this post was submitted on 05 Oct 2024
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Bill pay. Maps. Wikipedia. Every Song Ever. Every Movie Ever. Every re-run ever. Almost all the games. Communication about weird hobbies with people across the globe. Email your favorite author or artist directly. Free e-books from 5000BC to 1935 AD. Online tickets for travel. Online shopping. Podcasting. Online music collaboration.
Postal mail still a thing.
There is a lot to like about the contemporary internet. Perhaps people are less grateful now.
"every re-run ever" - except when streaming platforms decide to delete stuff forever arbitrarily, because they give zero shits about preservation.
Just download it then! I just got Infinity Train!
Well. I think it might be worth checking again what I wrote. I was quite clear in that I said there's a not lot to like, not that there's nothing to like. If I didn't get anything from the modern internet, I'd not be here posting these comments.
I'd like to pull you up on the point about free e-books. Project Gutenburg was in its second decade by the time most home users got online. So that's hardly a contemporary internet exclusive, it's almost as old as the internet itself. Also, communication about weird hobbies is certainly not unique to the contemporary internet. We just did it on open services not controlled by corporate entities. Corporates that only run the service in order to sell your data.
As for a few of the things I don't like? Well. Ads everywhere (including those containing malware), constant hacking attempts for anyone running a server (ssh/sip/www very commonly hit with some protocols getting 100+ hits per second), AI crawlers scooping up the whole internet without any care about how they impact transit fees or user experience, licensed purchases (streaming services, games, etc that can be taken away at a moments notice with zero recourse for the user), terrible user agreements for EVERYTHING especially regarding privacy with no way to reject since ALL companies offering similar services have the same damned agreements, subscriptions on everything everywhere and increasingly so, having to click to reject cookies everywhere and knowing they're still building a profile about me whether I like it or not just in order to throw more adverts my way.