Is it just me, or is the Internet becoming less usable?

[Kim]

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.

[TheLurker]

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.

[Cudzoziemiec]

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.

[Kim]

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.   


_{[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.}

[Kim]

On the plus side, at least the mainstream internet means that people are making phone calls less.

[dynamo]

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.

[vorsprung]

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

[Polar Bear]

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.

[Beardy]

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 

[ian]

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.

[Jurek]

^ Mostly this.

[TheLurker]

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.

[Asterix, the former Gaul.]

What is not becoming less usable?

[rogerzilla]

When Google stopped caching images, the image search was essentially broken for good.  Many images are on shopping or classified sites, and therefore ephemeral.

[Mrs Pingu]

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...

[rogerzilla]

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).

[Ham]

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.

[Nuncio]

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.

[robgul]

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

[L CC]

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.

[bhoot]

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!

[arabella]

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

[Kim]

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.

[rogerzilla]

SO has an app that scrapes recipes from URLs without you having to wade through the crap.  I doubt it works on videos.

[Jaded]

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.