rwhitisissle @ rwhitisissle @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

Evolution implies that old things die and new things take their place, so those are not mutually exclusive concepts. The thing taking its place is comparatively worse than the thing that came before it, though. Which is fucking annoying, but oh well.

And the reality is there never will be anything that can meaningfully compete. Not anymore. Youtube has inertia. It’s not just that content creators get part of the advertising or that Youtube functionally advertises their channels based on related content algorithms. It’s also that youtube has over a decade of historical material. It’s the largest collection of video content in the history of the planet. Ever. By far. The age of “people are going to ditch your service for a competitor’s” is long gone. We are squarely in the age of the solid internet, which is ruled by a handful of very large, very powerful corporations, who do not really have to worry about “new competition,” because the scale of their operations is so vast, so well established as a part of the culture, and so astronomically expensive to maintain that nothing new could ever hope to compete.

That's a good analogy. The internet's kind of like a gen-Xer, super into anti-establishment punk and grunge music, wearing nothing but Nirvana t-shirts well into its twenties, who woke up one day to find itself a NIMBY-esque middle-manager who votes every election for either corporate democrats or your mildly less homophobic Republican candidates and who cares about no issue beyond getting his taxes lowered. And the sad thing is, that's the internet people wanted. We/they wanted it banal, tame, sanitized, and, ultimately, lifeless. All the porn is sequestered into its own little corner of things, where it used to just be everywhere (you couldn't go to the front page of reddit without just seeing a ton of T and A) and all the media is hyper-sanitized because corporate sponsors want everything family friendly so they can feed the same advertising to kids that they do adults. And instead of interesting, new websites cropping up every other week that you find with Stumbleupon, it's just screenshots of comments from 4 social media websites reposted ad-nauseam on each other and the same mundane youtube videos you've been watching on repeat the past 6 years. And now corporations like Google and Reddit are starting to go the extra mile and box people out of even quietly bypassing the web of bullshit they've put around the content they host, dictating not just what kind of content is available, but how you interact with it.

It kind of reminds me of this passage from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, where Hunter S. Thompson is talking about the sixties. You can read it here. He talks about strange memories, about this feeling like you were a part of an important time that meant something. The internet of the early 2010s was a special place. Alive and vibrant and strange and perfect for weirdo loners who couldn't figure out how to interact with people in real life. I don't think I'll ever be able to fully quantify or describe how much of that time shaped me into who I am, or about what ideas and thoughts and beliefs that live within me that all those moments, aimlessly frittered away in some little corner of cyberspace gave rise to. Maybe I would have been better off if I never was an "internet person." I know the changing of the time and the end of this era would hurt less. I know I wouldn't feel so old seeing the internet, which was once something that felt like a good friend, dying of cancer-like greed and the pathological centralization of all its myriad services.

Perhaps this is the story of all history: of how new frontiers, like the "Wild West," always become settled, and how we remember the best parts of what we experienced and try to forget all the bad parts of it, or forgive those flaws because they didn't really affect us. I know the new internet is certainly kinder to women, LGBT persons, and people of color today than it was back then. And that's good. And I know that the myths of history, of the Wild West, or the Gold Rush, or the early internet, or any other period of rapid settlement and development is never as neat and clean or as kind or even as "real" as we care to remember. And for the people who come afterwards, the way things are now will be all they know. They'll never even think to wish the internet was different or better, because they weren't there and they didn't experience the internet with all its raw potential before it became a digital stripmall. And for all our lamenting, nothing will really change. There might be holdout places, small corners where nostalgia lives on. Virtual retirement homes for the internet's senior citizens. And maybe that's fine. Because nothing lasts forever. Things, people, places, ideas, they all die, and you just have to appreciate the time you had with them. And even the internet as it is now will die and give way to something new, even if it takes decades or centuries to happen.

But even with all that said, you just can't help but wish the thing it became, in this moment, held more of the dreams of the people who actually helped make it.

It's an end of an era. I've been on reddit for over a decade, and on youtube for even longer. Crazy to think I might be giving up both of those services within a few months of each other. Feels like the internet is dying. Oh well. Maybe I'll go back to reading a shitload.

People are generally okay with some ads. It's the quantity and aggressiveness and propensity for making the content worse by how they inject them into the videos that people don't like. Yes, their infrastructure costs money to run. But their service is only possible because of the people who make videos for them and the people who watch them. It's always been a give and take relationship. They've just been gradually deciding over the years to take more and more as their monopoly over a certain category of digital media has solidified and people have responded in the way people always do.

"Drink verification can."

Y'all remember when back in the day, Google's motto was "don't be evil." And then at some point somebody told them how much money there was in being evil and then they just pivoted to being a functional parody of a giant evil megacorporation from a cyberpunk novel? Cuz I remember that.

Me: "haha...no" proceeds to delete function "whoever wrote this can figure it out again."

That was probably it. Thanks!

As someone with an up to date ublock origin on Firefox, I literally just got one.

If it was great people would vacation there, but they don’t.

Casual reminder no one has EVER vacationed in Florida.

I'm gonna guess Seattle has better seafood, but Atlanta has better pork and chicken?

If anyone here is ignorant, I'm guaranteeing it's you.

I get where you're coming from, but this is a textbook case of "familiarity breeding contempt." Prejudice is a national problem. Americans, regardless of regional distinction, have been historically prejudiced against all non-whites. You think Native Americans in the pacific Northwest had it easy when their kids were forced into Indian Schools? Or that the million or so Hispanic-Americans rounded up throughout the Southwest and unceremoniously deported to Mexico in Operation Wetback weren't victims of systemic injustice? The particular brand of systemic racial injustice that served as a cultural foundation for the South is a historical product of complex social factors going back centuries, and it's so vibrant in our imaginations because of an equally complex confluence of historical factors, not the least of which is that American audio-visual media of the 20th century has a fascinating obsession with the South and its history. A lot of this can be tied to the fact that at the time when film making was truly getting started the Civil War was distant enough to not be a horrific memory in the lives of your average American, but close enough to be a point of nostalgia. There's other factors there too, of course, like the intentional spread of Lost Cause mythology, but there's literal tomes of historical analysis written about that. But anecdotally, the first truly successful major motion picture was The Birth of a Nation, without which you don't get a movie as monumentally influential as Gone With the Wind. I know I'm sounding like an apologist, but the reality is that while the abortions of justice in the South are tragic and extensive, they aren't particular to the region. They're just magnified in our collective cultural consciousness by virtue of complex historical, cultural, and technological factors.

Oh, also this point: "there has never been a single good thing the US has done that can be attributed to a Southerner or Southern state." My brother in Christ, Martin Luther King, Jr. was from Atlanta. The Civil Rights movement might have been national at the time of its closing, but it started as a distinctly Southern Black political and social movement organized by Southern black congregations. I know you'll probably say "they wouldn't have had to form a civil rights movement if the South wasn't so racist." Yeah...of course. But that's the point: it isn't a monolith to which you are only free to attribute purely negative qualities. It's a complicated place with a complicated history and a complicated blend of cultures and peoples. Which is equally true of, well, most places, really.

only in the South do they hold the power to restrict women’s rights and attack LGBTQ people relentlessly

Dog, have you ever heard of a little state called Utah? Religious conservatives don't just hold power in the South.

Yeah, I was gonna say, OP has never lived somewhere like Atlanta. The South works like this: 1st world cities nested in 3rd world states nested in a 1st world country.

Honestly, the internet was at its best when it was the fever dream of stoned, sexually frustrated grad students at Berkley. Infinite potential - it could've been anything. Could've. But wouldn't. The real thing, after it became fully saturated in everyday American life, was always going to be some mediocre, watered down corporate cesspool of lowest common denominator, hyper-sanitized garbage. Because that's what people like. They like safe, familiar, predictable, and uncomplicated. Well, most people.

when Gnu Hurd comes out

Any day now...

That would require government oversight and accountability. Best I can do is regulatory capture and the continued gutting of American anti-trust law.