Internet Turned to a Pile of Garbage (rant).

Joost

Joost

Other Christian
Heirloom
This is mostly a rant,


I’m amused on how internet these days turned to a centralized pile of garbage.
Everyone is trying to sell you something. The internet is a big Ad.

Amazon with its cheap low-quality products with fake 5-stars reviews.

Influencers shilling garbage for corporations or even governments (South Park made an episode about them recently called “South Park - Not Suitable for Children”.

Facebook/Instagram filled with Thirst Traps. I have a Facebook dummy account I use to follow 2 job groups; I don’t even have the app installed (I use a browser to avoid ads) and the Reels/suggestions have girls sexualizing themselves and using titles in the video pointing to their OnlyFans (“Her OF is free!). I tried once clicking on “showing me less” or block such crap and it doesn’t matter. Facebook keeps pushing it.

TikTok and Snapchat might be the same. Girls sexualizing themselves, targeting lone men.

Webpages were you could find answers are now written by AI. Want to learn how to write a resume or cook a vegetable? Here’s 3-pages “answer” with a bunch of filler content that might or may not give you the answer.

Search: Google and DuckDuckGo are censoring pages. If you look for news, only from MSM.

Reddit: same crap. Yesterday I checked their website and 15 out of the 50 trending topics were about Trump (in a negative way obviously).

YouTube? That’s the new MTV. I would be depressed if I had kids spending time watching YouTube trending videos.

News? Even right-wing websites have clickbait or rage-bait content.

Apps? Now everything is subscription.

Games? Freemium.

TV shows and movies? Woke garbage 99% of the time.


I posted a thread about becoming a programmer but I see it’ll be a great mistake to spend more time in front of a computer. We’re in the information era. You can get information about everything mostly. But most of the time…it’s garbage.
 
Forums were peak internet, and they're mostly dead now. Twitter is poor substitute imo. I spend way too much time in front of a screen, so it is actually a blessing. Now I am trying to learn how to fill my time in more productive ways. It has been more challenging than expected.
 
Joost said:
The Reels/suggestions have girls sexualizing themselves and using titles in the video pointing to their OnlyFans (“Her OF is free!). I tried once clicking on “showing me less” or block such crap and it doesn’t matter. Facebook keeps pushing it.
Click to expand...
You can get uBlock Origin to block any part of a website. You can get it to just treat those reels/suggestions like ads. It's very useful.
 
Golden age of the internet was basically the 00s, peaking in the late 00s when it was fully web 2.0 - it was the wild west, and had no restrictions whatsoever. Next the masses (and women) joined in and ruined it. Then big tech, (mostly google) basically took over the internet and ruined everything. I find it amazing how little the average person understands any of the technology they're using. Boomers think Gen Z understands tech but they don't at all. The Millenials and Gen X are more likely to understand it because they saw it develop to what it's become.

I'm finding myself closer and closer to ditching my phone, ditching gmail completely and completely resetting my online presence/digital footprint and my relationship to tech in general. It sickens me.
 
There is still a lot of good stuff to be found on the internet, such as this forum, but man, you have to DIG. Search engines are indeed completely useless. Even if you're looking up perfectly apolitical stuff that wouldn't cause any kvetching, it's all SEO'd autogenerated garbage. I hate Reddit quite a bit, so it's a travesty that I have to include "reddit" at the end of my every search query if I want even a chance to find any useful results.

I used to think AI would solve this problem and you'd be able to just ask it things instead of using a search engine, but while I expected TPTB to lobotomize AI to an extent, I did not expect it to be anywhere near as extreme as it has been. These days, AI is just completely worthless for nearly anything other than programming and entertainment.

Sure, I can ask it for a script to a movie with just a bit of a concept and it'll do a better job than the "professionals" in the current entertainment industry, and I can ask it to draw me a funny picture of Wario dressed as a Roman Catholic bishop baptizing the new convert, Shrek. It can also write me some code, and it will be terrible but fixable and it basically did 30-70% of the job for me. But can I ask it to fetch me useful information about a historical event, or to tell me the species of an insect according to my description of its physical features, or to tell me if it's legal in my country to order a really cool 16th-century-italian-style halberd online, from the website of an anonymous racist I met in a shady right-wing Discord server, who claims to be an European blacksmith? Maybe, maybe not, depends on the AI's mood and on the alignment of the stars, maybe it'll answer, maybe it'll dream up a fake answer on the spot, maybe it'll refuse to answer, maybe it'll lecture me about the evils of describing a weird bug I saw on my garden as "a really fat wasp". Who knows? Not the AI.

So in the end, I had to call the police (on their non-emergencies number) to ask about the halberd, since they'd probably know about that legality stuff. They did not, in fact, know (big surprise there), so I had to pay a legal counselor a bunch of shekels just to be told that "nooo, it's le pointy, you can't have that!", even as there was a gang shootout a couple blocks away, because this is 2023 and laws only exist to harass the law-abiding middle-class taxpayer and keep him from having fun in ways that don't involve base pleasures and/or goyslop.
 
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Joost said:
This is mostly a rant,


I’m amused on how internet these days turned to a centralized pile of garbage.
Everyone is trying to sell you something. The internet is a big Ad.

Amazon with its cheap low-quality products with fake 5-stars reviews.

Influencers shilling garbage for corporations or even governments (South Park made an episode about them recently called “South Park - Not Suitable for Children”.

Facebook/Instagram filled with Thirst Traps. I have a Facebook dummy account I use to follow 2 job groups; I don’t even have the app installed (I use a browser to avoid ads) and the Reels/suggestions have girls sexualizing themselves and using titles in the video pointing to their OnlyFans (“Her OF is free!). I tried once clicking on “showing me less” or block such crap and it doesn’t matter. Facebook keeps pushing it.

TikTok and Snapchat might be the same. Girls sexualizing themselves, targeting lone men.

Webpages were you could find answers are now written by AI. Want to learn how to write a resume or cook a vegetable? Here’s 3-pages “answer” with a bunch of filler content that might or may not give you the answer.

Search: Google and DuckDuckGo are censoring pages. If you look for news, only from MSM.

Reddit: same crap. Yesterday I checked their website and 15 out of the 50 trending topics were about Trump (in a negative way obviously).

YouTube? That’s the new MTV. I would be depressed if I had kids spending time watching YouTube trending videos.

News? Even right-wing websites have clickbait or rage-bait content.

Apps? Now everything is subscription.

Games? Freemium.

TV shows and movies? Woke garbage 99% of the time.


I posted a thread about becoming a programmer but I see it’ll be a great mistake to spend more time in front of a computer. We’re in the information era. You can get information about everything mostly. But most of the time…it’s garbage.
Click to expand...
Everything here is one of the big players. Coincidentally, they're all owned by the shekel-grabbers or the "ur computor haz vairus" individuals, and... China? The East India trade company and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.

Anyway, stay away from centralized sites like that. The issue is that no one uses what I'm talking about here, but this place is technically one of them. You barely ever find more websites nowadays, so much that you didn't mention more than 10 in the OP.
For all that is good in life, don't use Xitter, plebbit, or zoomer tok. 4channel (now only 4chan) was also ruined beyond recognition. I go there every once a month or so, and 99% of the time I get mildly upset at the amount of garbage threads, and eventually go "it really is that bad huh", then close window.

Also, thank the soy webdevs and soulless corporations for working in conjunction to create the most abominable javascript filled garbage that has ever touched hardware. This in turn forces a downward spiral of "UPGRADE BRUH JUS UPGRADE BRO" because normal hardware can't run bloated websites and apps. The corporations will always reject minimalist design and push for trash. You can barely reason with them as a webdev, and it encourages all of this. It is so goyed man, it's unreal.
 
The Internet was ruined by facebook, which pulled people off particular forums and websites and second the smartphone, which made facebook directly accessible everywhere. These two brought masses of females into the web and it's women who actually killed off the internet. Noughties internet lacked easy tools for women to feed their ego. Instagram is the single worst website on earth and it eventually spawned even worse Onlyfans.

If we were to repair the internet we would have to make it geeky again. Women are not geeks. You have to control what females do, if you allow them en masse into some sphere you have to put rules in place so that they won't be able to do whatever they want, otherwise it always turns into egoistic beauty pageant.
 
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To me what has happened to the Internet is what has happened to modern life.

It's all so professional, all so corporate, all so generic, all so obvious. All so boring.

The one thing that I do find good (apart from this forum and the other one I use) is YouTube. I think it's extraordinary that you can watch channels whenever you want about your specific interests. It means that you just consume that and not the rest of the msm nonsense.

In the old days if you wanted to see any specific thing in TV you had to wait until it was scheduled or maybe record it. That is a positive.
 
mountainaire said:
The smartphone ruined the internet.
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It was a number of things. High on the list were the smart phone and Facebook. I think a lot of people would agree there was a "golden age" of the Internet: a case could be made of anywhere between the late 90s to the late 00s. I'd say it fell somewhere in the middle.

Two big things stand out between the Internet then vs today: 1) the Internet today is consolidated and censored. And 2) anonymity is heavily discouraged. Being on the Internet was like living in a digital wild west; today it's a digital metropolis.

I miss a lot of things about the digital wild west. It was awesome. The other way to look at it, though, is it didn't offer a lot of meaningful tools for daily life. Now we have ways to communicate much faster and better. The Internet is less exciting and fun, but far more helpful. The trouble is, kind of like the wheat and the tares parable, where the wheat of those tools grew, so too did the tares. You have to stay on top of your computer and phone constantly and pay a bunch of money to keep the tares at bay. Heck, most of us are addicted to the tares. That could be something very harmful like porn, but usually it's just distractions like games, lame youtube videos, social media. It's hard to rise above it, remain focused and just use the best things the Internet does offer. We allow ourselves to get taken it by the tares.

As a few mentioned, the Internet as we knew it isn't going back. All we can do is make a decision. Either we continue to try to navigate this digital metropolis (that would be being IN the world but not OF the world), or we admit that, for us, it's too much temptation/distraction, and go the monk route. There is certainly also Christian precedent for this as well, like an alcoholic realizing he must abstain. I definitely am in the former group, but it's possible that down the road I call it quits with this digital sprawl.

Either way, I am glad this thread exists. I like to look back from time to time at the old Internet. It's like remembering a friend who passed on. Great times were had. Maybe we will see the old Internet again in Heaven 😛
 
Joost said:
This is mostly a rant,


I’m amused on how internet these days turned to a centralized pile of garbage.
Everyone is trying to sell you something. The internet is a big Ad.

Amazon with its cheap low-quality products with fake 5-stars reviews.

Influencers shilling garbage for corporations or even governments (South Park made an episode about them recently called “South Park - Not Suitable for Children”.

Facebook/Instagram filled with Thirst Traps. I have a Facebook dummy account I use to follow 2 job groups; I don’t even have the app installed (I use a browser to avoid ads) and the Reels/suggestions have girls sexualizing themselves and using titles in the video pointing to their OnlyFans (“Her OF is free!). I tried once clicking on “showing me less” or block such crap and it doesn’t matter. Facebook keeps pushing it.

TikTok and Snapchat might be the same. Girls sexualizing themselves, targeting lone men.

Webpages were you could find answers are now written by AI. Want to learn how to write a resume or cook a vegetable? Here’s 3-pages “answer” with a bunch of filler content that might or may not give you the answer.

Search: Google and DuckDuckGo are censoring pages. If you look for news, only from MSM.

Reddit: same crap. Yesterday I checked their website and 15 out of the 50 trending topics were about Trump (in a negative way obviously).

YouTube? That’s the new MTV. I would be depressed if I had kids spending time watching YouTube trending videos.

News? Even right-wing websites have clickbait or rage-bait content.

Apps? Now everything is subscription.

Games? Freemium.

TV shows and movies? Woke garbage 99% of the time.


I posted a thread about becoming a programmer but I see it’ll be a great mistake to spend more time in front of a computer. We’re in the information era. You can get information about everything mostly. But most of the time…it’s garbage.
Click to expand...
You are so right.

I remember scouring Geocities pages on random subjects, just passionate people that wrote something.

These type of sites:

Pages are written for SEO, filler content. Mostly everyone is selling something, political, commercial.
Makes me feel sick going through your list, but it's right. It also seems to have gotten harder to find what I look for.

Google is very censored. Nowadays I use Yandex a lot, which is just less censored on the western content. And I already hate ChatGPT and Gemini, these models are the same crap.

I also noticed that the torrent space is almost dead, making it impossible to find some old movies not on netflix.

Maybe it's a calling for us to take more distance from the worsening online world. Maybe it's not a healthy thing to spend more than an hour behind a screen per day in whatever form.

All that developed is meant to hijack us in some way.
 
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