Yet Another Cycling Forum
Off Topic => The Pub => Topic started by: rogerzilla on 03 August, 2023, 10:50:40 am
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Paywalls.
Anti-adblocker techniques.
Ceaseless ads if you can't use an adblocker (e.g. YouTube on TV)
Constant begging from content creators who think they're good enough to give up the day job (very few are).
The Facebookisation of everything, taking it offline for refuseniks.
I almost yearn for the days when you only had to worry about pop-ups and flashing banner ads.
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No, it's not just you...
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I use a VPN routinely these days, which helps some. Google are however evil shits and keep throwing up a verify app when I’m on a UK port, and refuses to work if I’m on a foreign port, so I use yahoo instead. So just ads on YouTube to put up with, which I avoid where possible by using alternative ad free platforms that some of my fav content providers use.
Still, it’s a lot of work.
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Farcebok has a setting for shitvertisers for them to specify a geographical radius for people they want to spam. Problem is, it doesn’t work. I and countless others are heartily fed up with getting spammed by businesses from the opposite end of the country, while the shitvertisers really ought to get together, storm Meta's HQ and demand their money back. Or start shooting hostages.
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Facebook's sinister data mining was good enough for them to email me at an address which I never gave them, yet stupid enough to spam my timeline with bizarrely irrelevant ads - donkey rescue and religious cults.
I'm permanently off there now. I miss the Moulton group, as that's the only active online community for the bikes (the MBC forum is just tumbleweed) but it's worth it not to have Zuckerbot going through my pants draw.
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Definitely noticed this. I'm guessing that the endless promise of attracting users today for the promise of profits tomorrow is no longer good enough for investors. They actually need to generate revenue today.
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Telly becoming unwatchable and radio unlistenable too.
The danger is that when someone realises that advertising puts people off things instead of wanting to purchase, then society may collapse!…
P.s. sorry, I think I accidentally just reported Rogers post to admin, as my phone is doing random clicks… anybody know how to recall it?
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Nope. See also
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/enshittification which refers to https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys
Ob. Grauniad link on same topic.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/mar/11/users-advertisers-we-are-all-trapped-in-the-enshittification-of-the-internet
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My main gripe with the internet - and Facebook in particular - is that too many web developers assume that everybody has a device which can cope with the browser being made to run a metric fuckton of scripts all at once, and a fast enough connection to handle all the bandwidth-nomming stuff on a page.
There appears to be no incentive to write code that makes efficient use of resources at the user end.
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Can I add the creeping assumption that everyone is accessing it via a mobile phone or fondleslab, rather than a real computer.
We're starting to get to the point where websites are less functional than their equivalent app. Note that Windows is trying to run Android apps, and that OSX is slowly turning into IOS, as a result. Also, everything's a (vertical) video now.
Meanwhile, extra loud for those at the back: Discord is not documentation.
(When they come to power, the Democratic Ruthless Bastards Party will no doubt be reëducating Discord for unilaterally redefining the meaning of 'server')
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Ah yes. I'd forgotten how Google search has deteriorated into a marketing tool. Search results are even worse on the mobile site, where it blithely ignores keywords on the assumption that an easily-led underclass accesses the Internet on a phone.
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P.s. sorry, I think I accidentally just reported Rogers post to admin, as my phone is doing random clicks… anybody know how to recall it?
Oh dear. But Roger is admin. This means the whole YACF shuts down while Roger investigates his own alleged misdeeds in a mobius loop of catch 22 situations.
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I don't want a video of how to make it, I just want a recipe. Is that so fecking difficult? Clearly yes, I have to scroll through paragraph after paragraph of dross and photos and pop up videos to get to the list of ingredients. After I've painstakingly removed all the cookie agreements.
I don't watch youtube, mostly as it is inhabited by people who shouldn't have given up the day job. I loathe amateurism in entertainment, which is why I struggle with most of Arrivee's content. People are rarely as clever or funny as they think they are (looks in mirror. Damn). Mr Smith has a lower bar and pays for it to be ad-free.
I don't really resent paying for content, as we all know, if you pay peanuts you get monkeys. Anything free comes at some other cost- enshitification is just the current currency.
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Not to mention search results serving up the same product 57 zillion times FROM THE SAME VENDOR. I want to see options and alternatives, not the same fucking item from the same Tosser who uses the same suspects as couriers.
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Can I add the creeping assumption that everyone is accessing it via a mobile phone or fondleslab, rather than a real computer.
Threads. Not only not fit for the desktop but inaccessible from the desktop. And the laptop. Sort it out, Zuckerbot, u muppet >:(
(When they come to power, the Democratic Ruthless Bastards Party will no doubt be reëducating Discord for unilaterally redefining the meaning of 'server')
No, we’re just going to shut Discord down, blow up their offices, use the rubble to make an artificial reef for the fishies, erect solar panels on the site (with Discord's former employees tasked with keeping it free from birb poos) and make people use a tool where it’s actually possible to Find Stuff.
The people behind Reach's multifarious webshites will, however, be summarily shot to DETH. You can just tell that reëducation won’t work for some people.
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I use a VPN and my beef is with Cloudfare and similar content delivery networks. Any site that uses them, for example, Camelcamelcamel.com, means I cannot visit their website without disabling the VPN. This even occurred to my own website which is hosted on a british based server, the purpose of which is to host photos of items I sell on ebay. Even my webhost is now preventing users of vpns from viewing the photos in my ebay listings. That feature should be my choice whether to enable it or not. I don't care how people are using the internet but I do want them to view my photos. Pain in the arse.
Similarly Google is very anti-vpn but at least there are alternative search engines such as duckduckgo.com, Presearch and Startpage who don't seem to care.....yet.
Conversely to some here I never watch television or listen to radio. Everything I watch is online and I can't remember when I last logged into iPlayer which is the only terrestrial service provided online that I used. I find there's a lot of very useful content on Youtube but it is Google still. There are alternative means of accessing Youtube content which are in many ways better than the web browser experience. Yes they eliminate providing revenue to the content creators but many of those also use alternative channels such as their own websites or streaming sites, e.g. Rumble.com, and for those who repeatedly provide useful, to me, content then I donate directly.
Facebook, Meta, Twitter, TickTock I stay away from so am unaffected by their authoritative measures against privacy advocates. I am a consumer of Reddit though but again there are, for now at least, alternative means to view Reddit hosted content. Once the Reddit API is blocked to third party apps then I'll just stop using it. It's based on user generated content and if less users use it then it will die a gradual death. I guess that is what is happening to Facebook and why Meta is now being offered up. To me it's tarnished by it's links to Facebook so I'll avoid it completely.
There are always alternatives, not always as slick as the established incumbents but people will slowly learn how to find them and change their habits.
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The people behind Reach's multifarious webshites will, however, be summarily shot to DETH. You can just tell that reëducation won’t work for some people.
Recommend use of blunt bullets.
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P.s. sorry, I think I accidentally just reported Rogers post to admin, as my phone is doing random clicks… anybody know how to recall it?
Oh dear. But Roger is admin. This means the whole YACF shuts down while Roger investigates his own alleged misdeeds in a mobius loop of catch 22 situations.
There's an xkcd for that. (https://xkcd.com/838/) It turns out that it all gets reported to Wowbagger.
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P.s. sorry, I think I accidentally just reported Rogers post to admin, as my phone is doing random clicks… anybody know how to recall it?
Oh dear. But Roger is admin. This means the whole YACF shuts down while Roger investigates his own alleged misdeeds in a mobius loop of catch 22 situations.
There's an xkcd for that. (https://xkcd.com/838/) It turns out that it all gets reported to Wowbagger.
;D
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:D :D :D :D :D
🎅🎅🎅🎅🎅
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Can I add the fuckers that program the Back button on the borwser to not go anywhere (or just the home page)
What is the point of that?
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Can I add the fuckers that program the Back button on the borwser to not go anywhere (or just the home page)
Oh yes. Chrome on my shitlist, because a few versions ago it decided that a left nudge of the scrollwheel - previously used for horizontal scrolling - would now be interpreted as a 'back' command. This is not configurable in settings, and the right nudge performs the usual scroll action.
I still regularly find myself scrolling right through the Met Office forecast using the mouse, then inadvertently jumping to whatever site was previously in that tab because my muscle-memory tried to scroll left.
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Can I add the fuckers that program the Back button on the borwser to not go anywhere (or just the home page)
What is the point of that?
To keep you on their webshite. A sure sign of a company you do not want to do business with.
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This brings to mind a thought I was having the other day.
Chrome
I’ve never used it, basically becasue Google. And because I stopped worrying about using a third party browser when we went Apple, and now just use Safari as a good enough browser. Though if I was still using windoz on my work pcI would surely have looked for something to replace that awful Edge win10 shipped with.
Should I be using it? Is it any good as a browser? Or is it as bad as I think it is common as it does from Google.
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I've always assumed
1. It's a data-gathering trojan
2. It won't block ads Google wants you to see
YouTube is rather good with an adblocker - atrocious without one. For this reason, uninstall the YouTube app. It always shows ads!
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Chrome is the new IE6
It *was* a good browser, but like everything else, it's become enshittified.
Most of the time I actually use Chromium, which is basically Chrome without the proprietary Google stuff. Occasionally you find something (MS Teams springs to mind) that doesn't work in Chromium or Firefox, at which point I start up actual Chrome.
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Fruitarians will go their own way and good luck to them, but to minimize the shit-level to something just about bearable I use one of Opera, Brave, Chromium or Firefox (roughly in that order of precedence and all available for *nix/windows) with javascript switched off.
Opera is preferred because I can switch JS back on (and back off) with minimal fuss if I *absolutely* can't avoid it (attachments in web e-mail and a couple of image hosting sites) whereas it's more difficult to kill it in the others. Firefox seems to have gone out of its way to make it impossible to switch JS off hence its relegation to the hindmost tit.
A site that won't work at all without JS is an indicator to me of one that has reached terminal enshittification and is one I will never visit again. Ditto those that refuse to play because ad. blocking is switched on.
It'll never happen, but wouldn't it be lovely if we all just said, "Fuck you" to all these unusable sites, stopped visiting them and then watched the owners run round like headless chickens as the ad & "clicks" revenue evaporated like morning mist. Ah well, a Luddite can dream. :)
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Is email turning into WhatsApp? I've just sent someone an email and received a reply
[name] reacted to your message:
There's nothing after the colon but there is one of those broken-image icons before the name. It's just like a "reaction" on WhatsApp, but even more useless.
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Email has, of course, been getting steadily worse since Outlook Express taught a generation of new users how not to use email, and everyone since followed their lead.
While we do occasionally get culture clashes over how email is supposed to be used (the main offenders being people who grew up using IntstaAppChat, who seem to have no sense of more formal writing[1]), but technical enshittification is a bigger problem. Embrace-extend-extinguish spam filtering tactics by the big providers mean it's both dangerously unreliable and almost impossible to use for discussion lists or (on a bad day) automated notifications. And that's before you factor in the effects of autocarrot and the sort of brevity[2] that comes from people routinely not having a real screen and keyboard.
At some point it became normal to send someone details of whatever in an email, then phone them up and leave a voicemail telling them to check their spam folder. :facepalm:
[1] And I say that with the full awareness of the irony that what I consider informal email style to be what passes for formal writing these days, outside the of legal profession.
[2] Related rant: At some point it became established that line-based communication should take place in space-wasting speech bubbles. Presumably a skeuomorphism from the days when SMS messages were expensive, to discourage you from using your SMS app as if it were an IRC client, it doesn't make a lot of sense now that your messaging app effectively *is* an IRC client.
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On the plus side, at least the mainstream internet means that people are making phone calls less.
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I have used Firefox for years. It's gradually becoming 'enshitted' in its default configuration but can become unenshitted by using something called the user.js file. There are a lot of changes to the default configuration that can be carried out to Firefox that are under the hood. For those that are curious type about:config into your address bar, press the enter key and then click on show all. A huge array of settings available to scroll through.
The user.js file allows you to customise these settings for privacy and functionality of your firefox profile. You can have separate profiles with various customised settings. You have to understand the impact of the changes or you could break your profile. Although this can easily be undone by deleting the prefs.js file which hard resets your firefox profile.
That together with the various addons makes Firefox the best web browser in my opinion. I also have it portable so the entire app can be carried from one machine to the next. With a little work it will work on both linux and windows using the same portable install aswell as between virtual machine and host machine which is pretty cool. Best and most powerful addon for Firefox is Noscript. Certainly worth understanding how to use that.
Another thing I like about Firefox is that when you 'Quit' in Android it can actually clear everything depending on your settings. On the desktop it can too but you can also clear cache, history and everything else by tapping ctrl, up arrow and del.
I'm not going to claim for one moment that it's a simple task to set up your own user.js file but I'm trying to offer hope to those out of you who may be thinking there's no alternatives and are feeling less empowered.
There are Firefox derivatives that offer more privacy out of the box. On Android 'Mull' being an example and on desktop Linux, maybe Windows too; 'Falkon' are two that I'd recommend.
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Paywalls.
Anti-adblocker techniques.
Ceaseless ads if you can't use an adblocker (e.g. YouTube on TV)
Constant begging from content creators who think they're good enough to give up the day job (very few are).
The Facebookisation of everything, taking it offline for refuseniks.
I almost yearn for the days when you only had to worry about pop-ups and flashing banner ads.
Community maintained help sites like stackoverflow at war with their own volunteers
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I love the internet. It has become the greatest pacifier of rowdy yobs on public transport as they are all staring zombie-like at their fondleslabs.
But seriously, ...
Oddly, as I read through this thread from the start I am listening to the radio via the BBC Sounds app. Radio 4 xtra tends not to have ads except for upcoming 4 xtra content so it's perfectly acceptable to me.
I have given up on Farcebook after the 2016 fiasco, have never been a twatterer (so I cannot become an eX twatterer !!!) and my LinkedIn account has not been used by me since I retired 5 1/2 years ago. I do use YouTube and have got used to ignoring the ads and can automatically hit skip now after the countdown by sheer muscle memory. The only surprise I get is when there is no skip option.
We do watch occasional television content on the big box in the corner but not even an hour a day.
The internet has become in my view just a reflection on C21 life. It is what you make of it.
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Actually, because of my routine use of a VPN, when I connect to another country, the ads on YouTube become curiosities. Seeing well known product designs with different product names, or other products you can’t buy really does gladden the heart when you know you are giving the man the bird ;D
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I don’t bother with adblockers, if sites annoy me I don’t visit them. I don’t begrudge ads, someone has to pay, but it doesn’t mean they have to annoy me. That’s my little ‘contract’ with them.
Don’t bother with much social media. It was fun for a bit, but like any fluid social group, any online group proceeds towards totalitarianism, as the purity fringe push out the middle (and interesting) voices. Not all bad, in a previous age they’d be hanging heretics and burning witches. Bless you internet.
End of the day, the internet is great, but you can go do something else.
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^ Mostly this.
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I don’t bother with adblockers, if sites annoy me I don’t visit them. I don’t begrudge ads, someone has to pay, but it doesn’t mean they have to annoy me. That’s my little ‘contract’ with them.
It's the balance though, isn't it? A few lightweight ads scattered on a site? Fair enough. Sites splattered with ads like sores on a pox-ridden sailor's face? Nah. As you said, I can and will go and do something else.
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What is not becoming less usable?
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When Google stopped caching images, the image search was essentially broken for good. Many images are on shopping or classified sites, and therefore ephemeral.
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I'm going to have a moan.
Twitter is fucked, it just shows me the same stuff on repeat for days on end. I know there's been a flight away from it but I never used to be able to keep up with the feed.
I'm clearly not grokking Mastodon, as I only see the few people I have followed, or what's on my federation (.Scot for want of a better idea). It's not even close to replicating my Twitter feed.
Thanks to those on here I got a Bluesky account but that seems mainly people moaning about Russ In Cheshire.
And I know Faceache has always been useless, but when I'm just trying to type a search term in marketplace and it seems like each letter is being individually despatched by carrier slug...
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I don't know how accurate it is, but an independent traffic site says visitors to The Daily Mash have dropped by over 30% in the last month (when they introduced a paywall after viewing something like two stories).
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Paywalls.
Anti-adblocker techniques.
Ceaseless ads if you can't use an adblocker (e.g. YouTube on TV)
Constant begging from content creators who think they're good enough to give up the day job (very few are).
The Facebookisation of everything, taking it offline for refuseniks.
I almost yearn for the days when you only had to worry about pop-ups and flashing banner ads.
Fast rewind to the start of days.
There was compuserve, and the wild west.
Compuserve worked for those of us who used it (relatively few in the UK). All tech companies had a presence that was easily found. All interests were represented in the forums. Chat was there as well. It was a service, we paid for it. In the days before effective search, you could find stuff as you could in a library.
And then there was the generation going through uni at the time (who you represent?): "Yay! the Internet is FREEEEEEEEE"
No it isn't, and never was. Someone somewhere has to pay, this day was always coming. You sowed the wind.
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I don't want a video of how to make it, I just want a recipe. Is that so fecking difficult? Clearly yes, I have to scroll through paragraph after paragraph of dross and photos and pop up videos to get to the list of ingredients. After I've painstakingly removed all the cookie agreements.
Testify!
I'm returning to recipe books.
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Paywalls.
Anti-adblocker techniques.
Ceaseless ads if you can't use an adblocker (e.g. YouTube on TV)
Constant begging from content creators who think they're good enough to give up the day job (very few are).
The Facebookisation of everything, taking it offline for refuseniks.
I almost yearn for the days when you only had to worry about pop-ups and flashing banner ads.
Fast rewind to the start of days.
There was compuserve, and the wild west.
Compuserve worked for those of us who used it (relatively few in the UK). All tech companies had a presence that was easily found. All interests were represented in the forums. Chat was there as well. It was a service, we paid for it. In the days before effective search, you could find stuff as you could in a library.
And then there was the generation going through uni at the time (who you represent?): "Yay! the Internet is FREEEEEEEEE"
No it isn't, and never was. Someone somewhere has to pay, this day was always coming. You sowed the wind.
Ah, Compuserve - "The information service you won't outgrow" . . . - I still use this bag that was a freebie from them last century
(https://i.ibb.co/6v4Y62S/compuserve-bag.jpg)
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I don't want a video of how to make it, I just want a recipe. Is that so fecking difficult? Clearly yes, I have to scroll through paragraph after paragraph of dross and photos and pop up videos to get to the list of ingredients. After I've painstakingly removed all the cookie agreements.
Testify!
I'm returning to recipe books.
My current MO is to find the recipe online, and then precis by hand to use in the kitchen.
To whit:
200gdblecrm boiled pour onto 200g choc
fold into
200g cream whipped
60gH20+60gSugar boiled to 118C drizzle onto 4 yolks while whisking
fold in
pipe into acetate lined rings and freeze min 3 hrs
That was a 15 minute video.
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I do that do, but then end up with scrappy bits of paper with no title to tell me what they are. I also prefer paper in the kitchen than screens that go to sleep and have to be awoken with a floury finger!
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aah, but in the pile of scrappy bits of paper I can remember it was:
- 1/2 piece A4 with small squares
- green felt tip on a ripped open envelope
- actually written in hte original notebook
- my mum's handwriting on a both sides of blank postcard
- etc (includes the odd stupormarket recipe card and chopped out newspaper article)
which is why I still haven't gotten around to making a neat version as I'd never find anything once they were all uniform ink and paper
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I do that do, but then end up with scrappy bits of paper with no title to tell me what they are. I also prefer paper in the kitchen than screens that go to sleep and have to be awoken with a floury finger!
The trick is to have a screen in the kitchen that stays awake when there's someone in the kitchen.
Wipe-clean keyboards are horrible, thobut. We've decided to use whatever hand-me-down ones fit neatly on top of the microwave, and any accumulated crud that can't be removed with a) a damp cloth or b) compressed air is pointedly ignored, as attempts at more thorough cleaning tend to be terminal.
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SO has an app that scrapes recipes from URLs without you having to wade through the crap. I doubt it works on videos.
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The Paprika app works well. There are iOS and MacOS versions and they sync.
Wander off to make internet kedgeree with the smoked haddock he bought this morning from the fish van.
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The Paprika app works well. There are iOS and MacOS versions and they sync.
Wander off to make internet kedgeree with the smoked haddock he bought this morning from the fish van.
Ah, Kedgeree, indexed under "B" in Delia's opus - for "Buttery Kedgeree" of course.
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Paywalls.
Anti-adblocker techniques.
Ceaseless ads if you can't use an adblocker (e.g. YouTube on TV)
Constant begging from content creators who think they're good enough to give up the day job (very few are).
The Facebookisation of everything, taking it offline for refuseniks.
I almost yearn for the days when you only had to worry about pop-ups and flashing banner ads.
Fast rewind to the start of days.
There was compuserve, and the wild west.
Compuserve worked for those of us who used it (relatively few in the UK). All tech companies had a presence that was easily found. All interests were represented in the forums. Chat was there as well. It was a service, we paid for it. In the days before effective search, you could find stuff as you could in a library.
And then there was the generation going through uni at the time (who you represent?): "Yay! the Internet is FREEEEEEEEE"
No it isn't, and never was. Someone somewhere has to pay, this day was always coming. You sowed the wind.
There's a difference between walled gardens, the open internet, and you-are-the-product advertising-funded services.
Compuserv and AOL were walled-gardens you paid for. Facebook is a walled garden you fund by being the product.
The open internet can go either way. You can use gmail, or you can pay for email hosting. You can clog up your browser with Reach shitverts, or you can subscribe to the Torygraph.
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stupormarket
Every time I read or hear this word, I remain optimistic about the human race.
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I have paprika as my online recipe book and some bookmarks for ones which will not work with paprika.
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I used to collect those dial-up cds last century. I have a whole stack of them somewhere in the loft. Lots of different providers of which AOL were the most aggressive. I just tried to get the odd ones I didn’t expect to find.
Doubt if they work now.
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I used to collect those dial-up cds last century. I have a whole stack of them somewhere in the loft. Lots of different providers of which AOL were the most aggressive. I just tried to get the odd ones I didn’t expect to find.
Doubt if they work now.
I have 3 or 4 "coasters" on my desk each made from 3 freebie CDs glued together - one is the original Windows 95 from the cover of Computer Shopper mag - and another is a promo from AT&T when I worked there in 1992.
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When I explained AOL CDs to CrinklyCub some years ago, I remarked that someone famously made a sofa out of them. The look of disbelief after the pause for some mental arithmetic was hilarious.
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I collected cover CDs and the like for many years, but eventually Dr B’s sensible rubbed off and I ditched the lot. And there were a LOT. I also remember when BT first rolled out its consumer internet CD, principally becuase I was one of 4 people who were to provided 24/7 second line supplier to the product. We had to go and sit with the first line help desk one week in four, which given its location at Colindale, was a shit. Trying to educate the help desk bods how to question customers to identify what family of modem they had so the first line could talk the customer through the setting up (and thus save us the trouble) was type II fun and was an interesting exercise in illogical thinking.
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My first personal* email address was fullname@btinternet.com in 199? on dial up , I don't think I ever had to call Beardy on the helpdesk, we had decent expertise in the Liverpool office. When ADSL took off, BT were a bit slow off the mark in my area so I defected to Pipex, again fullname@pipex.com. When BT got around to offering broadband free of charge to staff I moved back, only to find I was now fullname265@btinternet.com.
*I once had a Telecom Gold address, as part of my teams job was pushing sales for it in the local area, when we were Liverpool District. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecom_Gold
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Paywalls.
Anti-adblocker techniques.
Ceaseless ads if you can't use an adblocker (e.g. YouTube on TV)
Constant begging from content creators who think they're good enough to give up the day job (very few are).
The Facebookisation of everything, taking it offline for refuseniks.
I almost yearn for the days when you only had to worry about pop-ups and flashing banner ads.
Fast rewind to the start of days.
There was compuserve, and the wild west.
Compuserve worked for those of us who used it (relatively few in the UK). All tech companies had a presence that was easily found. All interests were represented in the forums. Chat was there as well. It was a service, we paid for it. In the days before effective search, you could find stuff as you could in a library.
And then there was the generation going through uni at the time (who you represent?): "Yay! the Internet is FREEEEEEEEE"
No it isn't, and never was. Someone somewhere has to pay, this day was always coming. You sowed the wind.
I remember a techie genius, back in the low noughties, who could do wizardry with various sorts of software & hardwar/software interfaces, who was rather militant about that.
When I asked hm how he thought the cables, servers, etc. needed for it it to function shoul be financed, he just got a stubborn look & said "It should be free". Press the point & he got angry.
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Subscription, of some kind, vs shitverts or/and "All your base are belong to us"
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I think a good part of my career has been spent explaining why things aren’t free to people. Strangely they never seem keen to work for free.
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I resent paying to be advertised to.
Thankfully itv and c4 have more than enough content funded through advertising that I don't feel the need to buy any of
Advertising rate streaming services
Sky tv
Youtube
Or even a TV license
On the plus side of adverts they're long enough to do various human tasks such as emptying bladder or adding content to glass that will form next bladder emptying.
Is the Internet for anything other than delivery of video content, I'm, the occasional email and ride with gps now?
The www is basically unusable.
Sent from my IV2201 using Tapatalk
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Strangely they never seem keen to work for free.
Apart from the authors of a substantial portion of the software that makes the internet function, of course.
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That’s not even vaguely true.
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If you think the internet is becoming less usable, check out what it could be like:
A tool of political control’: how India became the world leader in internet blackouts
(https://amp.theguardian.com/world/2023/sep/25/a-tool-of-political-control-how-india-became-the-world-leader-in-internet-blackouts)
I hope dishy Rishi doesn’t get to hear about it and get ideas.
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That’s not even vaguely true.
I think it is true. The majority of web servers are running Linux, which itself started as a hobbyist project. Many of the packages that constitute their operating systems have, historically, being authored by hobbyists.
The Internet building blocks that started out as unfunded side projects of academics and software developers are too numerous to even list. Also to consider, are the rampant exploitation of said projects, where-by licenses have been breached to incorporate them into other products or, the cloud giants have spun up 'as a service offerings' without recompense to the authors/projects.
I've no objection to the 'Internet' not being free, as in beer. It's important it remains free, as in speech. Built on open standards, and largely relying on FLOSS software.
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The Internet golden age is definitely over.
- People are less inclined to go to the trouble hosting their own content - largely for reasons of cost/convenience. Instead they have switched to platforms that turn both the content producers and consumers into products.
- So much more content has shifted to video - usually hosted on YouTube - which I find a lot harder to consume (unless it's for entertainment) and of course, is much harder to index in order to find in the first place.
- Search engines increasingly prioritise the wrong types of results - commercial sites always come ahead of forum posts, for instance.
- Too many giant walled gardens which cannot be indexed by web crawlers (relates to the first point)
- All potential for the Internet to be a tool for mass democratisation has now been fully squandered
- Using a VPN (alongside other tools and techniques) to get some level of privacy makes an increasing number of sites (usually ones that I have to begrudgingly interact with) unusable
- An unfortunate by-product of the shift on-line is that it's next to impossible to find companies you can interact with on the phone, when the need to speak to a human being arises
TL;DR Searching for anything is 99% less useful than it was
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It's important it remains free, as in speech.
Seconded.
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That’s not even vaguely true.
I think it is true. The majority of web servers are running Linux, which itself started as a hobbyist project. Many of the packages that constitute their operating systems have, historically, being authored by hobbyists.
The Internet building blocks that started out as unfunded side projects of academics and software developers are too numerous to even list. Also to consider, are the rampant exploitation of said projects, where-by licenses have been breached to incorporate them into other products or, the cloud giants have spun up 'as a service offerings' without recompense to the authors/projects.
I've no objection to the 'Internet' not being free, as in beer. It's important it remains free, as in speech. Built on open standards, and largely relying on FLOSS software.
'Hobbyists'?
Sorry, but that is nonsense.
Nearly all of the fundamental building blocks were actually created by scientists, or engineers working in major corporations. Many of those engineers were paid to work on the open source software (and this includes Linux of course).
Linux started as private project, but even before version 0 came out it had major contributions from people who did this stuff as part of their job.
A lot comes from companies like IBM.
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The Internet golden age is definitely over.
- People are less inclined to go to the trouble hosting their own content - largely for reasons of cost/convenience. Instead they have switched to platforms that turn both the content producers and consumers into products.
Could someone, or preferably several someones, explain what is actually meant by phrases like this and "If you're not paying for it, you're the product"?
I think what is meant is that your data is harvested and sold, ads are targetted at you, and your presence is generally monetized in numerous ways by numerous people/organizations. But that's not really being a product, that's being a consumer.
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The Internet golden age is definitely over.
- People are less inclined to go to the trouble hosting their own content - largely for reasons of cost/convenience. Instead they have switched to platforms that turn both the content producers and consumers into products.
Could someone, or preferably several someones, explain what is actually meant by phrases like this and "If you're not paying for it, you're the product"?
I think what is meant is that your data is harvested and sold, ads are targetted at you, and your presence is generally monetized in numerous ways by numerous people/organizations. But that's not really being a product, that's being a consumer.
No, that's not being a consumer. The data collected ("Your Electronic Life") is harvested, much in the way of crops, and that is sold as a product to those who want to buy it to sell stuff to the right people. Your perspective determines if you think this is a good or bad thing, but you (that data anyhow) are very much a product. It is what is produced as a result of the content provider's efforts.
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It is what is produced as a result of the content platform provider's efforts.
People who create content and then upload or share it on many platforms, grant the platform provider (and often their parent company and/or subsidiaries) an unequivocal license to use that content as they see fit. Zoom back pedalled on this, but they were amending their privacy statements in order to use calls for AI training. It is an example of how some platforms go beyond harvesting data (for instance, including all your contacts and even your call logs, from your phone when you run an app on a smart phone) and selling it to data brokers. There are some organisations actually looking to model and using AI, even replicate, human behaviour. This is the ultimate end goal for some tech giants and more nefarious organisations. I don't think we are too far away from seeing, to some degree, the demise of content creators.
There's already evidence out in the ether, showing how data has been harvested and processed in order to generate and effectively target messaging in political campaigns. This enables political parties or groups with deep enough pockets to get their desired result at the polls.
At an individual level, there are concerns and possible harms that arise out of mass data collection. At a societal level, it can mean the death* of true democracy.
*should such a thing have ever existed.
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There's already evidence out in the ether, showing how data has been harvested and processed in order to generate and effectively target messaging in political campaigns. This enables political parties or groups with deep enough pockets to get their desired result at the polls.
At an individual level, there are concerns and possible harms that arise out of mass data collection. At a societal level, it can mean the death* of true democracy.
*should such a thing have ever existed.
Actually what you are describing is a feedback loop. Y'know, you might not like it (and I don't either) but it could be described as true democracy, you just have to convince the people what they want is what they want. Democracy has never and can never exist in a vacuum, a good orator and poor policy maker has always won more votes than a poor orator and good policy maker. Stinks, doesn't it?
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Put it this way: YouTube wants £11.99/month to spare us from shitverts, which are now so numerous and annoying that their only purpose seems to be to force people towards the subscription. The ads make me shout "f**k off" and "c**t" at the TV a lot and would not persuade me to buy a product any more than a kick in the nads would persuade me.
YouTube pays nothing for its content; it piggybacks on others' creativity (or lack thereof).
That's how the modern internet works.
There are more egregious examples: Amazon Prime is about to start running ads unless you pay them even more protection money.
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....The ads make me shout "f**k off" and "c**t" at the TV a lot and would not persuade me to buy a product any more than a kick in the nads would persuade me.....
Funny that's what most people say, and yet businesses still advertise because, you know what? it mostly works even when you hate it.
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....The ads make me shout "f**k off" and "c**t" at the TV a lot and would not persuade me to buy a product any more than a kick in the nads would persuade me.....
Funny that's what most people say, and yet businesses still advertise because, you know what? it mostly works even when you hate it.
For values of 'works' that are biased towards the metrics by which marketing people use to assess the efficacy of their shitverts than actual sales. Goodhart's law applies here as much as it does everywhere else. It being easy to count the number of clicks on a given shitvert, or to ask people to name 5 brands of deodorant, or count the number of in-sewer-ants policies with a Free! cuddly meerkat[1] that have been signed up for, or whatever, but relatively hard to determine that your shitvert is actually leading to those additional sales.
Which is presumably why shitverts with good gags unrelated to the product, or that fill your BRANES with earworms or have you swearing at the telly are so popular. Even if you vow never to buy $product because of an annoying shitvert, you're thinking and talking about about $product[2].
File under 'modern life is rubbish'.
[1] Spilchucker wants to change that to 'marketeer'.
[2] Case in point: I'd never heard of Pelican bieks until they were mentioned by P@nd3m1c Pr0duckt10nz™®
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There's already evidence out in the ether, showing how data has been harvested and processed in order to generate and effectively target messaging in political campaigns. This enables political parties or groups with deep enough pockets to get their desired result at the polls.
At an individual level, there are concerns and possible harms that arise out of mass data collection. At a societal level, it can mean the death* of true democracy.
*should such a thing have ever existed.
Actually what you are describing is a feedback loop. Y'know, you might not like it (and I don't either) but it could be described as true democracy, you just have to convince the people what they want is what they want. Democracy has never and can never exist in a vacuum, a good orator and poor policy maker has always won more votes than a poor orator and good policy maker. Stinks, doesn't it?
If the feedback loop was in fact producing policies that mattered to voters, I would agree with you.
The emphasis however, is on messaging. And it's putting that message across to those who, according to the data, can be persuated to vote or change their vote.
This is different to developing a policy based on voter data, putting it into a manifesto and publicising that policy to the electorate.
It's nuanced but it's pivotal.
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YouTube pays nothing for its content; it piggybacks on others' creativity (or lack thereof).
YouTube pays quite a lot of money to people who upload videos, at least those large enough to qualify. I don’t think any of the other platforms do.
If you squint hard enough and ignore the nazis it’s almost a healthy business model.
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The other platforms do too. Tiktok, insta, facebook, all pay out if your milkshake brings enough boys to the yard.
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There's already evidence out in the ether, showing how data has been harvested and processed in order to generate and effectively target messaging in political campaigns. This enables political parties or groups with deep enough pockets to get their desired result at the polls.
At an individual level, there are concerns and possible harms that arise out of mass data collection. At a societal level, it can mean the death* of true democracy.
*should such a thing have ever existed.
Actually what you are describing is a feedback loop. Y'know, you might not like it (and I don't either) but it could be described as true democracy, you just have to convince the people what they want is what they want. Democracy has never and can never exist in a vacuum, a good orator and poor policy maker has always won more votes than a poor orator and good policy maker. Stinks, doesn't it?
If the feedback loop was in fact producing policies that mattered to voters, I would agree with you.
The emphasis however, is on messaging. And it's putting that message across to those who, according to the data, can be persuated to vote or change their vote.
This is different to developing a policy based on voter data, putting it into a manifesto and publicising that policy to the electorate.
It's nuanced but it's pivotal.
So only valid messaging is allowed, and people unable to tell the difference should therefore not be allowed to vote. Oops. Or maybe the people wielding that influence should not be allowed to do that. That feels the most reasonable doesn't it? After all we that way could ban Murdoch from doing what he does. I'd like to, as well, but actually that completely undermines free society and speech more than Murdoch. Who sits in judgement? Who is allowed to lobby? We may hate the way that it has turned out, but it is us and our society that got us here.
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You are conflating different things. It's very simple.
1. Enforce existing electoral and data protection law. For example, laws around transparrency in who is funding political advertisements.
2. Ban micro-targetting of political campaign advertisements.
3. Prevent processing of personal data for political campaign advertising purposes unless individuals have expressely consented to it at the time of collection.
None of that is harmful to free society.
We may hate the way that it has turned out, but it is us and our society that got us here.
No one searching for an insurance quote would think that their data is going to be passed onto a political campaign (https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/feb/01/leave-eu-arron-banks-insurance-company-fined-data-breaches-information-commissioner-audit). No one would reasonably think that a platform built for on-line social interaction would be used to collect data for use in political advertising (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook-Cambridge_Analytica_data_scandal).
Society as a whole, is not responsible for those things. In neither case was consent sought or given.
No one asks to be lied to or deceived.
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No one would reasonably think that a platform built for on-line social interaction would be used to collect data for use in political advertising (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook-Cambridge_Analytica_data_scandal).
Objection: Facebook was built for perving at classmates (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Facebook), so the users were the product from the outset. We didn't reasonably expect it to become popular enough to be the de-facto form of online communication and authentication, and therefore a politically relevant manipulation tool.
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No one would reasonably think that a platform built for on-line social interaction would be used to collect data for use in political advertising (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook-Cambridge_Analytica_data_scandal).
Objection: Facebook was built for perving at classmates (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Facebook), so the users were the product from the outset. We didn't reasonably expect it to become popular enough to be the de-facto form of online communication and authentication, and therefore a politically relevant manipulation tool.
Should everyone signing up to Facebook be reasonably expected to know that? The only people I'd even half expect to know that are people who work in the technology industry.
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No one would reasonably think that a platform built for on-line social interaction would be used to collect data for use in political advertising (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook-Cambridge_Analytica_data_scandal).
Objection: Facebook was built for perving at classmates (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Facebook), so the users were the product from the outset. We didn't reasonably expect it to become popular enough to be the de-facto form of online communication and authentication, and therefore a politically relevant manipulation tool.
Should everyone signing up to Facebook be reasonably expected to know that? The only people I'd even half expect to know that are people who work in the technology industry.
Many users of Facebook don't actually know there is an Internet.
Also many users of Facebook don't know that a significant proportion of the population aren't on Facebook.
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No one would reasonably think that a platform built for on-line social interaction would be used to collect data for use in political advertising (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook-Cambridge_Analytica_data_scandal).
Objection: Facebook was built for perving at classmates (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Facebook), so the users were the product from the outset. We didn't reasonably expect it to become popular enough to be the de-facto form of online communication and authentication, and therefore a politically relevant manipulation tool.
A certain Big Four accountancy firm had to let some of its male employees go after it emerged they were playing a game called "Beat the *****" (name omitted to protect the victim) whereby all new female starters' photos on the corporate intranet were compared against ***** for attractiveness, ***** being considered the height of female beauty at this point early in the millennium. So presumably a pixie-faced brunette.
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....The ads make me shout "f**k off" and "c**t" at the TV a lot and would not persuade me to buy a product any more than a kick in the nads would persuade me.....
Funny that's what most people say, and yet businesses still advertise because, you know what? it mostly works even when you hate it.
ISTR that a certain brand was so confident that it would always be first in the publics' mind when making a choice that they stopped advertising. Maybe it was Parker pens, maybe not, I can't recall.
Anyway they soon had to resume advertising when sales hit the floor.
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No one would reasonably think that a platform built for on-line social interaction would be used to collect data for use in political advertising (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook-Cambridge_Analytica_data_scandal).
Objection: Facebook was built for perving at classmates (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Facebook), so the users were the product from the outset. We didn't reasonably expect it to become popular enough to be the de-facto form of online communication and authentication, and therefore a politically relevant manipulation tool.
Should everyone signing up to Facebook be reasonably expected to know that? The only people I'd even half expect to know that are people who work in the technology industry.
That depends how big a fan they are of David Fincher films.
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Fair point. I remember when it was first available to random BRITONS, it was pitched as a more functional free-as-in-beer version of Bullies Reunited (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friends_Reunited) (remember that?), which was enough to make me wary of it from the outset. Nothing I've seen since has improved my impression of it, but I accept that if you were later to the party (or less internet-savvy) it probably came across as a thing for organising bike rides or sharing photos of the grandchildren or selling things with your phone or whatever. Which is the crux of the problem, of course. Users are perfectly happy to share other people's data in exchange for dancing pigs.
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No one would reasonably think that a platform built for on-line social interaction would be used to collect data for use in political advertising (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook-Cambridge_Analytica_data_scandal).
Objection: Facebook was built for perving at classmates (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Facebook), so the users were the product from the outset. We didn't reasonably expect it to become popular enough to be the de-facto form of online communication and authentication, and therefore a politically relevant manipulation tool.
Facebook was inspired by bedroom startup last century called 'ClassMates' in the US. It was follwed by British 'Friends Reunited'. From what I remember, they were micro examples of all the evils that social media would soon bring upon us in macro form. We were warned and Zuckerberg knew exactly what he was doing.
Admittedly I have an FB account - I had to open it to get money back from a dodgy online seller. It has been dormant ever since.
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Friends Reunited (long defunct, killed off by Faecebook) mainly seemed to be a means for people to hook up with old flames and was, by all accounts, a bit of a marriage-wrecker.
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Friends Reunited (long defunct, killed off by Faecebook) mainly seemed to be a means for people to hook up with old flames and was, by all accounts, a bit of a marriage-wrecker.
It was good for a moment to look up all the people you were at school with and what they were doing now, which was broadly nothing interesting*, and remember why you didn't much like them. Oh and for ex-girlfriends/boyfriends who dumped you, just to confirm how bad their decision was (there is no guarantee however they didn't get off with a svelte and sexy, bazillionaire and are now floating through their middle years on a luxury yacht in the Caribbean while you're doing night shifts in a Swindon Tesco).
*the school weirdo was sent down for molesting a sheep, and the school headcase for murder x 3, neither of which was much of a surprise.
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The Internet golden age is definitely over.
- People are less inclined to go to the trouble hosting their own content - largely for reasons of cost/convenience. Instead they have switched to platforms that turn both the content producers and consumers into products.
Could someone, or preferably several someones, explain what is actually meant by phrases like this and "If you're not paying for it, you're the product"?
I think what is meant is that your data is harvested and sold, ads are targetted at you, and your presence is generally monetized in numerous ways by numerous people/organizations. But that's not really being a product, that's being a consumer.
No, that's not being a consumer. The data collected ("Your Electronic Life") is harvested, much in the way of crops, and that is sold as a product to those who want to buy it to sell stuff to the right people. Your perspective determines if you think this is a good or bad thing, but you (that data anyhow) are very much a product. It is what is produced as a result of the content provider's efforts.
Good explanation, thanks. It doesn't quite fit with being a product though, to my mind. As you say, the data collected, and what is done with it, is the product. To follow your crops analogy, it isn't the crop (what grows) that's the product, but the wheat or potatoes or whatever that is harvested, and then the things that that becomes. And, once you've harvested your crops, you're left with an empty field; whereas after harvesting personal data, the persons still exist. The people are the providers (witting or unwitting, willing or unwilling) of the product, rather than being the product itself.
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It's not just data collection, though. It's also finely-tuned access to people so that they may be influenced (usually to buy stuff of vote for something), based on that data.
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It's not just data collection, though. It's also finely-tuned access to people so that they may be influenced (usually to buy stuff of vote for something), based on that data.
Are you thinking what we are thinking?
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The Internet golden age is definitely over.
- People are less inclined to go to the trouble hosting their own content - largely for reasons of cost/convenience. Instead they have switched to platforms that turn both the content producers and consumers into products.
Could someone, or preferably several someones, explain what is actually meant by phrases like this and "If you're not paying for it, you're the product"?
I think what is meant is that your data is harvested and sold, ads are targetted at you, and your presence is generally monetized in numerous ways by numerous people/organizations. But that's not really being a product, that's being a consumer.
No, that's not being a consumer. The data collected ("Your Electronic Life") is harvested, much in the way of crops, and that is sold as a product to those who want to buy it to sell stuff to the right people. Your perspective determines if you think this is a good or bad thing, but you (that data anyhow) are very much a product. It is what is produced as a result of the content provider's efforts.
Good explanation, thanks. It doesn't quite fit with being a product though, to my mind. As you say, the data collected, and what is done with it, is the product. To follow your crops analogy, it isn't the crop (what grows) that's the product, but the wheat or potatoes or whatever that is harvested, and then the things that that becomes. And, once you've harvested your crops, you're left with an empty field; whereas after harvesting personal data, the persons still exist. The people are the providers (witting or unwitting, willing or unwilling) of the product, rather than being the product itself.
I've come across something that answers this, accidentally, in a way that makes sense to me – perhaps thanks to the context rather than the words. Not a product as such but a commodity.
We talk about politics, culture and travel becoming globalised, but on a more fundamental level, Spivak is correct that what really flows across the planet are various forms of money and information: investments, corporations, infrastructure, server farms and the combined data of all the digital platforms, sluicing invisibly like wind or ocean currents between nations. We users voluntarily pumped our own information through this system, turning ourselves into flowing commodities, too.
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2024/jan/16/the-tyranny-of-the-algorithm-why-every-coffee-shop-looks-the-same
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And on a completely different note:
“Globalisation takes place only in capital and data,” the literary theorist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has written. “Everything else is damage control.”
Love that name! Two parts Indian to one part Slavonic.
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YouTube shittery continues to increase, with regular pop-ups suggesting I pay £12/month to stop the shitverts they know I ignore. It's basically extortion. The latest bug/feature is showing the countdown to skip shitverts, then restarting the timer with more shitverts instead of showing you the content.
Another piece of cynical bastardy is the pop-up that says "fewer ad breaks for this long video". Yeah great, but they're two unskippable minutes each now.
The best way to watch YT is on a real browser with a good adblocker, although they are enacting countermeasures against those now. Unfortunately, most of my YT viewing is on a "smart" TV, where you get the full enshittified experience.
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YouTube seems obsessed with the increasingly disgusting and weird hero-wars.com adverts and excessive gambling. Both make me angry. I'd even prefer Hello fucking Fresh or Fuxking Wix.
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TBH, when it comes to social media these days, I think the only winning move is not to play.
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YouTube shittery continues to increase, with regular pop-ups suggesting I pay £12/month to stop the shitverts they know I ignore. It's basically extortion. The latest bug/feature is showing the countdown to skip shitverts, then restarting the timer with more shitverts instead of showing you the content.
Another piece of cynical bastardy is the pop-up that says "fewer ad breaks for this long video". Yeah great, but they're two unskippable minutes each now.
The best way to watch YT is on a real browser with a good adblocker, although they are enacting countermeasures against those now. Unfortunately, most of my YT viewing is on a "smart" TV, where you get the full enshittified experience.
There is an answer that works to stop the ads - if you install the Opera browser + uBlock there are no ads (Opera purports to have its own ad blocker but that's not infallible) - you need to go to the settings in Opera to enable the ad blocker and make sure "Allow acceptable ads" is disabled.
AND when you start Opera wait a minute or so while, I think, the ad blocker does some sort of handshake with Opera and/or the internet - then watch with no ads.
I'm using Firefox as my default browser with an ad blocker (that YouTube intercepts) - and just use Opera for YouTube.
Give it a go.
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I don't use YouTube very much but if I have to I'll fire up FreeTube on Linux.
It seems to be a YouTube wrapper but without the sh!t - it will even accept the same URLs as YouTube.
I'm sure there are other, similar services for your choice of OS.
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I use Chrome on the MacBook, and an adblocker and get no ads on YT.
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YouTube seems obsessed with the increasingly disgusting and weird hero-wars.com adverts and excessive gambling. Both make me angry. I'd even prefer Hello fucking Fresh or Fuxking Wix.
I think these must be targetted in some way, cos I see completely different ads. I don't even know what hero-wars.com is (and I'm more than happy for no one to tell me). I've no idea what you're watching or doing to make it show you that and gambling – I would have thought you an unlikely customer! But then I've no idea what I've watched or done to be shown that ad of someone lighting tea lights under a flowerpot. Or even what that's trying to sell.
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What I have noticed is that many internet ads, especially at phone-screen size, have no distinguishable style. Print ads you often know what it's advertising even with the names and logos removed, due to characteristic colours, lighting, layout, font, etc. Whereas eg the little ads for Ebay (which I virtually never use) and Temu (which I've never used) look identical. In fact a lot of internet ads are similar; boxes with bland photos and one line of text in always the same font.
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YouTube shittery continues to increase, with regular pop-ups suggesting I pay £12/month to stop the shitverts they know I ignore. It's basically extortion. The latest bug/feature is showing the countdown to skip shitverts, then restarting the timer with more shitverts instead of showing you the content.
Another piece of cynical bastardy is the pop-up that says "fewer ad breaks for this long video". Yeah great, but they're two unskippable minutes each now.
The best way to watch YT is on a real browser with a good adblocker, although they are enacting countermeasures against those now. Unfortunately, most of my YT viewing is on a "smart" TV, where you get the full enshittified experience.
There is an answer that works to stop the ads - if you install the Opera browser + uBlock there are no ads (Opera purports to have its own ad blocker but that's not infallible) - you need to go to the settings in Opera to enable the ad blocker and make sure "Allow acceptable ads" is disabled.
AND when you start Opera wait a minute or so while, I think, the ad blocker does some sort of handshake with Opera and/or the internet - then watch with no ads.
I'm using Firefox as my default browser with an ad blocker (that YouTube intercepts) - and just use Opera for YouTube.
Give it a go.
I don't see ads when using YT on my phone or PC (UBlock Origin). But you can't install adblockers on a TV.
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The trick with TVs is to use them for displaying video signals and never give them access to the internet.
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The terrestrial TV signal where I live is so poor, I often can't watch the mainstream channels without using their streaming options online on my TV.
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You could use some other device (Chromecast, Apple TV, Raspberry Pi, whatever) to do the streaming. That way when it becomes enshittified your expensive television still works.
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YouTube shittery continues to increase, with regular pop-ups suggesting I pay £12/month to stop the shitverts they know I ignore. It's basically extortion. The latest bug/feature is showing the countdown to skip shitverts, then restarting the timer with more shitverts instead of showing you the content.
Another piece of cynical bastardy is the pop-up that says "fewer ad breaks for this long video". Yeah great, but they're two unskippable minutes each now.
The best way to watch YT is on a real browser with a good adblocker, although they are enacting countermeasures against those now. Unfortunately, most of my YT viewing is on a "smart" TV, where you get the full enshittified experience.
There is an answer that works to stop the ads - if you install the Opera browser + uBlock there are no ads (Opera purports to have its own ad blocker but that's not infallible) - you need to go to the settings in Opera to enable the ad blocker and make sure "Allow acceptable ads" is disabled.
AND when you start Opera wait a minute or so while, I think, the ad blocker does some sort of handshake with Opera and/or the internet - then watch with no ads.
I'm using Firefox as my default browser with an ad blocker (that YouTube intercepts) - and just use Opera for YouTube.
Give it a go.
I've used Opera Ad Blocker in the past.
The Internet for the most part became even more unsuable without Ads
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uBlock Origin blocks all YouTube ads in Firefox on both Linux and Windows. Never tried it on a Mac as I dont have any Apple kit.
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YouTube shittery continues to increase, with regular pop-ups suggesting I pay £12/month to stop the shitverts they know I ignore. It's basically extortion. The latest bug/feature is showing the countdown to skip shitverts, then restarting the timer with more shitverts instead of showing you the content.
Another piece of cynical bastardy is the pop-up that says "fewer ad breaks for this long video". Yeah great, but they're two unskippable minutes each now.
The best way to watch YT is on a real browser with a good adblocker, although they are enacting countermeasures against those now. Unfortunately, most of my YT viewing is on a "smart" TV, where you get the full enshittified experience.
There is an answer that works to stop the ads - if you install the Opera browser + uBlock there are no ads (Opera purports to have its own ad blocker but that's not infallible) - you need to go to the settings in Opera to enable the ad blocker and make sure "Allow acceptable ads" is disabled.
AND when you start Opera wait a minute or so while, I think, the ad blocker does some sort of handshake with Opera and/or the internet - then watch with no ads.
I'm using Firefox as my default browser with an ad blocker (that YouTube intercepts) - and just use Opera for YouTube.
Give it a go.
I've used Opera Ad Blocker in the past.
The Internet for the most part became even more unsuable without Ads
Ditto and ditto. It didn't block the ads, just the websites that objected to ad blockers.
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The other sort of ad block does better, the one that campaigns against LED ad screens.
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I did think about putting this in ctrl-alt-del rant, but this seems a, slightly, more logical place for it.
Niklaus Wirth died at the very beginning if this year. You may not know the name, but he was particularly well known in ComSci and programming circles especially for the Pascal & Modula languages. I have fond memories of using the Watford implementation of ISO Pascal on a Beeb.
Nigh on 30 years ago he wrote a short paper on the need to keep software lean. Well we all know what happened to that ideal, don't we?
https://cr.yp.to/bib/1995/wirth.pdf
And to mark his death that plea/analysis was updated by Bert Hubert
https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/a-2024-plea-for-lean-software/
Neither of these articles is especially technical nor long so I would suggest that, when you've got a quarter of an hour or so to spare, that you do read them so that, the next time you are swearing in incoherent rage at a some terminally enshittified web site, application or operating system, you know where the blame lies.
If you can't be bothered to read either piece I'll leave you with the last sentence of Wirth's paper,
“The plague of software explosion is not a ’law of nature’. It is avoidable, and it is the software engineer’s task to curtail it”
Cheers,
Lurk
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Thanks, both very interesting, and lots of quotable snippets.
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The problem with kicking back against the businesses decision to enshitify is "jotters"
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The problem with kicking back against the businesses decision to enshitify is "jotters"
Why else do you think I buy a lottery ticket every week? :)
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I bumped into this earlier in the week and forgot to post it here
https://www.ft.com/content/6fb1602d-a08b-4a8c-bac0-047b7d64aba5
it also talks about companies downsizing... or wad that a tory graph rant piece... maybe it was, one of the things that strikes me in some of the examples out there of how companies work
we need a shopping basket sub-app
cool we'll hire 9 developers, and a couple of dev ops guys...
we need a buy it now button... 9 and 2...
we need an product spinner widget... 9 and 2...
ok I don't know if this is what really happens but I've seen it too many times.
we've got 8 devs and 2 testers developing a data aggregator and complex discharge workflow system. plus what ever else the clinicians decide they need for the life of the product.
and what ever else comes along.
either were massively understaffed or all these wanky pish startups are massively over staffed anyway.
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A little off topic, but my wife was a programmer, primarily Unix/C/Sybase, old school stuff. I don't know a damned thing about it. Anyway, the closing years of her last job provided horror story after horror story of enshittification, from the abandonment of proper documentation to [insert many examples I haven't the expertise to coherently describe] that comes from the loss of institutional memory. Lots of celebrations when things were fixed, ignoring how they got broke in the first place. It literally made her cry to see what they'd done to her work. She retired early, unable to hack it anymore.
Back on topic: The Web We Lost
http://opentranscripts.org/transcript/the-web-we-lost/
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The YT false countdown to "Skip" now seems to be completely embedded and happens every third or fourth ad break. I bet it's another deliberate ploy to piss us off so much that we pay the extortionate subscription. Which is more than a streaming service, for a platform with mostly amateur content. No way.
Can you get smart TVs that will run YT in an ad-blocked browser?
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This sounds like something that would've been mentioned on one thread or another, but if not, the DuckDuckGo browser incorporates a video player that gives an ad-free experience. I might not mind ads if they hadn't gone overboard, and inserted them with more finesse; I'm forever multitasking anyway, and can easily occupy myself one screen over.
I loathe amateurism in entertainment
I love it, if their heart is in the right place.
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And another thing.
Imgur, one of the image sharing services I use, has just started rendering uploaded .jpgs more lossy. As something of a perfectionist, this irks me greatly. One of the ways I amuse myself and the 'bots is to come up with books I'd like to read (here's the latest crop (https://www.notanothercyclingforum.net/index.php?topic=2008.180)). Jpegs have to be high quality to keep text from going fuzzy.
I don't blame them, as I'm not exactly sure how they make money anyway; and I would, believe it or not, happily pay {something reasonable} to have an account to ensure less future enshittification; but in my little world, it's yet another example of the centre not holding.
(https://prettygoodbritain.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/stephensonloco.jpg)
Scroll up and down for moiré
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jpgs are crap for text. or logos.
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jpgs are crap for text. or logos.
They're fine, at least for my purposes, if they're at 100%, and are almost inevitably smaller than .pngs, e.g., the above fake book cover is 161k as a jpg and 419k as the latter. This is something I pay attention to. Although these sorts of services accept png, I interpret that as "piss no good", i.e., taking the piss with free services isn't good for my karma.
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110% would be better, I guess.
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YouTube Premium is now £12.99. Bastards. I shall hook up my laptop to the TV to enable ad blocking, I think. Or pay for NordVPN and subscribe to YT via Turkey, which costs next to nothing.
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As for youtube; chrome + privacy badger + ublock origin = only ads that are within the video not what YT adds extra.
Got a spare laptop or raspberry pi then install Pihole along with the above extensions this cut down on ads and trackers.
Internet archive and 12 foot ladder jump most paywalls. Bit of searching you can get another news website writing/posting the same article or commenting on it so you can read it that way.
If I use the website enough I will pay/sign up to said website.