https://social.lol/@triptych/116276727579512933

To be less of a downer, I want to pin this reply thread on this post as it contains links to indie websites and communities that continue to live on. It’s not just nostalgia; even amongst the next generation, there’s growing enthusiasm for slow tech.

@ilovecomputers

Pulp and propaganda.

Don't forget the propaganda.

@ilovecomputers

This close to discovering that the real problem is, and always has been, capitalism (and, beyond it, greed).

@ilovecomputers 🎯 I remember a #search machine developped by an university in the early 1990s (?), before #Google came up. They found the best content, even for very complicated scientific searches, they found the smallest private website on any island in the Pacific, or in Asia, Africa. The world outside the USA was still connected.

They were destroyed by Google and the users prefering the #convenience of the biggest, believing their hollow promises. The biggest got the money for development.

@ilovecomputers

I was actually talking to my cousins about this the other day, a lot of people in our generation (Millennials but also Gen X and older Gen Z) were using the Internet before all of the really bad dark patterns were added in so we got them at a trickle rate and could develop defenses for some of them as they got more refined

How can we replicate that slow creep for kids now so that they can also build up their defenses instead of getting hit hard while unprepared?

@ilovecomputers we should've seen the signs when it got harder to filter chronologically, and then outright impossible. they told you algo knows better what to give you. when's the last time, outside Masto, you've seen a post with zero likes, fresh out of the poster's mind?... because I can't find any (unless among follows, sometimes) on any other damn social media.

tl;dr #yeah

@ilovecomputers speaking of cutting up good paper to sell back as pulp...

you think you're making a joke, but this is how International Paper gets the recycled percentage they claim. they send pallets of new reams by the truckload to be broken open and rebaled as consumer waste, which is then sold back to them for a small fee.

@ilovecomputers

It is really an old story. Money doesn't just talk it dictates.

Using the propaganda model...news businesses favoring profit over the public interest succeed, whilst those favoring reportorial accuracy over profits fail — and are relegated to the margins of their markets (low sales and ratings).

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent:_The_Political_Economy_of_the_Mass_Media)

@ilovecomputers This hits home hard, as I for with almost anything, from programming to learning Linux and all, there was very little resources in the early 90s. After learning the first steps of Linux from a booklet that came with the Walnut Creek CDROMs, it was almost insane that 5 years later you could just use Altavista to find help for your problems and discover someone's Geocities site on how to put Linux in a certain laptop and have all the devices working.

My distaste for the current state of the Internet is very hard to put in words without it being mostly swearing. I also mourn the death of actual web sites and how all the nuggets of information are nowdays social media posts, that do not get archived the same way as bare web sites were. SEO gives me the most unadulterated feelings of rage as it makes web search completely pointless chore.

If things weren't bad enough, the LLM generated web sites may start as a promising lead on something, but need to be quickly scanned through first so they don't end up just being pointless suggestions that end with "if things won't work for you, buy our Wonder Repair product".

@ilovecomputers And the reason for all of this is "Monetization".

Things used to be different because people put stuff on the internet because they wanted other people to see it, not to sell it.

@ilovecomputers

People using their real names and faces
Governments wanting to control it
Corporations flooding it

Just a few things from the top of my head that made it all go to shit
It was certainly a group effort