Modern Web Woes - I'm mad at the internet

[Raging Capybara]

Even with a 10000 terabyte ultra internet connection with negative ping, GIFs still take minutes to load.

 

[Coolio55]

Even with a 10000 terabyte ultra internet connection with negative ping, GIFs still take minutes to load.

I always heard that was a consequence of the file format. Nobody ever followed up on those assertions though...

(I'd still use APNG or FLIF though...)

 

[Xarpho]

Bring back Geocities.

Unironically this. One of the things that Geocities heralded and can still be found lurking around the corners of the web is the Web 1.0 sites, which were highly eccentric, specialized, and fun. None of them were all that huge but it definitely gave the impression that the Internet (the World Wide Web!) was full of information that you could never find in your local library. A lot of it was autistic, sure, but all of them have a unique, personal touch that's just not in big sites, and without moderators to homogenize and replicate content. Jumping around the Geocities website for maybe 15 minutes turned over a bunch of stuff, including Tolkien-themed fonts, people documenting their everyday lives in a way that was detailed and not through short blasts of information, a website on vegetarianism that wasn't trying to sell you a product or have a bunch of pseudoscience bullshit about food additives, an entire website dedicated to the movie Notting Hill...

There was something for everyone, and handing over control of that stuff to Wikipedia, YouTube, or others just means that work gets lost, stolen, manipulated by advertisers, eradicated by moderators, or homogenized beyond recognition. The sad thing is that there's actually nothing preventing people from setting up a small webpage to make something similar....it's just fallen out of favor.

 

[Dom Cruise]

The internet died in 2016 in the climate of the election and especially after Trump won.

It's incredible the number of websites I saw that year and shortly after go downhill, from either communities becoming intolerably toxic to websites turning into nothing but anti-Trump propaganda mills, just boom, boom, boom one after the other the number of sites I regularly visited plummeted.

One of the saddest casualties to me was the loss of the imdb message boards, which by the time they were deactivated in 2017 were not nearly as good as it used to be, but were still worthwhile, while someone created an archive and replacement it doesn't get nearly the amount of traffic the actual imdb message boards did.

 

[Spunt]

I have 7 Chrome tabs open, namely my gmail account, my google calendar, 3 KF tabs, the BBC Sport homepage and a Wikipedia article.

Somehow this requires 1.3Gb of RAM.

 

[ScatmansWorld]

I have 7 Chrome tabs open, namely my gmail account, my google calendar, 3 KF tabs, the BBC Sport homepage and a Wikipedia article.

Somehow this requires 1.3Gb of RAM.

>Chrome

Well there’s your problem.

 

[Xarpho]

propaganda mills, just boom, boom, boom one after the other the number of sites I regularly visited plummeted.

It's amazing to consider that around a decade ago I had some 8 or 9 message boards, blogs (all of the regulars haven't been updated in years, if they're even still online), and other places I checked regularly. Kiwi Farms, 4chan, and maybe two other message boards are the only sites left now, the others suffered similar declines or ceased existing entirely.

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole]

I have 7 Chrome tabs open, namely my gmail account, my google calendar, 3 KF tabs, the BBC Sport homepage and a Wikipedia article.

Somehow this requires 1.3Gb of RAM.

I have 22 windows and around 800 tabs open in Chrome. 1.6GB used. Get the Great Suspender(and remove youtube from the whitelist, it timestamps the video when suspending the tab anyway).

One of the saddest casualties to me was the loss of the imdb message boards, which by the time they were deactivated in 2017 were not nearly as good as it used to be, but were still worthwhile, while someone created an archive and replacement it doesn't get nearly the amount of traffic the actual imdb message boards did.

The IMDB message boards were great. On the page for Mark Margolis(Hector Salamanca in Breaking Bad) someone starts a thread saying that he saw him as an extra in a porn movie(The Opening of Misty Beethoven) and it was his first on screen appearance. Margolis grandson arrives to say it's not true, eventually he even asks his grampa who says it wasn't him, case closed. Later gramps remembers that yeah, he was in that one, in the wedding scene. Grandson returns with that information and posts grampas story and it is now listed on his IMDB as his first movie.

Other memorable ones was the eternal slapfight over Kirsten Rytters feet and the autistic guy detailing what he would say if he ever met Megan Fox.

 

[Spunt]

I have 22 windows and around 800 tabs open in Chrome. 1.6GB used. Get the Great Suspender(and remove youtube from the whitelist, it timestamps the video when suspending the tab anyway).

Thanks my nigga. Got it installed and found out that Google Calendar was taking up over 200Mb of RAM on its own. I once had a 486 with a smaller hard drive than that. It could run a calendar just fine. It's just a glorified spreadsheet, Jesus.

 

[JustWhy]

Yandev Image Search is pretty good in comparison.

yandex is sometimes painfully good with reverse image search... overall their search tool is working similiar to the old boogle

Oh my, this thread induce memories

Stop the homogenisation and centralisation of teh interwebz!!!
What is it now?
Practically only giant hosts that has everything under them - Gooegle, Micro$hit, Amazon, Yahoo and few others...

RIP pre 2008 Internet aka WWW 'Wild West Web'

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole]

Didn't know where to post this but I didn't know that Youtube has the ability to scan and automatically censor parts of videos when uploading them.

This is what Google don't want you to see.

Things are getting uncomfortably la-li-lu-le-lo. Or maybe he just fucked something up when making the video but I don't know why he would lie about that, it's easier to believe that google is developing more information control systems.

 

[AmpleApricots]

There's nobody stopping anyone setting up a http website (no encryption, which frankly often is plain unnecessary for static content) with pure early HTML that can be comfortably loaded on a 486 in some version of netscape navigator. In fact, it's never been cheaper or simpler to do this. That nobody does has the same reason why people still use youtube although it's a piece of shit with a terribly questionable company behind it - monetization. People wanna earn money for their brainfarts. (maybe make them a career) The thought process for many an interesting big project or sharing information in general is - how can I make money with this? The quality of the content often suffers as a result. That was also different about the early web, people were pioneers and it was about exploring the possibilities and having fun, not getting advertiser revenue. Even earlier before the web it was mostly scientific people you'd meet online that'd see value in sharing information that goes beyond some change for their wallet. Except some certain pockets all of this is but gone.

When I was more active in the electrical engineering and computer science circuit back in last century, newsgroups were a wealth of information about new developments by the big manufacturers and also interesting private projects and some very knowledgeable people who would share long messages with each other that were often more informative to read than some books. Now if you visit such places they're often back-to-back lowkey adverts by hobby- and professional engineers to just buy ready-made kits from them and like and subscribe to their youtube channel. People exchange a lot less information about their projects because they realize if they give too much information or share too much knowledge they can't monetize it for themselves. This made these places completly uninteresting if you aren't content with just consuming product. It's not 100% like this always but it really changed some places and the landscape overall, I just recently really noticed this and it destroys the cooperative aspect the early internet had.

I'm not saying that people don't deserve to earn money with their knowledge or that it's generally wrong to come up with solutions you sell to other people but it's been a bit extreme in the last few years and the value and quality of the content is suffering for it.

But like I said, it's up to everyone personally to bring the old internet back. Every single one of you can set up a personal homepage where you write about something you know about, kompletly without heavy frameworks and tons of Javascript and google tracking. Be the change you want to see and all that. You won't strike that big google ad-money and maybe barely anyone if anyone will read it, but such was the case for the old places you miss now too. Don't forget to submit your website to wiby if you do.

 

[He Who Points And Laughs]

Everything. Just everything.

I can't stand the persistent ID that so many people default to accepting, I hate the fact the adblocking isn't universal, I hate the SJW creep into FOSS with their ridiculous CoC and now their blackballing of ESR for speaking truth to tranny power. I hate that NetFlix took away our ability to shit on the shit they pump out, I am disgusted by "fact checkers" giving the death penalty for a joke said by anyone to the right of Trotsky while excusing blatant lies by lefties as "mostly true", I hate the fact checking of memes, the very idea that people need fucking hand holders to spoon feed them "truth".

Computers were a mistake.

 

[Master Paux Fas]

Discord and Reddit pretty much destroyed gaming clan/community websites and forums. Which I don't mind. It's been a lot better.

It's been easier and better for gaming communities and clans to stay connected, get updates, and announcements.

But I do miss the times of owning your own server and running your own website.

They still exist, but generally for older and more niche games with a lot of moddability. From the top of my head, Mount&Blade Warband still has sites for specific servers/mp communities, and TotalWar.org and the like are still invaluable unofficial hubs for modding and discussion of that franchise. They've slowly been going the way of the dodo though, and I can't see them surviving for many years longer. Fucking sad, because they put so much love and effort into everything. Rebbit and Discord are just constant shitty memespouting for the most part.

remember when youtube didn't have you scrolling through comments or playlist and shit was divided by pages?

I'll never fucking forgive them for that. I tried to dig through my Favorites playlist a few years back so I could backup all the songs I liked because Youtube was deleting the fuck out of anything. That was like 4500 videos. I had to remember where I'd stopped the last time and manually fucking scroll there. The old simple page system made navigating huge playlists easy.

That reminds me:
>'This is how your playlist looks like in English (United Kingdom). Switch to English to make changes.'

DO IT AGAIN NASIM

 

[interalia]

Unironically this. One of the things that Geocities heralded and can still be found lurking around the corners of the web is the Web 1.0 sites, which were highly eccentric, specialized, and fun. None of them were all that huge but it definitely gave the impression that the Internet (the World Wide Web!) was full of information that you could never find in your local library. A lot of it was autistic, sure, but all of them have a unique, personal touch that's just not in big sites, and without moderators to homogenize and replicate content. Jumping around the Geocities website for maybe 15 minutes turned over a bunch of stuff, including Tolkien-themed fonts, people documenting their everyday lives in a way that was detailed and not through short blasts of information, a website on vegetarianism that wasn't trying to sell you a product or have a bunch of pseudoscience bullshit about food additives, an entire website dedicated to the movie Notting Hill...

There was something for everyone, and handing over control of that stuff to Wikipedia, YouTube, or others just means that work gets lost, stolen, manipulated by advertisers, eradicated by moderators, or homogenized beyond recognition. The sad thing is that there's actually nothing preventing people from setting up a small webpage to make something similar....it's just fallen out of favor.

The Wikipedia mention here is really important, imo. Before the early 2010s or so, Wikipedia was genuinely a pretty open platform where you could write about just about anything and be able to expect it to stay up with maybe minor alterations or a few [citation needed]s. Memes about its inaccuracy (as if perfect or even good accuracy is possible or desirable for an open platform) contributed to the shrinking, pseudo-professionalized user base of the most unlikeable people on the site: increasingly pedantic autists obsessed with trying to turn Wikipedia into an authoritative resource, rather than a slightly more dressed up version of urban dictionary. The constantly tightening standards for citations and notability led to deletion of a ton of content and dramatic slowing in the pace the wiki expanded. Now they're stuck 15 years later with an aging user base that's long since written all they are able to write on their niche autistic interests, and still have huge gaps in terms of information that's actually useful to regular people who want to consult a general reference on something.

 

[uncleShitHeel]

Web 1.0 was great. There was a reasonable barrier to entry for normies and most of the large companies who are actively making it worse weren't actively making it worse.

How in the hell did serverside js become a thing? Why is the unmitigated retardation that is modern web development and seemingly everything gearing towards being web oriented become a thing?

I'm looking forward to 3.0 we're it goes back to being decentralised mess with a slightly higher barrier to entry, that and forcing people who don't understand the idea of why rather than how to forced to undergo lobotomies.


I could rant for hours about how Zuckerberg, Bezos, Ma and whoever the fuck runs Google are the four horsemen of the apocalypse.

 

[Stasi]

The BBC are doing a documentary on streaming and cloud services. The little trailer video and this quote are maddening:

Film and TV writer Beth Webb went in search of the internet and discovered that 'the cloud' is actually a vast network of energy-guzzling data centres and undersea cables.

What did you think was happening, all you shitty home videos and decades worth of selfies just exist in the ether? Fucking zoomers don't know how the internet works.

At least its not another article telling me physical media is dead and the cloud is the future.

 

[ToroidalBoat]

YouTube is oversaturated with advertising, but adblock blocked them all (sometimes in the hundreds). That is, until today -- now there's these ads that appear in place of videos that you have to click "skip ad" on, even with adblock on. I hate internet ads.

 

[Starving Autist]

My biggest problem with the internet these days is just that you can't really expect anonymity these days anywhere, I can't freely sperg on social media without giving out my phone number and email-adress (and in Twitter and Facebook's case, my ID). Also the censorship on every social media-site is pretty concerning, but I'm aggressively apolitical a real so it doesn't annoy me as much.

 

[Never Scored]

The modern Web is more useful but less fun. Going online used to have the same kind of feel as going up a random trail through the woods to see what's there. Now everything is corporate and consolidated and it feels more like going on a power walk through a busy city park with a bunch of advertising executives. It’s crowded and you’re not going to see anything new or exciting or unexpected.

I've pretty much disengaged from the wider mainstream Web because I don’t find it fun, and everything either wants my real name and phone number, wants me to use newspeak, spies on me or does all three. Where is the upside? Keeping tabs on people from high school or work I don’t even like? I have my wife and kids and parents and four or five friends I hang out with and that’s enough. If we need social media to talk, we’re not friends and I don't give a shit about your life unless you're hilariously retarded and I want to point and laugh. It's weird how I'm expected to care about this window in people's lives that most people's Internet use has become.

I use a few sites that are still fun like Kiwifarms, Internet Archive and Neocities and shit like Yahoo Finance and my credit union's site and that's about it. I download everything I watch through Usenet and I use an RSS reader to read news and download podcasts. I don’t subscribe to Netflix or Disney or any of that shit. It’s all bullshit. I pay a flat yearly fee for encrypted Usenet access and fuck all those corporate types who sucked the fun out of the internet.

To be honest the parts of the Web I engage with haven't changed much in the last 20 years.

I like this Wiby thing though. Thanks for that.