future of ~the internet~

Is the Guardian more cursed than it used to be?

all sites seem okay to me (in uk)

Back now I think, well that was exciting

yeah seems to have been sorted now

this wouldn't be a problem if we just agreed to have 5g chips implanted in our brains

Guardian and Reddit back for me but NY Times and Independent still down

Hooray, Twitch is back up in time for me to fix and eat breakfast! *spams a series of hype emotes*

apparently fastly is...

...AMAZON HOSTING!

Amazon style sheets were flaking out so that figoors.

whenever i click a link the anxiety kicks in - how many trackers am i going to need to reject, how many 'x's am i going to need to close. the web has just become a total shitshow.

Love the sites where you have to unclick 'legitimate interest' individually for literally hundreds of companies. Though opening a browser console and typing "jQuery('input:checked').click()" usually works, what a world.

i guess this is exactly what FB et al want, for the web to feel janky and broken so you just stay in their apps

hey instagram I HAVE ENOUGH SHORTS

https://kotaku.com/latest

New Dead Space Remake Will Be Next-Gen Only
Horizon’s Aloy Joins Genshin Impact, Is Cute As A Button
Battlefield 2042 Sandbox Mode To Include Bad Company 2 Maps
PUBG Skin Looks An Awful Lot Like Hypnospace Outlaw, Dev Objects
The Best Switch Carrying Cases
You Can Get Vintage Game Magazines Delivered To Your Doorstep
Raphael Lacoste's Art Of Assassin's Creed
Activision Blizzard Sued By California Over Widespread Harassment Of Women (<<actual news)
It's Not Every Day You Get To See New Footage From A Game Nintendo Cancelled Over 20 Years Ago
My Speedrunning Career Lasted A Bit Less Than A Week
Genshin Impact Players Insist On Reaching New Region The Hard Way
Ubisoft Shutters Troubled Tom Clancy Game A Year After Launch
Help, Netflix Made The Witcher’s Vesemir Hot
Guilty Gear Strive’s First DLC Character Is The U.S. Secretary Of Defense
FFXIV Player Won’t Stop Until He’s Eaten Nearly 140K Eggs

----

i don't know why kotaku is still in my mental list of websites i should look at. some things, some topics, just shouldn't be updated every day. there isn't enough to make it a thing that has new articles every hour or so for eternity. but they have to do it, to make money and have jobs. so they publish stuff like this. was it always this bad? i don't know. polygon is essentially the same website. they even run "stories" on the same non-events, like within hours of each other. there are a lot of websites like this. daily content, despite the content being non-daily.

i want kotaku to update in an irregular way, like every 3-5 days. and on that day, it should only run interesting articles, even if there is only one. and kotaku should ICQ me and say "i updated my website! :DD" . i will hear "uh oh!" and walk over to the giant CRT and read it, then excitedly sit down to read what my friend has written this time

the model for quite a long time now, and not just kotaku, has been volume and lots of it

sigh. it's true. but has it always been this vapid? it's relentless.

first of all, why did i just instinctively visit kotaku.com to see what was new? secondly, this was what was new

You may now buy an ugly, slow, Mario-themed TAG Heuer smartwatch for $2,150

the headlines themselves have gotten to a point where they seem intended for the viewer to say "hmph!" in a way that's closest to disillusion with existence itself. but after that, the content of the story is also like that. everything has become fully saturated with it.

why can't a website just focus on the GOOD news!? people would love that! nothing but good news, imagine reading that!

(jk, i know this theory is tested in small towns across the country for the last 50+ years, and in fact, no one wants to read only good news)

https://i.imgur.com/uvi1gU4.png

"finally, in the year 2021, an op-ed by the editorial board of the Washington Post changed the course of climate change for the better. it was called "Hey, world, are you noticing? Floods! Fires! Could it be time to do something about climate change?"

oops! that was an reference to a sentence i deleted from an earlier post, where i wondered whether that same existentialist vapidity had come from, or spread to, newspaper op-ed sections. i deleted it because i thought "...eh, who cares". but then a minute later, over the post, it's right there. it's everywhere on my screen. there must be a solution for this. and the solution is probably on my screen somewhere, hold on

hmph

i wanna know more about these nearly 140k eggs

i would say the ubisoft one is an actual headline too but the rest yeah it's minor updates to games or reporting on social media discourse or whatever

Ray-Ban Stories

https://www.ray-ban.com/uk/electronics/RW4004%20UNISEX%20ray-ban%20stories%20|%20wayfarer-black/8056597489478

i like this

https://search.marginalia.nu

https://the-crypto-syllabus.com/yanis-varoufakis-on-techno-feudalism/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w52CziLgnAc

"Photoreal Avatars"

wild

idk if this is the thread for such concerns, but where is anyone even visiting/reading on the net outside of youtube/reddit/socials anymore? my love affair with the web blossomed in the middle of web 2.0, and community felt so abundant and alive then. i don't think it was rose-tinted glasses; the fun of anonymity, identity and personalization were embedded in the regular infrastructure of many sites - but now, everything feels so homogenous. not to mention navigating through endless captchas, cookies, 2fas, emails, notifications... i guess communities have centralized and blogs have died... but i really feel like i only open safari now to check a few reddit communities and watch yt. it's making me a bit sad...

I still use RSS feeds as much as I ever did; that and Twitter is still taking me to places across the web but definite drop in the non-homogenous weird-little-site I rock up to

outside of work, where I spend a lot of time on Slack and stack(overflow|exchange)-type sites, I find my internet usage decreasing to almost nothing in my spare time. A few social sites (ILX being one of them), hobby Discords, and a handful of kinda-trustworthy news sites. Search engines have gotten to the point of being almost useless unless a person cares enough to get good at filtering out the vast sea of seemingly “AI”-generated dreck that try to pass as how-to or product review articles.

basically i've become the fulfillment of the ad-based internet economy, pretty much everything i do on the internet leads to some kind of purchase. idk it's helped me to be honest about that rather than think the information i consume is "important" in any way.

even after spending a lifetime on the internet and using it to escape the shitty culture i was born into, i frankly just don't believe that "actual" community can exist solely through the internet, and that it never did. internet can be a support but there has to be bodies in shared space or there isn't community imo.

I still go to a fair number of sites, don't know if there's much point listing them tho as they're so niche - mostly to do with comics, food in London, a few movie blogs.

What I've stopped doing tho is exploring - hardly ever find a new site via links from one I'm reading, never google a term to find sites associated with it. That's def been supplanted by YouTube, sadly.

Hanging out in discords has a bit of that old message board feel and is def superior to facebook and twitter.

I got on the internet in the mid-1990s, when anonymity was not the default - people posted to Usenet with their real names and indeed email addresses - so I suppose in that respect Twitter is a bit of a throwback. It was smaller then and perhaps because of that it felt more information-dense, but I'll concede that there's a lot more content nowadays, it's just that the ratio is unfavourable. And people were assholes back then. Massive assholes. Not in the way you'd expect, but still massive assholes.

As for general internet use I am occasionally reminded of how bleak large chunks of the modern internet are whenever I have to use a computer that doesn't have adblock, or I'm abroad and Google insists on making me use the non-personalised version of Google News. Google News' default is its own take on what is relevant in the US, which almost certainly isn't what people in the US actually want to read. I have met people from the US in real life - I was going to say "Americans" but you're going to complain that I could be talking about people from South America or Canada etc - and neither of them were dummies.

Also, simple technical queries. What's the difference between Crucial's MX and BX SSDs? Google presents page after page of links such as Crucial BX500 Vs MX500 - Which Is Better One? [New 2021], which is supposed to make you think the page was made with love and care by a human being, or alternatively "robo-content", which usually goes e.g. "SSDS are solid state drives. There are many differences between them. You might be looking for the differences. I'm going to tell you the differences. It's important to understand the differences etc" without getting to the point. In which case Reddit etc are the only option, because they're written by real people. For the record Crucial's MX SSDs have on-chip write levelling, or some kind of memory chip that looks after the SSD, whereas the BX models don't have that.

Meanwhile professional media organisations are a wasteland of poor-quality writing by unpaid interns, or on-message rubbish written to fill a quota. I don't want to hear what a 21-year-old man has to say about human society. You're 21, you're a five-year-old sixteen-year-old boy. You've memorised a lot of command line switches and facts and figures. You don't have a soul yet! You aren't conscious, or self-aware, and more importantly you aren't in a position to speak your mind because you're sackable. Totally sackable.

This is one of the reasons I participate on Ilxor etc. Firstly because it sets my mind in motion, and secondly so that I have something to read in the future. A few years from now I'll forget that I wrote this post, and I'll stumble on it and think "that was entertaining" and "that man is witty but could do with proofreading" and of course that man will be me. I am lighting a candle, but it's my candle, and it's actually a tape, as in Krapp's Last Tape, and I mean some of you are pretty good as well.

It has to be said that the internet circa 1995 was also filled with assholes, but a different kind; petty little fifty-something engineers. There are a few relics of that demographic on e.g. Airlines.net or Photo.net, because they've been around since the 1990s and have some of the same participants, now old men. Also blu-ray.com, which is full of people boasting about their collection of 4K blu-rays that they bought to replace their original blu-rays that are now junk. The same people in the 1990s would have had a large shelf with Star Trek VHS tapes, two episodes per tape, total spend £700 etc.

But this was predicted. I remember an old essays from 2001 or so called Content is Not King. It argued that the internet was email and social connections, not newspapers. It's one of those "too early to say" topics twenty-one years later:
https://firstmonday.org/article/view/833/742

I've been covering bad parts of the internet for long time now.

For years, there was one site extremist researchers warned me not to cover because publicizing it would be dangerous.

But it's time people know KiwiFarms—and how they're chasing political enemies around the world.

— Ben Collins (@oneunderscore__) September 2, 2022

#legs are coming soon

search results are SO TRASH it’s driving me bananas and AI seems guaranteed to make it worse, help me i used to really like the internet

Time to start publishing printed books of cool links again

xp i tried to talk about this on another thread and somebody told me "just go to the library"

https://i.imgur.com/6x1qcOA.png

Google Image Search is especially impressive in how frequently it fails completely.