This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
The modern internet is now a highly optimised machine for detecting human vulnerability, amplifying it, and placing a payment link beside it. Any insecurity can become a commercial niche, including the desire to escape commercial life itself. There is always a course, a newsletter, a private community, or a referral code waiting at the end of the funnel.
Just avoid social media. Social media is not the whole Internet.
kid: mom, can we have socialism at home?
mom: we have socialism at home. ("social" media)
It always comes back to financial incentives. Enshitification follows the almighty dollar. Unrestricted and subsidized capitalism amplifies it all along with socialized protections and policies for those that need it least. (And those same people and organizations who benefit most are the first to speak out and block similar practices from benefitting the people)
Ordinary people now spend their lives promoting investments they barely understand, products that do not work, and political claims they have never examined. Many earn nothing. They are unpaid distributors for someone farther up the pyramid. The consumer, salesman, and product have collapsed into the same exhausted person.
Until everyone looks at their phone/app/online usage and questions how they are being 'used' it will still continue to drag along like a zombie. I regullay stop and ask whose tail i am wagging.
The subject cannot see the experiment. The operator cannot fully explain it. The regulator can barely comprehend it.
This is the crux of the issue that prevents anything from changing. By keeping the discussion suspended in a grey area, there's always the thought terminating well-ackshuallys. The inevitable conclusion being that you can't precisely define the issue therefore it doesn't exist. We've been past the point where we're shackled by the sci-fi foretold system that nobody truly understands anymore.
He pretty much covered everything pretty well. One characteristic I've recently come to realise with the current state of affairs is such that people make assertions. The internet started off as a proverbial sailing off into the unknown seas to explore new worlds. People listened more than they spoke. When they came upon a new land they listened to the locals to learn about their ways.
Now people come upon a new land and start blasting. They may probe a little to find out who the locals are, and then proceed to tell them why their stupid and wrong and should feel bad about themselves.
I think we need a special internet where making money is outlawed. If your website turns a profit in any way it's removed.
The i2p project seems promising
Kagi are trying to do something similar with their smallweb project, where they're building a list of personal sites/blogs. These types of sites usually don't rank highly in search engines, but Kagi does rank them above other results since they're almost always better than the SEO slop that ranks highly in other search engines.
They have a site to randomly browse them too, kinda like StumbleUpon if you ever used that. https://kagi.com/smallweb/
The list is in this repo: https://github.com/kagisearch/smallweb
The irony of Kagi, a for profit AI company, doing this
Their mission has always been about making the web better for humans, though. Their AI stuff is all opt-in and they have a decent philosophy about it: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/why-kagi/ai-philosophy.html
Their leadership, business model and finances are sketchy, and the AI stuff being opt-in is a byproduct of their marketing. They are an AI company, and their product is an AI. Kagi Search was just a stepping stone to reach their goal.
This is a nice read on Kagi: https://d-shoot.net/kagi.html
Kind of? The money came in and ruined it like they ruin everything. Gotta wring out every ounce of value out of everything, even if you kill it in the process
It's crazy to me how much money these companies can make off of human attention. Trying to inhabit places that doesn't have monetary value.
I came on here to say this, and found the first comment to have expressed what I wanted to. Fuck yes.
then again, the very same type of person who is susceptible to one scam after another is the same person who watches one crime movie after another. because it hits the same spot. people just need to see someone bleed, suffer, loose out, etc. the internet delivers that to them by spreading fear, hate, anxiety etc. it's all the same stuff.
the person who wants to be told for the 100x time that climate change is gonna ruin the world is the same type of person who promotes hate speech, because in the end, both want to see the world burn in one way or another, just that some people externalize that urge while others internalize it. same underlying mechanism though. people are addicted to the pain, hurt, destruction like the insect is attracted to the fire that burns it.
Everything needs to cost more so the taxes go up and we can pretend 40 Trillion of debt doesn't exist.
Hello, would you be interested in an exciting career as a writer at Wall Street Journal?
Now?
I remember using netgroups and UUCP in the early 90's to piece together files from alt.binaries.pictures.erotica
Back then there were fewer financially/data-predatory websites, mostly because we didn't have payment methods on the Internet yet (we were just getting websites as opposed to news and gopher), and it wasn't yet practical for companies to scrape your data.
So instead we were inundated with viruses. Like every few weeks, somehow, a virus would eat your frickin' files. It was more simply malicious, not even greedy. Not going to try and argue which is worse.
I also used gopher, usenet, uucp, archie and all that in the early '90s. And if you were just a little bit careful, catching a virus or trojan was very rare.
Now, everything is monetized. You're under constant surveillance on a scale it was unimaginable at that time, and being careful amounts to nothing (unless you're super paranoid) because your security depends completely on how others secure your data, assuming that they're trying to secure and not sell it.
In this respect, now it's much, much worse than it was, even if in some other ways it's somewhat better.
Peak internet was around 2005-2010, IMHO.
Getting drive-by zero click malware from an Adobe Flash / ActiveX embed banner ad, or JavaScript / CSS vulnerability, had nothing to do with how careful you were. You just randomly got viruses from your computer existing with an Ethernet cable connected. Antivirus were also pretty useless.
If you never got one, you were either extremely lucky, or just didn't notice and it was sneaky spyware
Those came later (late '90s-early '00s), and ran mostly on Windows; believe it or not, at that time there were people that used Linux or Mac (I dual booted, Wintendo for games, everything else on Linux).
And most malware came from shady sites. Again, if you were careful, you rarely got it (rarely, not never). If you were not careful, well, it usually was obvious because even if your Windows was not infected with a virus or trojan, your browser would be full of toolbars and the PC would run like crap.
We're talking about late 90s to early 2000's in this thread. At the end of your comment you say peak internet was 2005, so I'm getting mixed signals here. What year are we talking about again?
I'm happy for you that you were gaming on Linux back then, but it absolutely wasn't a mainstream thing. Windows dominated the market share. I knew one person with a Mac. Average users weren't using Linux.
I really think you're misremembering or blinded by rose tinted glasses, because almost every website had dodgey ads. Banner ads were basically Russian Roulette whether or not you got infected, and almost every site had them. Flash games sites, news sites, random user-hosted websites, yes porn sites, sometimes even MySpace pages, really almost every site was a risk and eventually the dice gave you malware. Unless by "being careful" you mean you stayed on Wikipedia and never actually used a web browser properly, you were getting exposed to these ads eventually.
Even the original article we're commenting on mentions this, so I'm not sure why we're all pretending that the internet was perfect back then.
I’m a kid of the 90s, and 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. [...] None of this was entirely innocent. There were scams, viruses, Nazis, pornography, and chain emails from deposed Nigerian princes.
I enjoyed reading that. I agree with a lot of it.
No, not "always has been!" Some of us remember the '90s, before the corporations found it and ruined everything.
Take the rose tinted glasses off. Dial up companies were charging long distance when you were on BBS/sited outside your local zipcode by the minute. Some companies were walled gardens and you couldn't access the entire internet (compuserve)
Trolls, catfish, and cyber crime existed even before the '90's.
I thought the writer of this article did a good job at explaining the modern omni-grift that's got him feeling so down. I feel I understand the contrast between the Wild West of old (that you describe) and the systematic, infectious leeching of today.
I did enjoy the article too! It might have been wrote by a human and not ai lol
I just get annoyed when people claim "back in my days the internet was better" when really it's the same exact samething lol
I think the cyclical, self-destrctive nature of the grifts he discusses really is different from any trends I saw on the internet in the 90s. He's not suggesting that the online world of the 90s was all rainbows and unicorns, but that much internet "culture" today works on the basis of hurting the very people perpetuating it, trapping them within it. That may not be entirely new in human experience, but it's more visible, more spread-able, more mainstream, more large-scale than ever.
That sounds very US specific ngl.
I don’t remember anyone charging long distance for internet packets.
In fact, I don’t even know how you’d meter that? Did they just charge you for open TCP sockets outside their own CO? Wtf who did that fucking bullshit? I’ve had a dozen different ISPs since about 1996 and no one ever charged long distance for packets
Okay, Zen_Shinobi got the details wrong but the landscape right. It wasn't that difficult to rack up a long distance bill with your computer. It usually wasn't your ISP collecting that bill though.
In the early 90's it wasn't uncommon to have an ISP that wasn't your phone company. AOL, Compuserve, all the little Randonets. The first ISP my father used was NANDOnet, which was operated by the Charlotte News and Observer. We were in a different area code than Charlotte, so using his state of the art 14.4kbaud modem to access NANDOnet accrued a long distance charge like any other phone call to Charlotte. You don't remember the likes of Earthlink and AOL advertising "more local numbers?"
Well into the 90's, you'd have use for a modem even if you didn't have an ISP at all. BBSes were often a computer with a modem attached. You'd dial directly into that BBS. No TCP/IP at all going on; you essentially had two computers connected together with an arbitrarily long serial cable. These BBS systems were owned by random nerds scattered across North America, so using BBS systems almost certainly meant long-distance phone calls. Doing things like multiplayer gaming in something like Doom over a modem could, theoretically, be done over a long distance line if you were that kind of decadent.
Anyone remember porn dialers? There were probably other industry sectors that used this business model, but it was commonly associated with the early internet porn industry. It's the 1990's, nobody's got a Venmo account, hell you can't rely on every American having a Visa card. How do you bill your customers? What you do is you host a website purely for advertisement purposes, you don't ship your actual product over HTTP at all. You offer a download of a scummy piece of software that uses the customer's modem to directly dial your 900 number. They can download...almost certainly pictures probably not video, while connected, and then their phone company bills the customer for the toll. Not unlike a phone sex service, same business model, slightly different product.
Re-read what they said. They're talking about modem dialup to a long distance number, so the phone call the modem made was long distance and hence charged at the higher rate.
It's ok to not get it, this is pre internet and a very long time ago
Early internet, yes. Not pre-internet.
BBS's pre-date what we know as the internet - that is, commercially available interconnections via an ISP to a "wider web" of servers. Pedantically you can argue there is overlap with the period when only universities and a couple of tech companies were interconnected but calling that the internet is like calling a horse and buggy a car because it has wheels and carries passengers
I think we may just have a difference in perspective. I would call a buggy a car because it has wheels and carries passengers. I wouldn't call it an automobile, because that implies an automatic engine, but I would consider it a form of car.
Same with BBS/Internet. Once you have a series of servers interconnected, and have access to them via an ISP, yes. That is a form of early internet. It dates back to something like the 1960s. Going back to NASA and government usage.
So I think we're talking about the same thing with just a difference of perspective and opinion.
But you didn't access a BBS via an ISP, that's one of the key differences. You dialled your modem directly into the BBS
I don't disagree but I don't like this article.
Internet is just human.
You see the negativity and the loudest people and keep forgetting about the silent majority.
Open source projects, people organizing events/ charities, communities geeking out over the same stuff, Wikipedia - basically all the human knowledge is at your fingerprints.
Scammers, abusers, margin groups, hate groups - they are all there. It is just so much easier to see the negative parts.
Western culture is a cesspit. Not just the internet.
Not much better elsewhere
cesspits are not addictive
Are drugs not cesspits?
No, drugs are drugs and cesspools are cesspools. Apples and triangles are different concepts too.
Apples and triangles are different concepts too
Explain this then:
Thank you for bringing such an absurd brand of sanity to this chat. (I'm serious.) XD
