dicksteele

Hey, thanks for your lovely comment. I really wish to be in your position one day. How long have you been writing for?

Drink bourbon in a nice garden and listen to the radio. I’d probably write a lot more also

I’m good. Trying to figure out which remote part of the world I’d like to visit, maybe stay there.

Writing stories. Not very good ones but many of them at least.

Me too boss. Shift 8 of 9. 10 days off in sight though.

Last time I played (more than 4 years ago) there was one in each star system…

It’s a baby plumbus

Maybe the dreams are true reality and what you perceive as being awake is simply a faded memory of what you believe happened. After all, your memories are mostly made up anyway.

I think I got the first iPhone 3G. Then I moved to android and my last android phone was google pixel 3. Changed to iPhone 13 and been with that ever since. Similar tech history for sure.

I find it hard to trust this source. This sounds like ai generated garbage when you listen to the voice in the video.

My guess would be the rise of content and businesses that are kept afloat by ad revenue contributed heavily to the enshitification of the web, but I also feel that sometimes we look back with rose tinted glasses. I am going to ramble a bit as I try to remember the web as I’ve used it through the years.

Even in the late 90s there were pop up ads, sometimes people would make them horribly annoying with sound and moving windows. While using a noisy 56k modem would bring some nostalgia to some, it was a terrible time to view images. I also downloaded a free cup holder that opened my cd-rom drive.

Then there were projects such as the million dollar homepage, which sold pixels as ad space, $1 for 1 pixel and 1 million pixels available. Once the web became monetised in this way, it seemed to be the start of the dot com bubble and with that, only the likes of Amazon and eBay seemed to survive out of all the big online retailers at the time. Google became very useful around this time also which made web directories and web rings almost irrelevant. Hence the beginning of the big tech companies real push to monetise the web even more. You could get free web hosting but it was often full of ads and popups.

Google was once a beacon of hope to me, I thought they were really pushing new kinds of tech for the good of mankind, I was a dumb kid. They saw dollar signs in their eyes from Adsense and never looked back, I also used a little Adsense banner on the side of my website I am ashamed to admit, those days are long gone though. I think I was in college when someone invited me to use gmail (so maybe around 2005) and I remember watching the counter on the side of the login page seeing how much free space they were offering to each account, the number was increasing every second. I think I used Firefox at the time also which was the better alternative to internet explorer 5, which you needed to use html and css “hacks” to get some functionality in. I remember using digg over Reddit, not realising that this was the beginning of the downfall of the internet for me. I hopped over to Reddit with the digg exodus and Reddit seemed to suffer the same sort of fate with people trying to control the content that other people were seeing. Even on digg there was a race to post the latest xkcd comic and all of the people were beaten by a guy that obviously had a script to post it as soon as the image was posted on the original website. Then there was the power user mrbabyman, god knows how much he made from posting. Probably these same guys were getting paid to publish posts on Reddit as well, I think I remember a user called gallowboob doing so.

I think my opinions vary at times but I solely blame monetisation and ad revenue for the decline in web content. The web is better to use thanks to some of these companies, such as google. Finding new and relevant content is a plus, but it was a double edged sword all along. I believe it’s now in human nature to monetise and control everything though I’m not sure what the solution to that is. Gemini and gopher are nice alternatives but it’s too basic for me, I love that there are no popups though.

To conclude my ramble and a tl;dr. I blame the pop up ad as the trigger for enshitification.

Are you me? This is my tech journey also, including fedora on desktop and laptop, iPhone without any upgrades for last 3 years.