Modern Web Woes - I'm mad at the internet

[Never Scored]

I force my browser to make all fonts wingdings. I go on Project Gutenberg and read Shakespeare in wingdings.

 

[Coffee Shits]

Mozilla adding the half-assed swipe-to-go-back gesture is the worst change to Firefox in recent memory, and I'm including the rape of the add-ons ecosystem. I have never once used it for its intended purpose.

 

[The Lawgiver]

"Your browser is outdated" redirect pages are bullshit.

Why not let the site load anyway? It can still work.

This pisses me the fuck off so badly because the coding for those redirects is so shit on google's end that if I use any browser other than chrome (which I fucking hate and only downloaded because of sites that for some reason locked their loading to chrome only) It's like a 60% chance one day despite being in the list of supported browsers, sites owned by google will suddenly direct to one of those pages and will never go back. I'm not sure what kind of coding they use to register that but I'm not gonna uninstall and reinstall a browser just to get around that dogshit. I wonder sometimes if there's a way to block that redirect script. If False positive adblocker redirect messages are anything to go by then it's highly possible there's a way to block it like how adblockers block those redirects.

 

[ToroidalBoat]

Video ads that have a countdown until you can close the damn thing suck.

The motion makes it harder to ignore.

"you gotta watch this ad bro"

redirects

I miss older stuff like "this site best viewed with Netscape" compared to that crap.

 

[Kikkoman]

 

[ToroidalBoat]

I've noticed that it seems American sites - or English-speaking ones in general - are the most obnoxious and aggressive with advertising. Whether it's popup ads or ads with audio from the '00s, or scrolling autoplay video ads from Current Year.

It seems they're also always the ones with long and demanding TOSs they try to apply just by visiting, "you gotta disable AdBlock bro" BS, and the most JavaScript-heavy and dependent.

TL;DR: Clownland brings the circus even to website design?

 

[Agent Abe Caprine]

Every fucking website requires an incredibly long and faggy code of conduct agreement to make an account that rivals the apple user agreement in length and complexity.

To make matters worse, none of them prohibit being used to create nukes. Seriously, that was in the iTunes TOS.

"You also agree that you will not use these products for any purposes prohibited by United States law, including, without limitation, the development, design, manufacture, or production of nuclear, missile, or chemical or biological weapons."

At least Apple covers all bases.

 

[ToroidalBoat]

Holy bursting boats it's hard to find game tips online in 2020.

When the search engine actually finds relevant stuff, the results are usually either YouTube videos or articles that dance around what you want to know. It can take awhile to find vidya info you want. The same could be said about other subjects too. Especially when compared to 10 years ago when things were more to the point.

 

[ditto]

It can take awhile to find vidya info you want.

I miss text files in general, especially the old walkthroughs that used to float around Usenet and TOTSE.
Just the facts, presented clearly by someone who is doing it because they want to and not to get SEO.

 

[Never Scored]

I generally have the system monitor open just because I like to watch the squiggly line go up and down. I'm using a Raspberry Pi 4, and even though I'm overclocked to 2.0 ghz, the CPU is generally creates a bit of a bottleneck, though the ram is usually fine. Usually I have 3-4 tabs open. When I load a website, all four cores spike up into the 85-90% range for maybe a 4-5 seconds, then they all drop in the 20-40% rage and stay there when the pages is loaded. Ram stays pretty consistently in the 2-2.5 gigs out of eight used during regular browsing. Some weird things cause it to spike, for example, Youtube and live streams work fine and the CPU load stays below 50% once it's loaded, but if chat is not hidden all four cores stay around 75-80%. Hovering over the little youtube thumbnails cause CPU use to spike up to 100% and makes the Youtube video playing chug a bit. Some sites have constant shit going on like Yahoo Finance or Aliexpress, which spike all four cores up over 80 for a good 15-20 seconds, before levelling off around 50% until I close the tab. Right now for example, I have two threads open here, and the CBC news front page. All four cores consistently below 20% after everything's loaded and I'm just reading or typing a message like this. There's a slight bump up to 50% for about one second when I switch tabs, but other than that, it stays below 20% on all four cores.

Anyway, the point of this is we were interested in getting a new web page made where I work. We contacted a couple of local firms. I loaded some of their sample sites on the pi 4. CPU load spikes up as usual and...... it doesn't go down again. As long as the tab with one of the design firms'(plural) website is open it just fucking stays at like 90%. I left one open just sitting there for over 10 minutes and it didn't go down. Nothing happening on screen. No games or email client or anything open. Just parked on the site. Just no attempt at optimisation at all.

 

[Duncan Hills Coffee]

Holy bursting boats it's hard to find game tips online in 2020.

When the search engine actually finds relevant stuff, the results are usually either YouTube videos or articles that dance around what you want to know. It can take awhile to find vidya info you want. The same could be said about other subjects too. Especially when compared to 10 years ago when things were more to the point.

Good fucking luck if the game is even remotely obscure or shares a title with another, more popular video game. Trying to find walkthroughs and tips for Tomb Raider 1 is infuriating when I get results for the 2013 reboot, and trying to troubleshoot Doom's become a nightmare when the results bring in pretty much every game in the series.

 

[Dante Alighieri]

Holy bursting boats it's hard to find game tips online in 2020.

When the search engine actually finds relevant stuff, the results are usually either YouTube videos or articles that dance around what you want to know. It can take awhile to find vidya info you want. The same could be said about other subjects too. Especially when compared to 10 years ago when things were more to the point.

Yeah I miss the days of prevalent text walkthroughs. Sometimes I get stuck in an area or forget what I have to do next, and need to go hunting for a guide to help me out. Too often it's a video or something tangential to what I'm looking for.

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole]

Yeah I miss the days of prevalent text walkthroughs. Sometimes I get stuck in an area or forget what I have to do next, and need to go hunting for a guide to help me out. Too often it's a video or something tangential to what I'm looking for.

Soundless (probably) russian screencapture videos where instead of talking the dude starts notepad and slowly typse *backspace-backspace* types what he's doing, correcting spelling mistakes as he goes along, then erases everything and starts anew for the next step so you can't skip to the end, pause, and read the entire thing. And good luck reading that shit on a phone. A phone photo of a printout with the instructions would be more user friendly.

 

[Never Scored]

Soundless (probably) russian screencapture videos where instead of talking the dude starts notepad and slowly typse *backspace-backspace* types what he's doing, correcting spelling mistakes as he goes along, then erases everything and starts anew for the next step so you can't skip to the end, pause, and read the entire thing. And good luck reading that shit on a phone. A phone photo of a printout with the instructions would be more user friendly.

Do people not make new guides on gamefaqs anymore?

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole]

Do people not make new guides on gamefaqs anymore?

No, google serving up silent russian videos is the new stackexchange for strange windows problems. What a miserable cyber punk future we live in.

 

[Temporal Refugee]

In terms of impact to humanity as a whole, I'd say the single greatest tragedy in the modern era has to be the shift of stewardship over the internet from educational and cultural entities, to commercial ones. If you look at the trajectory of website content, usability, performance, etc there's a noticeable nosedive that coincides with the rise of AdSense et al. The internet became dominated by companies and individuals drive by profit rather than communication, sharing their passions,etc. The whole notion of "you are the product" doesn't go nearly far enough to describe the internet today; You are a product that mindlessly consumes your sellers' other products, and every day the marketers who made your world this way find new novel ways to make sure that no amount of ad blocking or mindful consumption can ever break you out of the cycle.

Worse yet, many of us are not only products who buy products, but also generate additional revenue by functioning as a product through a second channel; "user created content" because the merchants have figured out just the right size carrot to dangle in front of us to make that happen. Why bother creating content when you can "provide a platform" where people will create the content for you and agree for you to keep a dollar for every few cents they make from the revenue? This also means that things like game walkthroughs, comedy acts, music, etc is now published "independently" via these platforms that give creators a pittance rather than nothing at all, because we've been convinced that nothing is worth doing unless it makes us money, and the only way to make money is to sign with a slimy agent like Google because it's now unthinkable to subsist on advertising deals without a multi billion dollar company in the middle.

The internet has become a bloated, money driven shithole because people are fucking stupid, and would rather be bought and sold like cattle by whoever can make the shiniest website, rather than taking a stance more conscientious in regards to privacy and ethical consumption. Sites are in an arms race to build the shiniest site to attract those of us who will generate optimal revenue by signing over our data to advertisers, buy things from those advertisers, and often advertise for them ourselves in any our own creative endeavors, and it's working. We ignore or even mock anybody making content that exhibits the hallmark signs of somebody making something on virtually no budget because they are doing so out of passion alone, we act like people self hosting content that could be more easily hosted on a corporate owned platform are total weirdos, and even those of us who are regarded as militant about privacy and the like tend to pick at least one overlord we'll still allow to assfuck us for profit.

 

[Never Scored]

In terms of impact to humanity as a whole, I'd say the single greatest tragedy in the modern era has to be the shift of stewardship over the internet from educational and cultural entities, to commercial ones. If you look at the trajectory of website content, usability, performance, etc there's a noticeable nosedive that coincides with the rise of AdSense et al. The internet became dominated by companies and individuals drive by profit rather than communication, sharing their passions,etc. The whole notion of "you are the product" doesn't go nearly far enough to describe the internet today; You are a product that mindlessly consumes your sellers' other products, and every day the marketers who made your world this way find new novel ways to make sure that no amount of ad blocking or mindful consumption can ever break you out of the cycle.

Worse yet, many of us are not only products who buy products, but also generate additional revenue by functioning as a product through a second channel; "user created content" because the merchants have figured out just the right size carrot to dangle in front of us to make that happen. Why bother creating content when you can "provide a platform" where people will create the content for you and agree for you to keep a dollar for every few cents they make from the revenue? This also means that things like game walkthroughs, comedy acts, music, etc is now published "independently" via these platforms that give creators a pittance rather than nothing at all, because we've been convinced that nothing is worth doing unless it makes us money, and the only way to make money is to sign with a slimy agent like Google because it's now unthinkable to subsist on advertising deals without a multi billion dollar company in the middle.

The internet has become a bloated, money driven shithole because people are fucking stupid, and would rather be bought and sold like cattle by whoever can make the shiniest website, rather than taking a stance more conscientious in regards to privacy and ethical consumption. Sites are in an arms race to build the shiniest site to attract those of us who will generate optimal revenue by signing over our data to advertisers, buy things from those advertisers, and often advertise for them ourselves in any our own creative endeavors, and it's working. We ignore or even mock anybody making content that exhibits the hallmark signs of somebody making something on virtually no budget because they are doing so out of passion alone, we act like people self hosting content that could be more easily hosted on a corporate owned platform are total weirdos, and even those of us who are regarded as militant about privacy and the like tend to pick at least one overlord we'll still allow to assfuck us for profit.

IMO all this is because the internet was made accessible to people besides techies and nerdy enthusiasts. Even as late as 2005-2006, a lot of people over 40 could barely use a computer and they certainly weren't posting anything. I was in my mid-20s when social media caught on in the late 2000s, so I remember it very clearly. The paradigm shift from being the lawless wild west to a walled garden very clearly and distinctly happened sometime between 2009-2013. That's the time period where the people who had a boner for what the internet originally represented, a completely free unregulated exchange of ideas/humor/information/etc just totally lost control and it got taken over by corporations who ban offensive ideas because they want to keep their customers happy. What happens on the internet now is roughly analogous to how Wendy's will give a free hamburger to a person who complains enough. Twitter is Wendy's and the hamburger is banning people they don't like.

It'd be interesting if something like the Gemini project or something like that could gain enough of a critical mass to become a rough approximation of the community on the late 90s internet. I doesn't have to reach the same kind of critical mass of hundreds of millions or billions of people as something like a social media site. Even if it managed to capture a couple million or so nerds it could be a pretty interesting space.

 

[Kane Lives]

It'd be interesting if something like the Gemini project or something like that could gain enough of a critical mass to become a rough approximation of the community on the late 90s internet. I doesn't have to reach the same kind of critical mass of hundreds of millions or billions of people as something like a social media site. Even if it managed to capture a couple million or so nerds it could be a pretty interesting space.

Optimistic if you think the tech monopolies of current year won't try to shut it down the moment they catch a whiff of dissent against their walled gardens.

This timeline is the worst; we get shitty McFutures dystopia instead of the cool cyberpunk one.

 

[Never Scored]

Optimistic if you think the tech monopolies of current year won't try to shut it down the moment they catch a whiff of dissent against their walled gardens.

This timeline is the worst; we get shitty McFutures dystopia instead of the cool cyberpunk one.

Maybe. I'd settle for the telnet BBS systems that still exist now getting a bit more popular to the point where there are 40 or 50 of them dotting the globe with a couple hundred active people each on them while still flying totally under the radar so I could at least play some BBS door games with some other spergs without dealing with the internet version of the person who asks to speak to the manager. I think the World Wide Web as we know it is absolute fucking toast even if 230 stays alive. It's McDisney now. There's no going back.

 

[Dick Justice]

words words WORDS

Fun thing was fun until money entered the equation, news at 11.

windows

What a miserable cyber punk future we live in.