i’d rather go back to browsing the 1998 internet on a webTV box than this modern bullshit. no offense to anyone.
the modern internet is a heavily propagandized mild abstraction of real life. the old internet was ‘the internet.’ it was a playground for nerds, misfits, shut-ins and the regular folk who made the mistake of logging on and trying to talk to the rest of us.
My mom told me never to click “I’m feeling lucky” because she thought it had something to do with porn because it’s a phrase people would say about sex.
That’s hilarious, especially when the the regular search button had almost zero filtering.
My mom was weirdly prudish in the '90s and early '00s, I don’t really know why. Like she wouldn’t let me watch Dexter’s Lab because she thought it was gross or something? Idk. Weird time.
Same here. She stormed into the room to make sure I wasn’t up to no good because she heard me say “hardcore” once.
Her reasoning: “hardcore is a kind of porn” lol
Yeah, enshittification.
Same way when Apple advertised itself as first calling itself “the computer for the rest of us” and now? Besides becoming a fashion label of sorts, absurdly expensive and difficult-to-fix computers.
(They were only able to do this at the time because they were being propped up by the CIA!)
It’s what happens when companies go public. The ideals of the company go out the door and they care about is profits
become a monopoly by roleplaying as ethical and efficient
fuck your userbase because they don’t have nearly as good alternatives
OpenAI had the same playbook.
i’d argue that that playbook belongs to anthropic. everything about claude’s font and color scheme screams “ethical, productive, efficient, humanist” (we all know that’s far from the case)
I mean, I get it, servers cost money, traffic costs money.
But there’s a little gray zone between going broke and sucking out every cent possible. Isn’t making enough money enough?
Shareholders need ever increasing value or they will sell their shares. In the US at least, it is illegal to not provide shareholders with value. The only way to reliably get value is to fuck over your customers at every turn and fire half of your employees every few years
The old is new again with same bastards in suits. Just like the 19th century railroad craze which had some hedging their money but then lost the investment game.
Are you exaggerating with the “illegal not to provide value” part?
That’s the reason we should get rid of publicly traded companies.
In the word of Jim Stephanie Stirling, “They don’t just want a lot of money. They want all the money.”
See, this is why I would suggest to switch to the post-scarsity model of Star Trek. Then they can have all the money, but it’s completely worthless.
Then why does quark charge latinum at the bar?
Because he’s not part of the Federation. All the people’s needs are met with replication technology.
When you’re a Trillion Dollar company, you don’t need MORE money. You make enough to make everything run without additional income.
But obviously a trillion dollars is still not enough. We need more.
Don’tbe evilI remember before ai I would just find what I needed with the.first link. Now I need to scroll past 3 ad links. Even duckduckgo has sponsored links.
Yes. I miss the days when the Wikipedia article was the first result. Now, even with ddg, to get to the Wikipedia article I have to add wikipedia to the query… This is so sad…
You can disable the AI settings in options. Or manually set “noai.duckduckgo.com”
it’s not just the ai the problem, it’s the ranking of the websites that’s becoming less “sensible”. And I’m not talking about sponsored results either.
I think with the whole SEO many shitty websites are now higher ranked. It’s not novel either, it’s been like this for at least ten years now!
You can just search on Wikipedia…
Duh! 🙄
Doesn’t change the fact that you used to find the (arguably) best result on top, and nowadays you don’t.
They’ve gotta pay the bills somehow. If you’re not paying for it, someone else is, and that mean either selling ad spots, or selling your info.
Not really the case with Google though, at least not anymore. They have more money than ever. They could very well go with less ads, but they instead shove more and more down people’s throats.
Google has been an advertising company for over two decades. Everything else that they do is to feed AdSense.
DDG allows you to disable ads and AI in the settings!
SearXNG is really easy to self-host
Don’t Be Evil ☝️
Back then when human rights were cool
Back when humans cared about humans instead of money.
Ha. Stone age?
Nah, like the 1990s
right lol.
there was at least a balance between profit and caring about the human experience, even if it was on some small level in the name of profit.
i hate zoomers who never experienced past decades being like ‘lol nothing was good.’
bullshit. go and watch home movies in a burger king shot in 1995 and really pay attention to what you see.
“everyone is happier” should be the main takeaway, even the employees.
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Dude I grew up in the 90s. My parents had shit from the 60s-80s that they still own today. Consumer products were made to last because if they didn’t the company would go out of business. Now every company and their dog is enshitifying everything and if they go out of business, the government will just bail them out, rename themselves, and carry on making garbage.
There’s a reason Nokia phones being indestructible is a meme, because they genuinely were. I had one as a child.
Obviously profit was the end goal, but making good shit people wanted would get more money for the company. Now it’s just quarterly earnings by all means. Longevity doesn’t matter as long as line goes up this month.
Back then running on FreeBSD 2.X.
And no Kubernetes cluster needed to serve a search box. 😉
…no morals, no care for humankind…
I remember using it back in the day because it was the only one fast enough for 54KB.
That’s the hook.
