We’re in a very strange moment for the internet. We all know it’s broken. That’s not news. But there’s something in the air—a vibe shift, a sense that things are about to change.
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The paywall is delicious irony. Or whatever makes the story unreadable until I subscribe.
Sorry, I didn’t realize it was paywalled or ad infested because of addons that I use to block all that stuff. Archive bypass: link
This is very relatable, between DNS filtering and uBlock Origin (with a couple custom filters) I always forget how user-hostile the internet has become until I use someone else’s device.
It makes me lose respect for… well, humanity. The people making this garbage and the people who put up with it.
Eh, the corporate fucks who decide to make websites this way, I agree with you, but the truth is most people who put up with it just don’t have the faintest idea of how computers work. You’d bring up DNS filtering and custom adblock filter lists and their eyes would glaze over.
It’s a different reason for losing respect for those two sides.
For the site markers, it’s about greed and where they draw the line for what they want their website to look and behave like.
For the users, it’s that they aren’t willing to learn just a little bit to improve their lives a lot. Like on Android, it’s just a matter of installing Firefox and ublock origin. You can further fine tune it from there but that’s enough for me to forget how cancerous the internet has become unless I end up browsing on a different browser (I hate apps with built in browsers).
Also the sale of personal data cookie.
Oh the irony, I opened the site which has no less than 3 popups and it immediately fried my mobile browser. I had to kill the tab.
My pihole guaranteed that my experience remained pristine. The author didn’t make any money from my visit, but their income loss is a sacrifice I’m willing to make.
Which is really what the whole problem here boils down to.
And people ask why we use adblocks… my potato computer can’t even browse the web without blocking as much stuff as I can.
I use pihole at home, but when I take my laptop out and about, I sometimes notice its fan going wild. Shut down the tab I’m reading and it calms down. What the hell are running on these sites?
Run pihole as a service… I think you can do that, maybe with a docker container?
I remember one time wwhen I was browsing reddit for a few minutes (booted righ before, doing nothing else, fedora os, minimum stuff installed, no unusual activity in the process list, automatic updates disabled) and noticed my fans spinning a lot, so I opened the system monitor to check what was happening. It was showing high cpu usage in a firefox process, and it registered 40bg of downloaded data!
It never happened again, so I guess it was some sort of bug they fixed, but still, it was something so bizarre to see.
What browser/OS? I didn’t see any of that.
Android and Firefox
Are you not using ublock or something too? I didn’t see any of that and is all I have installed. Maybe I just got lucky.
Not using ublock on my mobile until just now. I went to another location and opened it and this site wasn’t as bad that time, just the paywall got me
try hitting reading mode before the site can fully load I’ve found that can bypass it 9/10
Ok, will try reading mode next time I see a paywall. Thanks for the tip!
Oh God, it’s all over now, the bed bug experts have been compromised
Is the answer ban marketing people from the internet? I feel like that’s the answer, they ruin everything they’re allowed to touch
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Yeah and the most infuriating is that it works, people actually buy stuff just because it’s written somewhere urgh.
I’d prefer to go back to html only websites with as little JavaScript and CSS as possible.
I think the best website designs are from the late 90s early 2000s.
Those derivatives are so nice. They’re good to browse, look modern, and load fast on any device.
Oh, but that would mean the website is just providing you information. That’s not the goal–we need to fingerprint your browser, track you, and serve you ads. Quid pro quo – if you want to know this recipe for cookies, we need to know your purchasing behavior for the past six months. Btw, can I use your location? How about notifications, can I send you those? And for the best experience, you really should be using the app. It’s actually just the website wrapped in an iOS/android package, but it lets us track you more effectively. Thanks!
I find it’s rarely JavaScript or css themselves itself but sites that load 400 different things from 100 other domains. Sites that quit loading all this other shit work and perform great even if they’re fairly large and complex.
It’s the interconnected world tax.
Also fonts, google analytics, stylesheets, telemetry etc…
Hmm I wish there was a setting to disable ever downloading or using any custom font. I don’t give a fuck what any website author wants their font to look like enough to want to use any that I don’t already have.
I think ublock origin can block cosmetic styling. I’m not on my pc right now to check though. Also not sure if that includes fonts.
Oh nice, I thought an add-on might help with that but haven’t gotten to digging in to that. Even better if it’s one I already use. Thanks for the lead!
Edit: Yeah, it took all of 5 seconds to find the setting to block remote fonts in ublock origin mobile.
True. How i miss these days. When google began and was just some mere kB in weight.
Imagine the speed of the Web with modern hardware but plain html with minimalistic JS if need be. Right now, surfing is as slow as it was back then. Machines are multiple times fastet, but content is multiple times larger too. And the addons, the scriptblockers, the adblocker etc.
What a cancerous website. Even on desktop that place is a mess.
Here’s her solution at the end of the article:
We, the internet users, also need to learn to recalibrate our expectations and our behavior online. We need to learn to appreciate areas of the internet that are small, like a new Mastodon server or Discord or blog. We need to trust in the power of “1,000 true fans” over cheaply amassed millions.
The fix for the internet isn’t to shut down Facebook or log off or go outside and touch grass. The solution to the internet is more internet: more apps, more spaces to go, more money sloshing around to fund more good things in more variety, more people engaging thoughtfully in places they like. More utility, more voices, more joy.
It’s like a long movie that goes no where at the end
What a shit take (read it in a Peter Griffin voice)
Anyone else ever mix up shit takes and shiitakes?
yeah that was a dissapointing dinner party.
hmmmmm, shiitake’s… nomnom
Here’s the article:
How to fix the internet
If we want online discourse to improve, we need to move beyond the big platforms.
By Katie Notopoulosarchive page October 17, 2023
We’re in a very strange moment for the internet. We all know it’s broken. That’s not news. But there’s something in the air—a vibe shift, a sense that things are about to change. For the first time in years, it feels as though something truly new and different might be happening with the way we communicate online. The stranglehold that the big social platforms have had on us for the last decade is weakening. The question is: What do we want to come next?
There’s a sort of common wisdom that the internet is irredeemably bad, toxic, a rash of “hellsites” to be avoided. That social platforms, hungry to profit off your data, opened a Pandora’s box that cannot be closed. Indeed, there are truly awful things that happen on the internet, things that make it especially toxic for people from groups disproportionately targeted with online harassment and abuse. Profit motives led platforms to ignore abuse too often, and they also enabled the spread of misinformation, the decline of local news, the rise of hyperpartisanship, and entirely new forms of bullying and bad behavior. All of that is true, and it barely scratches the surface.
But the internet has also provided a haven for marginalized groups and a place for support, advocacy, and community. It offers information at times of crisis. It can connect you with long-lost friends. It can make you laugh. It can send you a pizza. It’s duality, good and bad, and I refuse to toss out the dancing-baby GIF with the tubgirl-dot-png bathwater. The internet is worth fighting for because despite all the misery, there’s still so much good to be found there. And yet, fixing online discourse is the definition of a hard problem. But look. Don’t worry. I have an idea.
What is the internet and why is it following me around? To cure the patient, first we must identify the disease.
When we talk about fixing the internet, we’re not referring to the physical and digital network infrastructure: the protocols, the exchanges, the cables, and even the satellites themselves are mostly okay. (There are problems with some of that stuff, to be sure. But that’s an entirely other issue—even if both do involve Elon Musk.) “The internet” we’re talking about refers to the popular kinds of communication platforms that host discussions and that you probably engage with in some form on your phone.
Some of these are massive: Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, TikTok, X. You almost certainly have an account on at least one of these; maybe you’re an active poster, maybe you just flip through your friends’ vacation photos while on the john.
The internet is good things. It’s Keyboard Cat, Double Rainbow. It’s personal blogs and LiveJournals. It’s the distracted-girlfriend meme and a subreddit for “What is this bug?”
Although the exact nature of what we see on those platforms can vary widely from person to person, they mediate content delivery in universally similar ways that are aligned with their business objectives. A teenager in Indonesia may not see the same images on Instagram that I do, but the experience is roughly the same: we scroll through some photos from friends or family, maybe see some memes or celebrity posts; the feed turns into Reels; we watch a few videos, maybe reply to a friend’s Story or send some messages. Even though the actual content may be very different, we probably react to it in much the same way, and that’s by design.
The internet also exists outside these big platforms; it’s blogs, message boards, newsletters and other media sites. It’s podcasts and Discord chatrooms and iMessage groups. These will offer more individualized experiences that may be wildly different from person to person. They often exist in a sort of parasitic symbiosis with the big, dominant players, feeding off each other’s content, algorithms, and audience.
Of course most people don’t want to abandon the internet or it’s infrastructure/sub technology.
People who hate the internet usually hate that it’s been opened to unfettered capitalism. (I suppose there is a subset of people on the right who would deny that diagnosis but instead mention results of late stage capitalism, “tiktok as an addiction, porn as a commodity, data sold to China” or similar.)
If laws could be passed to protect consumers, small businesses, sex workers etc, then I think the internet could be improved. Instead, we can barely get anti trust action against the big boys we hate being forced to deal with.
The site seems to freeze up on mobile
Probably should’ve applied some of this Internet fixing stuff to their own site first.
They probably did, but since their solution is a non-solution, it didn’t accomplish anything.
not sure if it works any better but here’s an archive link .
Good way to avoid their subscription spam 👍
It does, thank you :)
Grr
The internet that we knew was unable to survive everyone being on it.
Have you tried turning it off and on again?
Internet seems just fine in decentralized services. We all just have to want to adopt versus playing in the broken corporate Internet.
O shit waddup!
Have they tried turning it off and back on again?
Seriously though, just raise the technical skill barrier to entry. Anything that requires more than idiot-level tech savvy will scare off most of the horrible people that make the internet a horrible place. It didn’t even really take off until smartphones were a thing, dropping the barrier to the absolute minimum number of simple steps.
Some of the most condescending, man-splainy, anti-social, but-what-abouty contrarians I’ve ever had the displeasure of encountering online have been technical users.
Yes but you see here’s why that’s a good thing:
{Insert 400 page diatribe that is vaguely antisocial and misogynistic citing long-debunked or dubious scientific research as if it were real}
So that’s why you’re actually a wrong idiot who is probably also a woman and should get off the Internet and let the real technical guys handle it.
Meh
Fair enough
There are old usenet posts of people saying you can gain psychic powers by eating the radioactive element in your smoke detector. Usenet wasn’t easy to get on back then. No, that doesn’t work, and it excludes a lot of people who are otherwise sensible.
