Haha, so true. I really really miss the “old” interwebz. Imagine the content of back-then with the hardware of today. The dream of yesteryear would come true. A blazingly fast net. Just html with a bit of JS (when really needed). Not 10 frameworks (each used for one function), dozens of mb of graphics, a gazillion of cookies and tracker-scripts and… Jeez.
Today i need so much stuff to fight the other stuff, it’s stuffmageddon.
Oh and if you’re also European you can also fight (for free!) the silly cookie-war.
4chan back before the Nazi takeover was like the wild west. My favorite part was “Lithursday,” when we would share images with embedded PDFs of copyrighted content, including rare books, anarchist materials, and military manuals. I often wonder if those unusually large .jpgs are still floating around the internet waiting to be unlocked. I also saw legitimate acts of activism and terrorism unfolding live, without the interpretation and propaganda of the state.
Not 10 frameworks (each used for one function), dozens of mb of graphics,
Have you seen the old internet?! It would have been even more gifs, music players, and oh the flash websites! Haha I know that’s really not your point but this jumped out at me and made me chuckle.
some of our clients are on what the telco calls ‘extended’ dsl. they’re waaaay tf out at the ‘end of the line’ where speeds can be as shitty as 250-500kbps; there’s even a couple still on dialup. so we definitely consider the weight of a page and how many connections are made for each when we do our own sites.
I mean, it’s unavoidable. Everyone draws their own line in the sand based on what they think is “right” and “wrong”, using whatever best tools and ideas are available to them, picked from the avalanche of options.
The line will not stay put from generation to generation, that’s not a reasonable thing to ask for. If we go back 50 years when tv was king, it’s not like all the tv shows were equally good, or stayed good.
So, it’s kinda just on us to seek out and pick the right things to support, and be prepared in case those change too. It’s kinda the whole reason I’m personally here on the Fediverse. I mean, back in the stone age our ancestors had to do the same things, its not like their environments always just stayed perfect. If something changes and you don’t want to starve to death, you gotta just do something. Can’t just wish it away.
Death is unavoidable.
Doesn’t mean I stand in a ditch waiting to die.
I’ll rage against the dying light thank you very much.
I’ve heard something to the effect that approximately 80% of all internet traffic passes through Facebook and Google. Unfortunately I can’t find anything to substantiate that claim but it’s sounds plausible.
I remember the early internet. It was a wild place but at least it was fair and balanced. Now every click on every page is designed to serve the for profit attention economy. Kinda sucks in comparison.
It’s gotten real bad for me just in the last week.
Videos load really slowly, constantly stops when I play a playlist of videos.
I have had ad blockers for over a decade now, it’s never been this bad.
I’ve been using NewPipe since I found out about it. Ad free YouTube with no slow down that I can see.
Really? My main reason for still trying to use adblockers instead of NewPipe or another frontend is that every one I’ve tried is slooooow. Is there a setting I should change or something???
Alternative interfaces like NewPipe, FreeTube, etc. work fine for what they are, but I prefer using a web browser because I actually like Youtube keeping track of my watch history and its recommendation algorithm works (reasonably) well for me.
All the alternative interfaces have privacy from Google as a primary design goal, so they want you to import your subscriptions and let them keep track of what you watched locally, but the consequence and downside of that is that it doesn’t synchronize across devices (e.g. FreeTube on my Linux desktop and NewPipe on my phone). At least not without a bunch of extra effort on my part manually importing and exporting, anyway.
Honestly, I just use the internet less. I’m never going to pay. I can’t be bothered with the loopholes anymore. If it bugs me to pay or subscribe, I leave. I’m fine with them not wanting me as a user, and I hope they’re fine with me not wanting them as a supplier. They don’t have anything that I actually need that badly.
Oddly enough I probably use the internet more than ever. It’s just not that internet.
Weirdly, the only parts of the Internet that I’m really liking these days are Hacker News, Lemmy and the one part that I do pay for, which is Kagi Ultimate. It is very refreshing not to be the product and I do occasionally need to use a search engine for something.
If youtube was a reasonable price I’d pay it. But being google, they not only charge a ridiculous price, but even if you pay that, they’ll STILL sell your data on top.
Furthermore, it being a public company no profit will ever be enough. It doesn’t matter if I paid 30$ a month, the next quarter the 30 billion profit won’t be enough because it didn’t grow from the previous quarter…
Fuck all that.
And if you buy any hardware from Google, count on it being discontinued and unsupported within a year. Anyone who continues to buy shit from Google is either deluded or a fool, or both.
I got a Pixel 5a refurbished because it’s supported by LineageOS. Like a week after buying it I dropped it, cracking the screen. Got on iFixit, ordered a replacement screen, and once it got here spent an evening installing it. No regrets. But I am a fool, so that tracks.
My next phone will be a Fairphone now that they work with US carriers, though.
Yeah YouTube brings me a ton of value and I wouldn’t mind paying a bit for it.
Not $14 a month though.
I’m so done with “browsing” YouTube. I also hardly ever click the links anymore when people post them here, and that is because of the ads.
There are some good channels that I occasionally checkout whenever I’m really bored, and I absolutely don’t mind them getting the ad revenue like any other free tv show, but it’s nothing that I can’t do without.
In my opinion, good YT channels who make quality content ought to apply for other mean of distribution that doesn’t scare away viewers. Let’s say that f.i. Numberphile, Veritasium or Primitive Technology were on Netflix or even Disney+, I’d prefer to watch it there. That’s how bad YouTube is.
If YouTube managed to get part of the all-in deals that I have on the other “real” streaming services, then they’d get some fraction of whatever my cellphone carrier pays to those. Right now I just don’t want to bother with it.
