Even though not technically a rug pull, this is a rug pull. The end of real growth in the tech sector turned the internet into a cesspool. Not happy with stable returns these companies repositioned themselves as cybercriminals. They abused source contributors, collected donations as seed capital for launching for profits, and stole the data of billions. Taking inspirations from the villains in their beloved cyberpunk novels, they crafted a very real dystopia.
Kind of reminds me of this shockingly based rant I saw on /g/ once that discussed that even smartphones set computing backwards.
Honestly interested in reading this if you have it saved somewhere. I have been feeling this way as someone working in tech for close to two decades and I feel more and more vindicated every day. The web of the future looks like the web of the 80s (maybe the 90s if we can behave) because these mother fuckers kill everything they touch. Technological “progress” for progress’ sake means nothing. I AM LUDDITE MAN / 410,757,864,530 DEAD COMPUTERS
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Don’t worry investors! There’s always more profit to be made finding more efficient means of killing kids in hospitals
I tried to read the blog post but doublespeak and marketing crap gives me an insta-migraine so I checked Reddit.
Mozilla now doubling down on ads in Firefox
Did whoever wrote that pile of marketing gibberish actually say a goddamned thing?
Oh, they said something. They said they believe it’s right and proper for advertisers to intrude into our lives and steal our time and attention, and they’re going to help them do that while claiming to be the “good guys” by inventing some nonsense that “protects privacy” a little more. Never mind that everyone’s main objection to ads isn’t that they compromise our privacy; we object to ads because they intrude on our experience, waste our time and disrupt our ability to focus on the content we seek.
The obvious corollary to this is that ad blockers will eventually be crippled, just like on Chrome, no doubt with the same “security” excuse.
From another thread
“Advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of consumers” - founders of Google in 1998.
But the siren song of money always wins.
A Reddit link was detected in your comment. Here are links to the same location on alternative frontends that protect your privacy.
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dombat_coomerism
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I’ve been looking for an opportunity to post that for days lol
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Switch verb for adjective.
Pack it up boyz, goin’ back to books now. The internet is a fuck and everything will be an ad. uBlock Origin in all of its zeal and strength may not be enough to protect us from the endless and ceaseless onslaught that will be the internet to come.
WHAT’S DONE IS DONE, IT FEELS SO BAD; WHAT ONCE WAS CONTENT NOW IS ADPack it up boyz, goin’ back to books now. The internet is a fuck and everything will be an ad. uBlock Origin in all of its zeal and strength may not be enough to protects from the endless and ceaseless onslaught that will be the internet to come.
2035 - E-readers force you to watch an unskippable ad for 30 seconds between chapters. All physical books are banned.
Thus we return to the days of rote memorization and oral storytellers
“Thanks to nordvpn for sponsoring this story, go to nordvpn and use promo code ‘you will never escape’ for 3% off”
This retelling of the Odyssey is brought to you by HIMS.
Arguably better than even books. It forces people to be social and have good memory.
They wouldn’t be banned, but instead they’d be like $100 and sold as these premium, artisanally-produced things to the few who can afford them.
[451]
Hear me out… what if everything you say and do, whether you consent to it or not, put on The Cloud and then regurgitated back to you as a quirky “AI” podcast?
The cloud was a mistake. I still think truly dystopian that the new Windows OS has you save things to the “OneDrive” by default rather than your actual physical harddrive. That type of shit is the realest consent manufacturing, structure superstructure, 1984, power is whatever that has the means to deem something normal-ass shit ever.
Honestly, that’s where we’re headed. I don’t know if I’m going to be interested in scrolling through websites plastered by all the ads that are going to poke through the Manifest V3 ad controls.
Scratching one more company off the very very short list of software corps I think I could work at without experiencing total self-loathing
Mozilla continues to do everything but make sure the product that people care about actually fucking works. Layoffs, investments in shit no one will care about (VPN, Pocket, AI etc.), and now wanting to become an ad company? Librewolf is a nice fork and all but the web fucking sucks now.
The internet is turning into an AI-generated soup that only renders properly on Chromium and tracks every one of your vital measurements to serve you optimal ads
yes consumer, your gooch width is necessary information
Tired point but the only reason Firefox works is because Google gives them some number of billions per year to make Google the default search engine
Everything on the Internet has to choose between forcing users to watch shitty ads, or selling white labeled shit from alibaba 😮💨
Shitty video ads where some “personality” pretends to be really excited about some white labeled shit from alibaba
Welp, time to start figuring out how to use Gemini (or alternatively RETVRN to Gopher).
In reality, the best parts of the web are (and have always been) text-based. I mean, obviously we have lots of fun with our emotes on Hexbear, but the essential feature is being able to communicate with each other via text. My favorite little corners of the internet are inevitably someone’s niche blog or fansite which is almost 100% text-based. And, pivot-to-video be damned, the most effective and useful technical tutorials are text-based, especially since they can be easily updated and maintained.
I used text-only browsers back when web2.0 shit was just getting started for years and I am prepared to go back to them. We don’t need any of this. We never have.
And, pivot-to-video be damned, the most effective and useful technical tutorials are text-based, especially since they can be easily updated and maintained.
This is correct but it is such a frustratingly hard sell to a younger generation, in my experience. Every god damn thing is in Discord now, a glorified IRC server with less security (somehow!) and minimal if any capabilities for locally hosted backups, and no one gives a shit lol. Decades of YouTube videos can not be archived, but it doesn’t matter. Hit that little bell icon, gamers
I tried Gemini once, honestly found Gopher to be noticeably superior, and on several fronts.
Gemini feels like someone was throwing a tantrum at the modern web and decided to overcompensate by rolling progress back like 45 years to Web 0.0001255 Standards.
How so? I’m going to tinker with both regardless, but I’m curious to know what you found lacking with Gemini so that I can evaluate it with a more critical eye.
Mostly that even for something three decades newer, it does nothing with the newness except bad things: it doesn’t allow for more than one (1) link per paragraph, if at all. Doesn’t have a concept of text alignment, text weight, spacing, italics, underline or any of the other stuff CSS 0.1 inherited from the historical printing press. To my recollection, doesn’t even allow you to use any alphabet set that is not English’s one (so stuff like math equations are out of the question), and you can’t post a link that has international characters (like the wikipedia page for “Ñandú”) without hideously percent-escaping them. In 2024.
In exchange, Gemini seems to require SSL and a certificate of all things, which means it’s a lot costlier to implement on low-end hardware and it’s noticeably vulnerable to tactics like domain seizure because you need a valid cert which means you need an external “naming authority”.
Looking at it from a distance, it feels like someone looked a Gopher and went “I wonder how would this feel in the format of a brutalist buttplug”.
On the plus side tho, thanks to the lack of anything even resembling formatting, Gemini does realize one thing that I don’t recall Gopher realizing in full: rendering of the document is under control of the viewer, not of the author. For good or bad.
Another thing I like about Gopher is that it was designed essentially to be a mounted read-only networked filesystem. Works well with the whole UNIX philosophy of “everything is a file”.
Oh I didn’t recall that part, might have to relearn some things of Ye Olde Gooden Times, but if so, that’s wonderful!
Perhaps there is something like mount.gopher in the AUR already…?I’m not sure about the Linux world, a quick search reveals https://github.com/ewe2/gopherfs which seems like it’d do the trick.
I’m dumb. So does Gemini feel like 1998 internet, or something even earlier?
It actually feels newer and fresher (kinda 2000-2002-ish) despite it technically being limited to a modeling and rendering of documents in the style and paradigm of about
19941974.Credits where it’s due, tbh.
Completely agree! I like to limit myself to HTTP 1.1 and any website I’ll ever make will just be simple handwritten HTML with some CSS. I like to use elinks and xlinks for hypertext but in some cases – like lemmy – I’m unfortunately forced to use a bloated browser that supports JabbaScript and black magic (which makes no sense because online forums, message boards, blogs, wikis, etc. in the past all used to work without any JS). I like Gopher/Gemini a lot but I find it hard to discover interesting holes/capsules.
This corporate bullshit is so difficult to read. I hate it.
It’s always America, too. Microsoft’s must be the most profoundly unsettling.
Everyimw I think about Mozilla I get sad. Like they’ll just make a random feature like pocket so that /maybe/ the CEO can get paid more than several million dollars instead of spending that salary on actually making the browser better
I wish more people who claim they support capitalism realized this. Capitalism even sabotages those businesses.
It starts off with something that only hurts people (no big deal, right?) like suppressing pay and hiring as little people as possible (if anyone at all) so no jobs are being made of course this is all in the name of MuH eFfIcIeNcY.
Then the business itself suffers. How many smaller businesses like local cafes could have opened second or third locations in their local area if rent wasn’t so damn high? All the jobs that could have been created are gone. Quality products? Sorry but that would be bad for shareholders? All the people porky hired? He’s laying off all of ‘em, he’s richer than ever he just doesn’t need that many workers! Time to replace everyone with AI or my friends and family!
TL;DR: Rent seeking is a disease that kills what little fun there could be found in capitalism.
One of their main problems is never thinking correctly in the aggregate. It is “good” and “efficient” for a single isolated company to exploit its pool of labor in this way.
But in the aggregate, it is as self destructive as the paradox of thrift.
With less and less going to more and more people, there become less and less consumers to prop up the machine. And it starts to collapse under its own stinking putrescence.
Come to think of it, I think porky is beginning to anticipate this. I went shopping the other day and I couldn’t help but notice how many posters and books at the book store advertised about how they will help “your business”.
I’ve tried to go to some open networking events to see if I could BS my way into a job, and some of the conversations seem to discuss a future where EVERYONE is their own small business owner and we have abolished the “worker”. I’m guessing the millions who couldn’t beat the odds have starved to death and the rest of human history is the rich selling to each other. And this is all seen as a good thing.
That’s the Neoliberalism™
I don’t remember this ever not being the case. Even when I was little back on the 90s, everyone’s “dream job” was owning a small business. If you didn’t own your own “”““small””“” business, you’d better be a doctor or something because otherwise you were seen as “unsuccessful.”
It’s constantly reinforced. As I got older and looked into how businesses were built, I ended up turning into a commie because there was no way to own a business without doing unethical, ghoulish shit. Even though those methods may not be illegal, you aren’t getting ahead without destroying other people’s lives.
Damn this website just got me onto Firefox like a year ago
It’s still better than Chrome.
I guess it’s time to move to another browser very soon.
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yep, we’re down to two whole browser engines. they’ve made the web so mind-bogglingly complex, it’s prohibitively expensive to write and maintain one.
i dont think there’s corporate profit in it either, not with google owning the space. so basically, we’re only going to get a better browser if china builds it :D
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eh…
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Does China maintain one?
No(?) but I had a quick search and they have a chromium based browser called Twinkstar, so there’s that.
Twinkstar
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sorry, theyre all chrome forks
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According to Natopedia, Opera Browser is Chinese owned now.
“As of the end of 2023, Opera Software was 72.4% owned by Kunlun, a Chinese public company, making it a subsidiary of that company. Opera CEO James Yahui Zhou is a controlling shareholder in Kunlun.”
~ Opera (web browser) - WikipediaI think it’s Chromium based, just like the Russian Yandex Browser
I think it’s Chromium based
It is. I was (mistakenly) referring to the question of Chinese browsers and saw the R*ddit peanut gallery
about Opera being owned by the “SeeSeePee” and looked it up.
I guess we’ve got to hope that the LadyBird project succeeds and we get a usable browser sometime before 2030 https://ladybird.org/
I really do hope ladybird can do something substantial, but even the most optimistic outcome is maybe half a decade away. I really do hope the techno wizards of the net do something about meaningful alternative browsers and do it soon
yeah… I assume this is them signaling their plans for if they lose that google default search engine money (which is likely I guess?)
This is so depressing…
Also, yes Mozilla, I’m sure the reason people aren’t switching to Firefox is because it lacks good advertising support.
100%, Google is leaning into Mozilla to make this happen.
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