I’ve definitely turned into the paranoid nutcase within my friend group in recent years, I hate that everything is “smart” nowadays requiring an app/internet connection & account, just to do basic things that didn’t require any of that before.
What’s some things currently making you ramble like an old man?
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.
1993-2002ish was the golden age of the web. Now everybody just goes to the same handful of websites for everything. Even if you hate Spez, you still can’t find any quality answers to anything without adding site:reddit.com to your searches. Everything else is SEO-optimized blogspam generated by a bot. There are no real personal webpages being run by a single person or a small entity anymore. Everything is corporate and centralized.
That’s some rose tinted glasses, and misunderstands why we don’t do that anymore, despite being perfectly able to.
Those obscure websites you were referring to had a high barrier to entry, they required the person to know how to host and code some basic HTML. Sure, it had more personality, but that barrier meant there was far less people who could do that. So then platforms like geocities came out, where instead you now needed just an account and to fill out some forms to create your own little site, you didn’t even have to host anymore! That was the beginning of web2. Those people who now were creating pages on geocities didn’t have a voice before, they could have posted their own websites but simply did not have the means to, nor should they be required to just so they can post online.
Well, now we’re on geocities on crack, which the websites we post our content on have gotten much more advance, to the point that we are now. Those big internet monoliths exist because of web2, because people didn’t want to handle their own self hosting stack just to post some stuff to the internet, so no wonder we’ve reached this point. People then gravitated to the best places to post their content, and to explore other’s content. Because that’s essentially what the internet is, exploring other’s content.
That’s not right and I’ll tell you why. You’re not wrong about geocities opening up the ability to create websites to a lot more users. Geocities and other website creator sites like that were great, and did exactly that. Even MySpace did the same thing. But then here’s where corporations threw the control element in.
They added a social element. They took away a bare website presence, maybe a counter to see how many people came by, and replaced it with an upvote and downvote system where your thoughts were subject to peer pressure and social correction. MySpace, Geocities, all of those independent free website creator tools died in favor of Facebook, digg, Reddit, Twitter. The odd stuff, the weird stuff, the truly countercultural stuff, disappeared under the tyranny of the masses. People turned to blogs for a while. But soon those died too.
So now we have the new element of control. The control of what you get to see. What the web search engine shows you. What rises to the top of your feed. Hell a lot of the times you have to really work hard to find your own friend’s posts. I’m looking at you Instagram.
But by all means disagree with me. But you won’t convince me that this is better. Not in a million years.
There’s only so far to go technologically speaking. Making websites and message boards was a solved problem a long time ago. Search engines were pretty much perfected about a decade ago.
Tech companies stopped being tech companies too. I dunno what they are anymore. The dystopian cyberpunk evil corporations.
Check out perplexity search engine. It’s like having Google back the way it used to be
Are you talking about perplexity.ai ? because it looks like a shitty LLM answering questions instead of an actual search engine. It looks absolutely atrocious privacy-wise, too.
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.
Some people get downright feral when their noise machines are even brought up. It’s competitive aggression against other competitive aggressors and it’s supposed to go without criticism, or else.
This is precisely why I don’t say anything when it happens. It doesn’t seem to bother others — for some odd reason — and I don’t want to get my ass beat if they end up being unreasonable.
yeah the whole dang teenagers and their bluetooth boxes always struck me as odd. I mean not that it’s not dick behaviour but considering we allow sports cars to annoy everyone in like a 1 mile radius when the owner decides to compensate for whatever it feels odd that there’s this focus on people listening to music
putting massive touchscreens in cars
I don’t mind touchscreens in cars; what I can’t stand is when they put every important feature on there so you can’t even adjust your A/C or turn up the music without taking your eyes off the road for several seconds.
They should be limited to things like displaying the song title, controlling things from your phone like maps, music, and calls. Showing the backup camera, extra info that doesn’t fit on the dash, etc. Not replace every god damn function on the car.
My older brother used to have a Nissan Froniter, I can’t remember the year but it was the first year that backup cameras became mandatory. It had a screen but it didn’t have touch capability, it was pretty much as you described - only for song names, backup cam, and some other small things. As much as I hate screens in cars I thought that one made sense.
I once got a ride from someone who had an actual tv he watched while driving in his car
Playing train simulator while driving to work and dream about public transport
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.
It’s more aggressive car culture bullshit where people feel compelled to keep up with the latest aggressive gesture.
That too, yes.
But it starts with the manufacturers, and with no proper research and regulations. I’ve heard of people disappointed that they can’t control the brightness of their own car lights, apparently when purchasing it they never imagined it would be something 100% automatic.
I feel like every new comfort feature on a car is solved legally by still having the person at the wheel responsible and since now the computer does it (well enough maybe 60% of the time) you see way more of an increase in stuff like too bright lights, missing lights cause the rain detector isn’t working and things of that nature because people just assume the car will take care of it
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.
Literally every single door on this street. Can’t go anywhere without bezos and the cops with backdoors knowing.
Innovation is when you make every street a panopticon.
One time I was walking down a street and this woman rushed out of her house and starts yelling that she knows what I’ve done and she’s got it all recorded on her doorbell camera. To this day, I still don’t know what I was supposed to have done.
Let us see that same opinion once you have been the victim of a burglary. I have replaced two back doors to the tune of a few thousand quid. I spent years with higher home insurance because of the claims. Yet they never even got in. My cameras only record when my property line is breeched.
“Oh you don’t like the idea of always on cameras monitoring every street at all times? Guess you want burglaries to happen all the time.”
This study found that they actually increase the risk of being targeted by burglars
All the while you are sticking a camera with a history of shoddy cybersecurity to your home.
Look at this case of harassment that involved the use of a doorbell camera and try to pretend my concerns aren’t valid.
Edit: also I don’t understand the assertion that if I’d been burgled I’d agree with you. I’ve had to deal with multiple attempted break-ins, one time I scared a bloke off while he was trying to crowbar the back door open. It still didn’t make me want slap cameras on everything.
I don’t understand the assertion that if I’d been burgled I’d agree with you.
I do: chuds have this power fantasy that they are the keepers of exclusive truths that everyone would agree with if only they could see those truths, and by see those truths, they mean getting their brains flooded with cortisol and adrenaline after a burglary and deciding that a surveillance police state is cool and good.
