Heat Death of the Internet
Heat Death of the Internet
You want to order from a local restaurant, but you need to download a third-party delivery app, even though you plan to pick it up yourself. The prices and menu on the app are different to what you saw in the window. When you download a second app the prices are different again. You ring
You want to watch the trailer for an upcoming movie on YouTube but you first have to sit through an ad.
Its pretty bad when you have to watch ads so you can watch the ad you wanted to see.
79Firefox extension "easy youtube video downloader express" Silly name, great product.
3
Who uses Adblock??? They're a bullshit, sellout company.
You install Ublock Origin instead and add the annoyance and adblock-blocking lists...
There... Now you don't need to watch ads to watch your ads. Your news and recipe sites no longer have an ad every other sentence. A couple pages still refuse to load because you have an ad blocker. You learn to live without them. Your Google searches have sponsored sites filtered out.
You tell your mother that you can't read that article and it's not being represented on any other news platform, and suggest it's possibly not all that reputable. She tells you she got it from Facebook. You tell her to stop getting all her news from Facebook. You realize maybe social media is a symptom of a sick society too involved in each other's daily doings. You delete your social media accounts and block the pages.
You decide you want to read that book from the Wikipedia page your friend recommended. You open up Libby to see if your local library has a copy of the book. They don't, but they have digital copies of several other books by the same author. You make a note to check them out later, as they're not about the topic you were looking for. You search Google for the book title followed by .epub download and find several sites that have the book your looking for. You put it on your tablet, then put on your shoes, and go out to the park to read your new book. While you're walking, your coworker texts you to complain that your supervisor fired him for plagiarizing work off ChatGPT again. He doesn't understand how they could tell.
You get to the park, sit, and enjoy your book for a while.
55Sponsor Block is great too, specifically for YouTube. I'd say about ~90% of the creators own plugs are auto skipped. Pretty sure you can whitelist specific channels.
10... I kinda want to sit outside and read now. How many hours left in the work day?
4One for me, but I'm off today and already enjoying a Mai Tai!
1
I have experienced every single one of those situations. Such a frustrating but accurate article.
20Always cut out the intermediaries.
(I'm glad this story was published. We may roll our eyes, but it's a contribution toward raising normie's consciousness, which is welcome.)
8Always cut out the intermediaries.
In this vein: when you can, PAY CASH. Normalizing credit and debit transactions also normalized bleeding money from businesses to VISA, Mastercard, and whatever monster you bank with. They all suck. :) Businesses pay more for credit transactions than debit transactions, so use debit if the business doesn't take cash.
2
It feels like youtube especially is much worse. The app bit has happened to me before. No one updates the app/website and wrong info just gets piled on.
6One for me, but I'm off today and enjoying a Mai Tai already!
1Not sure what the restaurant app thing has to do with the death of the internet. It's shitty, sure; but does not affect the internet as a whole. It'll be the death of the restaurant, when people finally get fed up with that shit.
Everything else is just the corpo owned internet. And who cares if that dies? It's always been shit. It's just shit in a different way now.
1You want to order from a local restaurant,
Don't. Either order from a big chain or don't order at all.
you need to download a third-party delivery app
Choose a different restaurant?
even though you plan to pick it up yourself.
Just walk to the store and order in-store?
You want to watch the trailer for an upcoming movie
Why? Why would anyone do that?
but you first have to sit through an ad.
Use uBlock. Sponsorblock. DeArrow. Privacy Badger. Peertube. Yt2009. Ytdl. Vanced. Newpipe.
The first page of Google results are links to pages that have scraped other pages for information from other pages that have been scraped for information.
Append site:reddit.com to the end of each search. Use udm14. Try ddg or searx or any one of the many search engine alternatives.
All the sources seem to link back to one another.
Sir this is the internet. It's always been this way.
The photos on the page look weird. The hands are disfigured. There is no image credit.
Image credit and culture of copyright and corporate capitalist scum are to blame for most shitty things on the internet, defending this shit makes you deserve the misery you helped create.
Your coworker sends you a PowerPoint pack
2002 called.
It makes even less sense.
Not your problem.
You tell them you’ll just rewrite it yourself.
Cuckold.
your favourite social media
Ewww. Imagine corporate social media unironically.
the app you use for networking
Networking as in, computer networking? Depending on the exact application there may be tons of FOSS alternatives.
If not, then stop being a corpo bootlicker and don't """network""". Problem solved.
You want to watch a TV show from your youth so you check a streaming service,
Uhmmm, why would you do that? Rarbg exists for a reason. 1337x. Rutracker. VLC. Wanna go fancy? NAS or a simple old dell optiplex or a laptop. Debian. Qbittorrent-nox. Docker. Jellyfin. JBOD of old scavenged HDDs.
You can’t read the recipe on your phone because it prioritises the ads
Firefox & uBlock Origin fixes this issue on Android.
and the page no longer loads
Find a different recipe. This shit was always mostly ctrl+c/ctrl+v spam. Use a waybackmachine.
Your phone schedules an update.
Turn automatic updates off. Never a problem on android (Pixel, not reskins).
Alternatively: Don't use a phone.
Your Gmail
Don't use Gmail.
Your smart TV
Don't use TVs.
I thought GenZ/Millennials were past owning TVs?
The Airbnb
Don't use it.
Your Uber driver
Don't use it.
You still give him five stars.
Don't.
You buy
No.
Your mother
So fat,
they put her
behind a paywall,
Use 12ft.io. archive.is etc etc.
receive ads
Turn off notifications for shopping apps. Block all ads.
Strangers on social media assume you are American and get mad when you correct them.
Most of the internet is American, most websites are American, most people speaking English are American. Us stinky euros will always be secondary characters. It's Pax Americana age baby, I'm sorry you were born in the shit (I'm UK atm so def true for me).
you need to pay for a subscription to the site in order to read it.
Why not just have them send it to you as text files? Screenshots? Why are they hosting it on a paid third party website if they want it to be accessible? Why not self-host?
You go to your local library’s website and although they don’t have the exact book, they do have others by the same author. You place a hold on two of them, then go get your shoes on.
Or just download it?
All problems are user's own. Yes enshittification sucks. You're free to disconnect as much as you can.
-28"There are workarounds to these problems" doesn't disprove "there are problems". In fact, it only proves it more.
31Oh for sure. But problems do have solutions, I just wanted to share some. I know everyone really just wants to complain and sure I love a good moan too but c'mon this is getting oh so tiresome.
-7
Now tell us what those of us with lives, the need to interact with the rest of the planet, and better things to do than most of that bullshit can do. I run Linux and ad blockers. That's the most I'm going to do. I'm not going to become a hermit and live in a bunker.
15Suit yourself man, I don't judge. Personally I don't need UberEats and a Smart TV to interact with other people be they colleagues from work or friends. No idea what kind of folks you know but my gf and I and our friend circle usually just hang out IRL.
-4
Blaming the user and saying there are alternatives really doesn't work.
If you don't stand up against Pixel phones getting enshittified, then Fairphones are also going to get enshittified. If you don't stand up against U.S. airports getting spying facial recognition, then U.K. airports are also going to get spying facial recognition because they now know that nobody will give a shit.
Now Firefox is also getting enshittified, because just look at the most popular web browser. Google Chrome is literal spyware and they get no actual pushback, and are instead getting rewarded so Firefox copies it.
So, for example, instead of saying "Stop moaning about Netflix and torrent your movies even though you might get arrested if you don't have good opsec in countries with strict copyright laws.", push back against those changes. Boycotting works, telling your friends and family how Netflix is fucking them over without putting the blame on them works, even a Mastodon post works. But a half-assed response to an obscure article that blames the user doesn't work.
8they now know that nobody will give a shit.
It doesn't matter, there were plenty of people who gave a shit about a law in the UK that made protest legality be at discretion of the government and it still passed. The people are increasingly powerless, and most people don't understand and don't want to understand anyway.
they get no actual pushback
They've been getting pushback since like the 2010s. It hasn't changed shit.
push back against those changes.
Doesn't matter they'll pass anyway because most people just take it.
Boycotting works
Lmao. Isn't that literally what I'm proposing too though? Boycotting all that tech, hoping that en-masse that's enough to stop the tide?
how Netflix is fucking them over
Spoiler: they don't care
even a Mastodon post works
No normal person has left twitter.
Most people aren't even aware how shitty Elon is or what he's done to the platform quality and algorithm wise, they stay away from politics and scroll memes.
One of my normie IRL friends was trying to prove to me - a trans person - how twitter is actually good and hasn't changed much. I never used twitter much but I had a blocklist 10k+ of shinigami reds by the time I abandoned ship.
Imagine explaining to that same guy the more nuanced slow early stages enshittification of Reddit.
The man doesn't even get Reddit, I don't mean he doesn't like it but I think he straight up doesn't understand it. His perception of it is that it's some kind of nerd platform where people write long paragraphs about stuff and the surface level understanding of "argue on the internet" and that's lame and he'll go all "redditor" at seeing a video longer than 30s or more than one paragraph of text, though the irony of him also using it for every Google search doesn't seem to bother him at all.
The fediverse is beyond most people I reckon. So are all the things I said. So is the concept that some corpo is fucking you over or the concept of free software or the free and open internet. It's all over, the dream is over.
2
All problems are user's own. Yes enshittification sucks. You're free to disconnect as much as you can.
Wrong attitude. Only atomization and further exploitation lies that way. The solution is to get vocal and demand higher standards.
6Yeah you're not gonna get that from corpos who won't even need you for much longer. Once AI replaces your job, they'll also replace you as a customer because you'll have nothing, and they will simply only target the whales (rich). Even now the poor's best chance is to be entertaining so bored rich people give them money on YT/Twitch, between all the shock content and mukbangs it's just a less exciting version of gladiator arenas.
Everything will become like an F2P game, where whales make all the money, and the rest are there to be flexed on, like dating apps where men roll dice for a chance at a woman but they'll never get it unless they pay, letting the paying dunk on the poor. It's very transparently a casino.
It's the same sort of gender-specialized money extraction they've been doing from us through the beauty market, they just found how to do it for men.
I've been saying this for ages but I'm by far not the only one anymore https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MYB0SVTGRj4
Or we could demand change to this entire system and take humanity down a very different, much brighter path to gay luxury space socialism but nobody wants to. Guess boring cyberpunk it is.
-1
Unfortunately, you're suggesting some technical workarounds for the non-tecnical problem.
6Yes, the problem is capitalism ultimately. But you can't change that. At least I've not seen anyone even try, if anything - we are going the other way. But you can just not participate in it.
1
You instantly lost me at order from big chain. No thank you.
5Why not? I've never really had any serious issues with them tbh like the order experience is always fine and it's usually cheap as hell (£12 for a large pizza here in the UK from Dominos or PJs, obvsly no tipping either and tax is in price), and if they don't deliver you can always get a refund. All the smaller restaurants are usually immigrant traffickers or ghost kitchens here nowadays.
-3
It sucks and I like it that way!
3Thanks for the insightful comment
2Wait, is rarbg back? It was taken down a while back, did someone actually resurrect it?
2Rarbg wasn't taken down, they retired. Someone made 'therarbg' which is a successor website and hosts a lot of the release group's work as well as a lot of torrents backed up from the original site in general (look for ORARBG in the filename).
1