something like the Internet and the Web specifically would be most useful for a socialist state and even easier to create it.
  Only IRL, in that socialist state that had people trying, things went differently, because officials and directors and administrators felt that such a system would threaten their power.
  Probably could have happened to a limited extent if its authors wouldn't be idealistic idiots describing their communist dreams right away to those predators behind redwood tables. Should have been more modest.
  
  Only IRL, in that socialist state that had people trying, things went differently, because officials and directors and administrators felt that such a system would threaten their power.
  Would you mind providing some evidence for this claim? I assume you're talking here about the Soviet Union, but I have never heard that Soviet scientists tried to build an internet but were stopped by government officials. I'd like to see some evidence of this before I just take your word for it, you know? Thanks!

at least bonzi buddy stayed on your desktop or laptop, now every fucking thing requires installing an app on my phone so they can track me
I really need to follow through with setting up an android VM on my NAS so I can install apps to it and avoid the tracking bullshit
- tbf your phone doesn't need apps to track you, the OS already does that
  
  yeah but the companies who want me to install apps aren't privy to that, that's why they want me to install apps

It would almost be forgivable if it didn’t slow everything to a crawl. At this point I’d let them put a tracking chip in my fucking brain if they’d just let websites load properly, but we aren’t even going to get that.
- It's so fucking bad! Nothiung should load less than instantaneously but between the amount of crap shoved in to every site and the atrocious coding habits of "webdev" everything is an absurdly inefficient mess.
- Best I can do is Bounty ads beamed directly to your prefrontal cortex

The internet has become useless for news. Back in the old days you could use Google to find articles and read them. Today, everything is behind a paywal and Google results for news content has turned from a list of links to useful information to a list of banner ads for subscription services.
And no, I'm not going to buy a subscription for Racism Weekly or The Hunt The Poor For Sport Times just because they happen to have some interview with a ghoul or happens to be the ones who exposed some generic local government scandal. And even if I had disposable income and wanted to spend some of it on the self-important stenographers who calls themselves journalists, there's no way I would buy more than one or two subscriptions and I would still be excluded from most of the stuff Google tries to push.
- And no, I'm not going to buy a subscription for Racism Weekly or The Hunt The Poor For Sport Times just because they happen to have some interview with a ghoul or happens to be the ones who exposed some generic local government scandal.
  New site tagline

Me: goes to website to use its function
website popup: "Oh, you're using your cell phone to visit me! I look WAY better in an app!"
Me: can't figure out a way around the popup and surrenders to the app download
website's app popup: "We're sorry but your cellphone is too old, I can't be installed."
Me: goes to website on a computer made from parts from before the website and my cellphone existed
website: "Hey thanks for logging in, lets get to work"

It tru. Apps? Apps? I used to SCOUR MY FUCKING MACHINE to get rid of spyware like apps. I went nuclear on the boot sector. I DOD formatted by storage just to be certain every trace of spyware was gone.
I'm using uBlock Origin to block most advertising and sketchy our outright hostile and malicious code, uBlacklist to block shit from search results (pinterest), and Firefox for general purpose fuck this shit.

woe betide the marketing profession and those who partipate
- HARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRK

it's great how everything just sucks more and more and there's no end in sight

let's delete all computers in the world and start over from scratch (but after capitalism has been abolished)
- But everyone knows that if we do the butlerian jihad computers will just be replaced with psychopathic mentats smdh.
- nah we need the leaders to understand how bad it can really get
  nobody else needs to know tho
  or maybe everyone can kno, and it'll be part of basic education on why the old system failed

Siderant but every company that has you make a workday account on their external site when you apply can get fucked. I'm not gonna spend 2 hours filling out an application, after already sending my resume, after confirming my email address to a site I'm never going to use again in my life, to not get an interview anyway.
If you are after that sweet metadata just make your race and gender questions a bit more robust. (I still don't know if those are meant to be inclusionary or exclusionary.)
- love it when i'm applying for a job and have to misgender myself because there's no "nonbinary" option in their for some reason REQUIRED gender field
  
  "other" and " I do not wish to disclose" is just so fucking degrading it seems like too.
  I've filled out a few tech apps that has they/them etc and it seems like a step forward but those places are few and far between.

It's called dead internet theory
- i just realised i sounded like a
  by "correcting" you. comment deleted, sorry comrade.
  
  Nah, it's cool. If I am wrong I probably should know it.
- Like cyberspace Kessler syndrome

Archive.org will eventually be destroyed under capitalism, but it’s both a wonderful window onto how the web used to be and also the equivalent of low-background steel for human knowledge. That and Wikipedia are the only unsullied places I can think of that have outlasted the last 15 years or so of enshittification.
- I have bad news for you about Wikipedia.

Yes, but was Bonzi Buddy ~~on the blockchain~~ AI-based?

Luckily you can mitigate most of it by installing uBlock Origin.
- i second ublock origin.
  But the problem runs deeper. Sure you can hide from all those ads they display, but they can still data mine your existence and shape it with their recommendations.
  
  they can still data mine your existence and shape it with their recommendations
  You can protect from that, too, but it's substantially harder and takes a lot more effort.
  
  No, uBlock Origin is a tracker blocker too.
- I still can't see any links my friends send me if they're from twitter, facebook, insta, etc (half the time anyway, seems to let me sometimes for short amounts of time) because they block the site with a wall telling you to log in.
  
  If you're looking to view twitter posts your friends send you, just replace the url from twitter.com or x.com to nitter.net
- Ive been using it for years and a month a go I sadly started seeing ads on youtube for the very first time.
  
  Youtube has been trying some laughable pushback as of late. Update the addon, have it update its filters, boom, ads gone again.

Tor browser with security mode on Max. Find out how much of the internet is actually information or paywalls

I was just thinking about this the other day. I noticed that I would click on an imgur link and try to zoom in on my phone, and it legit just took me zooming as permission to redirect me to some completely random imgur post about the worst meme you've ever seen. And I'm like "isn't this like clickjacking or something? i thought that was considered malware"

i visit hexbear, my favorite invidious instance, and sometimes satisfactory tools and all of them with privacy badger and ublock. thankfully i have been relatively shielded from the enshittification. but i really hate how the www is headed straight into the shitter

163 comments