Modern Web Woes - I'm mad at the internet

[Tequila Jong]

One of my recent pet peeves with youtube is that i’ll be scrolling for a specific topic I’ve searched for on YouTube. And right in the middle has several videos for shorts and Videos Other People Have Watched not related to what i’m looking for.

Really been fed up with YouTube recently that i only have a handful of people i watch and will just go to their channels i’ve bookmarked to watch the latest.

It doesn't matter what I search for, I get nothing but politics and current affairs every third video. I don't sign in anymore and my browser deletes everything when I close it.

Also - Why do I need to have a phone number with everything? Is an email address not enough now? I just wanted to create a Gmail account to make shitty AI meme videos.

 

[GeorgeFloydFentanylStash]

Also - Why do I need to have a phone number with everything? Is an email address not enough now? I just wanted to create a Gmail account to make shitty AI meme videos.

Probably to help cut down bot accounts. It's very cumbersome that everything is requiring more and more a phone number. I use to have my Google voice number as my secondary number for sign-ups. Now it seems sites and apps are catching on and requiring your real phone number.

Next thing, they'll require an ID more and more because bots.

 

[Señora Airi]

Trying to find a private seller online. Marketplace now has it to where you need a verified ID (despite not needing it for the Dating service on FB). Craigslist is 99% dealer listings at this point. Can't find another site that does listings.

 

[Elysian]

Also - Why do I need to have a phone number with everything? Is an email address not enough now? I just wanted to create a Gmail account to make shitty AI meme videos.

The whole reason I’m switching from gmail is because they keep asking for my phone number, and since I refuse to give it to them recently made it so that I can’t login to my gmail account unless I do 2fa by authenticating the login using the YouTube app (why?!) on my iPad. Which means that unless I bring my iPad with me everywhere I go then I just can’t access my email from outside my house now.

 

[Ahriman]

https://x.com/WebDesignMuseum/status/1894032615180501241

Web Design Museum 1991 – 2006

Web Design Museum exhibits over 2,000 unique designs from the years 1991 to 2006. Discover forgotten trends in web design.

www.webdesignmuseum.org

Since I follow this guy on Twitter, his old website pics pop up in my TL. Man I really miss the late '90s to early '00s web design, it was fantastic.

Browsing the internet used to be much more colorful back in the day. Today's over-reliance on social media completely fucked us over, drained the web out of any kind of creativity it used to have.

I mean - if Zuck or Elon wanted it, they could implement some basic profile customization, similar to what MySpace used to have back in the day, using Markdown. At least that would let you make your profile, your own.

Alas, I don't think that'll ever happen again.

 

[Lemures Primata]

Really been fed up with YouTube recently that i only have a handful of people i watch and will just go to their channels i’ve bookmarked to watch the latest.

I got signed out of my youtube account the other day and got a glimpse at the normie algorithm.

The video I was watching was a podcast about meditiation and prayer.

The recommendations were unironically full of absolute political slop like Ben Shapiro, Sky News, Reddit Scientist Atheist debates, "What do we do about Gaza?", style videos. All with millions and millions of views.

Are people seriously watching this sort of shit or is it all bot views?

 

[CEO of Autism]

I fucking hate cloudflare checks and it's ruining the internet for me. Tired of getting cockblocked every time I visit a new site or any other site I haven't visited for more than 48 hours. Fuckers, I haven't changed my IP, haven't cleared my cookies, and still get asked to verify I'm human on a constant basis. Humiliation ritual.

 

[GeorgeFloydFentanylStash]

I got signed out of my youtube account the other day and got a glimpse at the normie algorithm.

The video I was watching was a podcast about meditiation and prayer.

The recommendations were unironically full of absolute political slop like Ben Shapiro, Sky News, Reddit Scientist Atheist debates, "What do we do about Gaza?", style videos. All with millions and millions of views.

Are people seriously watching this sort of shit or is it all bot views?

I never use my google account to watch videos. If i get tired of what the algorithm is feeding me, i’ll just delete cache and cookies. Or use a different browser

As far as the recommendations, i would say a little bit of both. You have retards that’ll watch every bit of awful culture war videos. And the bigger names will buy up bot views.

 

[Maurice Maine]

Browsing the internet used to be much more colorful

I don't know about that, even the pages shown don't present many colors. Of course in contrast to today's page they might as well be shot on Kodachrome but I painfully remember all those games with piss filters that were meant to be 'realistic'.

 

[Fig Kommandant]

Browsing the internet used to be much more colorful back in the day.

Cameron's World has some nice examples predating of the types of websites you posted.

 

[cactus]

I fucking hate cloudflare checks and it's ruining the internet for me. Tired of getting cockblocked every time I visit a new site or any other site I haven't visited for more than 48 hours. Fuckers, I haven't changed my IP, haven't cleared my cookies, and still get asked to verify I'm human on a constant basis. Humiliation ritual.

I get that shit when I try to look at the weekly sales at a grocery store near me. I don't know anyone who is gonna attack a fucking grocery store circular webpage.

 

[Big Fish]

This is more of a browser issue than website/net zeitgeist as a whole, but recently I had YouTube videos suddenly stop playing for some reason and I couldn't get it to work unless I reinstalled my browser (Ungoogled Chromium) and unchecked hardware acceleration decoding. Videos do play but with uBlock Origin on ads still display, but buffer endlessly. With hardware acceleration turned off entirely uBlock Origin blocks video ads as intended.

I miss when ads weren't as fucking invasive as they are now.

 

[Lemures Primata]

The fact that every single social media site heavily restricts, limits views, or shadowbans any new accounts. This is part of the reason why sites like Reddit become such echochambers. You need karma to post on almost all subreddits, so you have to comment mainstream opinions that follow the hivemind to get your "score" up.

I understand this is partly to stop bot accounts, but surely there's a better way to do this. Why do I have to jump through so many hoops, or wait an arbitrary amount of time, to just be able to get people to even see my posts.

For example, you find a hyper-niche subreddit relating to a technical issue you are having. Because it is hyper niche, there is no other active place on the internet to discuss this issue. You create a reddit account to ask your question. "Sorry, your account must be at least 6 months old and have a karma score of at least 1,500 to post on this subreddit."

 

[GeorgeFloydFentanylStash]

The fact that every single social media site heavily restricts, limits views, or shadowbans any new accounts. This is part of the reason why sites like Reddit become such echochambers. You need karma to post on almost all subreddits, so you have to comment mainstream opinions that follow the hivemind to get your "score" up.

I understand this is partly to stop bot accounts, but surely there's a better way to do this. Why do I have to jump through so many hoops, or wait an arbitrary amount of time, to just be able to get people to even see my posts.

For example, you find a hyper-niche subreddit relating to a technical issue you are having. Because it is hyper niche, there is no other active place on the internet to discuss this issue. You create a reddit account to ask your question. "Sorry, your account must be at least 6 months old and have a karma score of at least 1,500 to post on this subreddit."

I hate that shit to. I deleted my reddit accounts years ago when i decided to get rid of most of my social media accounts. Recently got rid of Discord to because any server you join, you’re greeted by avatars of fag flags and/or furfags.

Reddit is still a cesspool though. Any post that goes against the leftist echo chamber is either downvoted or deleted.

Luckily this place and another forum i post at are more sane than most of the internet.

 

[Fig Kommandant]

The fact that every single social media site heavily restricts, limits views

Beyond showing posts to users, I dislike how they restrict saving media from their platform and instead have a big "SHARE" button to make sure everyone just uses their platform. Back in the day, on instagram you could just right click on a picture and download it. Now on twitter you can't just right click and save a video, on reddit if you try to save an image, it's a JPG container but it's actually a JFIF file so if you try to upload it elsewhere it says it's corrupted.

 

[Lemures Primata]

Beyond showing posts to users, I dislike how they restrict saving media from their platform and instead have a big "SHARE" button to make sure everyone just uses their platform. Back in the day, on instagram you could just right click on a picture and download it. Now on twitter you can't just right click and save a video, on reddit if you try to save an image, it's a JPG container but it's actually a JFIF file so if you try to upload it elsewhere it says it's corrupted.

This is indicative of the overarching issue with the internet these days. An account is required for 99% of all relevant websites. Almost any query on Google will bring up at least a few of: Reddit, Quora (the worst of them all), Instagram, Twitter, Youtube, etc... Other than these, the only other websites that come up are mainstream news shite (forbes, BBC) and Indian SEO nonsense slop.

Then you have the issue of Discord, which is uniquely terrible.

Since when did everything become such a walled garden? As stated in the quoted post, you can't even download images from most mainstream social sites now, even after you've signed up.

The walled garden situation is bad enough, but as I mentioned in my previous post, they barely even function and are completely anti-user friendly with all the issues of shadowbans and throttled visibility/features.

Kiwifarms has some real strange-folk hanging around, but without these sorts of sites there is nothing for me on the internet. Do normies really spend all their time online reading Quora and watching algorithmically recommended "shorts"?

Niche forums are the only place to get any sort of coherent discussion and they are few and far between.

I hate that shit to. I deleted my reddit accounts years ago when i decided to get rid of most of my social media accounts. Recently got rid of Discord to because any server you join, you’re greeted by avatars of fag flags and/or furfags.

Reddit is still a cesspool though. Any post that goes against the leftist echo chamber is either downvoted or deleted.

Luckily this place and another forum i post at are more sane than most of the internet.

Discord is really very odd. Always had a strong aversion to it way back in the day even when it first started gathering speed.

I was quite happy using good ol' Skype for voice calls with friends.

Always seemed pointless to me. Skype or teamspeak were good enough for calls and video calls. I really hate how most discord servers attempt to be their own shite version of a forum or help center.

 

[GeorgeFloydFentanylStash]

Discord is really very odd. Always had a strong aversion to it way back in the day even when it first started gathering speed.

I was quite happy using good ol' Skype for voice calls with friends.

Always seemed pointless to me. Skype or teamspeak were good enough for calls and video calls. I really hate how most discord servers attempt to be their own shite version of a forum or help center.

I would use skype. But most people i know who i care about use iphones. So that makes it easy to communicate. Hate that the world went the Apple way. I resisted until 2021 until I realized that if i’m not going to have social media, then i will need to buy an iphone to communicate with my family.

They are the bunch that won’t download an app just for one person and stuck in their ways.

 

[BiggestKai]

More of a youtube woe but this has been a growing pain; if I look up something I have to dig through at least four videos to find an uncorrupted source.

Clip of a movie, interview, event, or literally anything? Has to have vine meme booms or some canned overacted laughter or be shot in portrait mode with some dumbass caption like "ONG FR WHO MADE THIS BLUD " or some shitty interchangable "meme phonk" music playing over it or my personal favorite some idiot's webcam footage in the corner.

It's like that thing with anime OPs/EDs on youtube where they're almost all the [4k UHD] [60 fps] abominations but now applied to everything else and I'm sick of it. I just want the original source.

 

[CEO of Autism]

Nothing bothers me anymore than an autoplaying video that occupies a third of the screen once you start scrolling down an article. You can hide that shit on desktop with uBlock but good luck having that kind of control with mobile browsers. Click on five different articles, autoplay the same fucking video. I don't know why sites keep insisting with this shit, it's clear no one likes that shit forced on them. All it does is deterring me from visiting your site when I'm using the phone.

 

[cactus]

Nothing bothers me anymore than an autoplaying video that occupies a third of the screen once you start scrolling down an article. You can hide that shit on desktop with uBlock but good luck having that kind of control with mobile browsers. Click on five different articles, autoplay the same fucking video. I don't know why sites keep insisting with this shit, it's clear no one likes that shit forced on them. All it does is deterring me from visiting your site when I'm using the phone.

Brave mobile or Firefox mobile with uBlock. I use the latter, works like a charm.