this post was submitted on 05 Jun 2023
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honestly heartbreaking in a lot of ways to see the current turn of events and how the web is today.
but what could we have done to prevent it? im not sure paywalls would've been feasible, i feel like most people would refuse to pay or just avoid your website all together. maybe a paywall network of websites of some kind could've worked? but its really hard to say.
i don't even have a problem with ads on sites to an extent, as long as they aren't overly obnoxious and don't spy on you and track your every move. that shouldn't be too much to ask, right? but alas, i guess it is in 2023. 🤷♀️
just such a sad state of things. the web is currently unusable without a content blocker or protection of some kind, which is insane to think about. this all really only scratches the surface too of the modern web's issues. in general a lot of the individuality and freedom of the internet is just... gone. all completely corporate and shall now, so much seo spam and clickbait and other garbage, just for the most clicks or revenue possible. there's little quality left for sure.
feels like we lost the internet in a lot of ways. i wonder what the solution is, if there even is one. i guess we just can't give up fighting.
So people don't want advertisements but they also don't want to pay for a bajillion subscriptions. I think the solution is socialization of the Internet. Governments should simply guarantee funding and make up the cost in taxes.
i think most people would be fine with advertising, as long as it 1: isn't overly obnoxious, 2: isn't scammy and doesn't contain malware or other garbage, and 3: doesn't track you and everything you do. advertising itself isn't the problem, it's the way it's being currently handled on the internet that's the issue.
A lot of the VALUE of a news article on the internet is the ability to share it and discuss it with everyone else. Paywalls remove that value, or require all of the people you share it with to already have subscriptions to everything else.
News has been paid for via advertisements for a lot longer than the internet. The subscription fees for Newspapers really only covered the printing and distribution costs, while the reporters' salaries were paid for via advertising.
The problem is that the advertising has gotten TOO intrusive. It isn't just a banner ad anymore. It is a ton of banners speckled between every other paragraph on the page. As soon as advertising gets in the way, people will look to get around it.
I have found that I am overly sensitive to almost all forms of push-advertising (as opposed to pull-advertising where I am looking for marketing materials on something I want to research). I have browser ad blockers as well as DNS based ones on my wifi. I also watch very little broadcast TV. I have no problem waiting for a season of a TV show to be on DVD so I can watch it without breaks, or the annoying banners that pop up while watching.
I don't understand why so many people are making concessions towards advertisements. Yes, some aren't too bad, but at the end of the day all advertising is just brainwashing you to buy more things. If we're going to dream about an alternate universe where the internet was better, we don't need to compromise with our imaginations.
At the end of the day, running a server does cost money, and people's goodwill will only go so far. I don't want to have to pay directly for every service, website, or whatever I see, but don't mind doing it from time to time.
I buy a lot of DVD's, blurays, or 4K UHD movies and tv shows, and then immediately rip them onto my Jellyfin server so that I know I will be able to watch them when I want, how I want. I feel like that does my karma of supporting the creators of those shows.
Advertisements allow me to watch everything else. There are youtube channels I follow, that get sponsored by "NordVPN" or whatever, and even though I don't use Nord, and would probably go out of my way to NOT use them because of all of the sponsorship messages I see, I am glad they give money to the creators I like.
The real problem is when they become too intrusive. I use ad blockers to remove Youtube ads, because I don't want a video to be split up abruptly while watching it. If there was a simple, short, ad before the videos, I would have no problem with them, but they became intrusive, so I block them.
I'm not inherently against the idea of advertising. I get why it exists, and I'm all for it. What I resent and have no intention of complying with, are the attempts at identifying me and collecting my data, as a means to 'manipulate' me into buying things. And, it also can't ruin my experience on the site. If advertisements were minimal and invasive, didn't try installing all kinds of ad/bloat-ware on my machine, you'd never see me making any attempt to protect myself against it.
The comment was getting long and I didn't want to get into socioeconomic side effects, mobile, or other factors.
It's not all bleak. The internet is still built on a foundation of free and open technology. HTML, CSS, and JavaScript (aka ECMAScript), TCP/IP and DNS …
The best thing we can do is teach those things. Keep them accessible to as many people as possible and make sure they don't become forgotten arcane voodoo knowledge. Anyone can set up a website and share it with others. We don't have to depend on big social networks.
The biggest challenge is how do you get people to be curious about this stuff? Back in the day, we had to learn, we had to look under the hood, because half the time stuff just didn't work and we needed to figure out how to fix it. But today everything is hidden behind a shiny UI and most things just work. There's no need to look under the hood (if you even still can, and it's not some encrypted blob or compiled binary webASM nonsense).
Not as simple as it used to be. Thanks to the abuse from ad, social media, and other tracking networks, now you need to comply with the cookie laws, personal information laws, data retention laws... and so on. It's no longer as simple as setting up a website and just sharing it; just having an uncontrolled log, or lacking one, can land you in trouble. Allow random users add content (like comments) to the site, and you can get drowned before even realizing what's happening.
What is an “uncontrolled log”?
Back in the day, you could set a site, have the webserver write whatever log, and not worry about it. Whether you used for access statistics, or forgot about it and deleted, nobody cared.
Nowadays, depending on the legislation of wherever you live, there might be requirements for a minimum amount of information you need to log and preserve for a minimum amount of time, and restrictions on what information you can't log and need to remove after a certain amount of time, or upon request provide to users, delete, or save apart.
It's become much more complicated.
You're not wrong, but I don't think anyone is actually trying to enforce this for small-scale things like personal websites or lemmy instances.
Sometimes all it takes is a single disgruntled user reporting you to whatever overseeing organization, to have to deal with this stuff.
@Skimmer5728 I think what we're doing right here in the fediverse is a good solution. We're just building a parallel infrastructure to their dumb web3.0 garbage. Those who want a better Internet can come over here and those who want to stick with garbage can stick with it.
well said, i agree, the fediverse is definitely a good approach.
i think the only concern will be getting more people to move here and adopt it, it'll be harder to convince and appeal to more mainstream people. but i guess that'll be easier and easier as the web goes to shit and gets worse and worse over time than it already is, lol.
Fediverse is really still in its infancy. Its only just shifted from those with a lot of technical knowledge to those with a fluency of it.
It's when the average person can create an account and start engaging that it will reach critical mass.
It's not a bad thing that its taking a while to get there so that certain cultures, terms of engagement and stable/viable instances (each with their funding streams) can be established. If there were a sudden mass exodus from centralised systems to the fediverse, it would just mean a massive loss of the signal to noise ratio rather than a slow, measure integration of each wave of new users.
Eternal September. There's no integrating the masses to a 'better' network. I think to some extent you're going to get what the big names have now because it's the people, not just the sites.
And the fediverse sign up is exactly as hard as an email sign up already. Idk how you make it easier.
The "web3.0" is also an attempt to escape the nightmare that "web2.0" has become, just centered on Blockchains and the technologies they allow. Technically, the web3.0 is not at odds with the fediverse, it might even be that some day both might end up working together.
For example, one of the alternatives to Reddit that's being worked on, is a Blockchain + IPFS solution that already has some features like user migration between instances. It's a bit hard to expect to onboard the average user to a full crypto experience, but things like Lemmy could be the "base service", while someone looking for something more could look into integrations with other solutions.
There was the original idea of microtransactions, where you could buy some credit, say $10, and every time you read an article, the author would get fraction of a cent. Or you'd need to manually approve it, such as with a like.
Of course companies saw a good idea and ran it into the ground, so now microtransactions mean something very different, and in their stead there are subscriptions for everything.
You're posting in the solution right now :)
Lemmy does give me a strong nostalgic feeling of old school forums. I think the Fediverse is going to give enthusiasts what they've been missing. I just hope it lasts and continues to grow.
That's what pisses me off about Bluesky. Mastodon already exists, and is not for profit. We don't need another "decentralized" platform that intentionally doesn't talk to the Fediverse and is trying to create its own version. Yet my fear is Bluesky will end up being mainstream and those for-profit CEOs will continue running the internet into the ground. I hope people end up realizing Mastodon already exists, and is a better version of what Bluesky wants to be.