"People sometimes end up on obscure sites run by just... anyone.
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@futurebird@sauropods.win Who is “they”?
Facebook, Amazon, the people who promoted putting everything in the cloud.
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All this time... they hate it. They hated how creative it was, they hated the serendipity, the intense meritocracy of memes and social vitality. All of the magical chaos that had me so delighted and charmed ...
I don't know why I didn't see this sooner.
@futurebird
The unwashed masses aren't supposed to produce content! They're supposed to consume it, and only from the giant media companies, and watch advertisements and pay subscription fees for the privilege!
What are you, some kind of commie? -
@Rtzq0 @futurebird Does your site use cleanstream for verification?
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@futurebird I found so many things I never expected to like, things outside of my usual. That's what made the old net so fun. I miss the rabbit holes so deep you pop out the other side totally bewildered. I was so into the John Titor thing it was ridiculous. Still kinda am lmao
Now it's just all the same. Everywhere. If it's not social media is promoting and selling something at every other post. The internet is a job now@futurebird Edit to add I forgot he was also promoting his event. I'm sharing this for the bit before that https://youtu.be/koKDP6kPvvY
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All this time... they hate it. They hated how creative it was, they hated the serendipity, the intense meritocracy of memes and social vitality. All of the magical chaos that had me so delighted and charmed ...
I don't know why I didn't see this sooner.
@futurebird When ISPs started selling “consumer” plans with fast download and slow upload, a lot of old-school internet people were annoyed. Weren’t we all supposed to be equal online?
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@futurebird They're authoritarian down to their bones. If nobody in authority tells them something has value, they don't believe it does.
My partner's late mother, just a couple of years ago: "If there weren't advertisements, how would we know what to buy?"
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My partner's late mother, just a couple of years ago: "If there weren't advertisements, how would we know what to buy?"
@woozle @futurebird When we needed it, we'd go get it. That's how.
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I remember early Ebay;
your search for 'crystal cat sculpture' has yielded 214 results all unique basically the us was an online garage sale before the Power Sellers ruined it. Everything I posted sold. Now I am lucky to get one sale a month.now your search for 'crystal cat sculpture' has yielded 2,140M results out of which 95% are the same
I miss old ebay.
@Crystal_Fish_Caves @futurebird I was never a big eBay user, but I was still pretty shocked by how gross it looks these days.
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@woozle @futurebird When we needed it, we'd go get it. That's how.
When I see something advertised, that usually makes me suspicious of it -- because they're spending money promoting it rather than making it a better product.
I suspect if neurodivergent people were more the norm, "advertisements" as we know them simply would not exist.
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@futurebird "Stop talking to each other and start buying things"
https://catvalente.substack.com/p/stop-talking-to-each-other-and-start@rehana @futurebird she's on Fedi @Catvalente
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@Crystal_Fish_Caves @futurebird I was never a big eBay user, but I was still pretty shocked by how gross it looks these days.
@Sadsquatch oh god is that how my store's home looks to pedestrians? I gotta move.
Ill try any of the site builders up to the 'give us your credit card' part I let one of the ai store builders take a crack at my aquarium decore niche store and it tripped up the ai at every turn like I am running a tropical fish door dash sushi mash up.
I took a poll a couple of days ago about ebay vs your own domain vs go to the mall ebay last brick and mortar almost beat online which I thought was crazy. -
All this time... they hate it. They hated how creative it was, they hated the serendipity, the intense meritocracy of memes and social vitality. All of the magical chaos that had me so delighted and charmed ...
I don't know why I didn't see this sooner.
@futurebird yeah it really is astonishing. A classic social media example of this is the difference between MySpace profiles (which had a lot going on to begin with could be further customized with CSS so were all over the place) and the very limited and sparse Facebook profile.
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"People sometimes end up on obscure sites run by just... anyone. A page made by a local club is as easy to find as a corporate site."
I didn't realize that the guy I was talking with about the internet in 1999 thought of this as a *problem* to be solved... not what made the internet awesome.
All along there have been people who see everything you love about the internet as an unfortunate design oversight, something to be fixed. And they've been working for decades to make it happen.
@futurebird I made the first website that Cal State L.A. ever had. I learned html and wrote it in Notepad. Of course it was entirely static. All it had was the location, phone number, and operating hours of the new Writing Center I was running. Probably no one ever saw it because no one was on the web. You had to have Netscape to see it and no one had it. The IT people were no help at all. They said, "If you had told us a year ago that people would want to put up webpages, we would have told you you were crazy." I said, "OK, but this is now, and I want to do this."
Ah, those were the days of promise and possibility. Then it all turned stupid.
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@futurebird some people really love order, hierarchy, and authority.
@dr2chase @futurebird not just that, but uniformity. I want my site to be orderly in my particular way, but even other people who want orderly things should be free to make them their own way
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@futurebird When ISPs started selling “consumer” plans with fast download and slow upload, a lot of old-school internet people were annoyed. Weren’t we all supposed to be equal online?
Fiber seems to have finally solved that problem. Same bandwidth both ways.
Until now, I figured the bandwidth asymmetry of DSL and cable was some kind of intentional “consume, don't produce” design decision, but…well, fiber ISPs would be throttling upstream if that were the case, so I guess bandwidth asymmetry was nothing more than a technical trade-off this whole time?
Happy to see it, at any rate. Uploading a software build now takes seconds instead of minutes.
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"People sometimes end up on obscure sites run by just... anyone. A page made by a local club is as easy to find as a corporate site."
I didn't realize that the guy I was talking with about the internet in 1999 thought of this as a *problem* to be solved... not what made the internet awesome.
All along there have been people who see everything you love about the internet as an unfortunate design oversight, something to be fixed. And they've been working for decades to make it happen.
@futurebird Yep... Feels about right.
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@futurebird They're authoritarian down to their bones. If nobody in authority tells them something has value, they don't believe it does.
You mean to tell me there are people who think there's no such thing as inherent value?!
That is seriously not normal. Like, that's one of those rare economic theories where, if you told it to a capitalist and a socialist, they'd *both* say you're nuts. They don't agree on much, but they definitely agree that they want nice things!
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All this time... they hate it. They hated how creative it was, they hated the serendipity, the intense meritocracy of memes and social vitality. All of the magical chaos that had me so delighted and charmed ...
I don't know why I didn't see this sooner.
@futurebird I've said for a while that the internet as we know it (or a lot of us from "the 90's/early 2000's internet" knew it) has been rotting for a very long time
Capitalism connected the overwhelming bulk of the planet to the internet and then ran headfirst into a problem: Nobody had any *money*
Those endless deluges of boner pills and pop up ads for "free money" were a capitalism "pioneer species". Eeking out fractions of pennies at a time. The name of the game was how much sludge you could fling and how many inboxes you could flood with it.
Then, after the turn of the century, they realized that malware could make money. Just turn peoples computers into email relays or DDoS vectors. Weigh the machine down with spyware and adware served up through garbage apps and P2P software (looking at you, KaZaA)
Meanwhile the capitalists looked at services like Geocities and thought "how can we inject ourselves in the middle and extract rent for this?" and we ended up with the "social media era" of "web 2.0". We moved off the free hosting of ISP's and into "the cloud" and started normalizing shovelling ads everywhere on MySpace/Twitter/Facebook.
Then the capitalists realized that they were leaving pennies (or fractions of pennies) on the table by not siphoning every single persons *data*. Surveillance capitalism became the name of the game to sell to advertisers.
Now we're at the final, nauseating junction with the AI slop machine. They've spent 20 years picking away at every shred of flesh, so it's a mad dash to scoop up the bones and dump them all into a giant pot and boil down the marrow and hope that the slop that oozes out of that brew is palatable to force feed to the populus
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Fiber seems to have finally solved that problem. Same bandwidth both ways.
Until now, I figured the bandwidth asymmetry of DSL and cable was some kind of intentional “consume, don't produce” design decision, but…well, fiber ISPs would be throttling upstream if that were the case, so I guess bandwidth asymmetry was nothing more than a technical trade-off this whole time?
Happy to see it, at any rate. Uploading a software build now takes seconds instead of minutes.
@argv_minus_one @fivetonsflax @futurebird *Puts hand up*
Hi, I have worked in the ISP space before.
Cable's asymmetry wasn't an intentional choice. But a design vestige of its history. Originally these systems were designed as a one-to-many (and one way) network. Radio waves were blasted down the wire and into the back of TV sets
The lacking upload speed is because the networks were never *designed* with the idea of broadcasts coming back up the pipe. DOCSIS was grafted on to cable TV networks as an afterthought and required major cleanup of the design of the networks to accommodate them
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@argv_minus_one @fivetonsflax @futurebird *Puts hand up*
Hi, I have worked in the ISP space before.
Cable's asymmetry wasn't an intentional choice. But a design vestige of its history. Originally these systems were designed as a one-to-many (and one way) network. Radio waves were blasted down the wire and into the back of TV sets
The lacking upload speed is because the networks were never *designed* with the idea of broadcasts coming back up the pipe. DOCSIS was grafted on to cable TV networks as an afterthought and required major cleanup of the design of the networks to accommodate them
Ah yeah. “Community Antenna Television”, I believe it was originally called.
What about ADSL?
