A race to the bottom with who can come up with the next dogshit idea on how to ruin the internet and make things actively worse for the people who use it
AI happened. The promises, benefits, opportunity for massive financial gain, and the clear and present danger of how transformative it can be have all caused internet-bases companies to throw out the rulebook and lose their collective minds.
Their fake advert viewing numbers and YouTube’s inability to monetise without ruining itself are forcing them to think of new ways to encrapsulate user’s and drain their wallets.
Instead of, you know, providing a service people want and would pay for.
The tech sector just hit a major correction recently. Wall Street found companies like Google to be overvalued and as such their stocks suffered. This is Google trying to claw back some of that value. See step 3 in the enshittification process. This isn’t just Google. It’s the entire tech sector.
Growth reaches a saturation point and now they have to cannibalise every single thing in order to continue growth (in company values). This comes at the expense of product quality for the person using it but that’s fine if you have no competition because everything is a monopoly.
The capitalist system is the problem. The system will ALWAYS reach this endpoint for as long as it is a system that demands infinite growth.
What do you mean, Google of all companies… It’s a company that makes 90% of its money from ads and all of its products are made with the express purpose of enabling them to spy on you or creating technical dependencies so you can’t quit their services.
Plus they’ve already tried to lock the web into proprietary formats (AMP, PWA etc.) and have maneuvered so they have 90% of the browser market and the smartphone market but can’t be actioned for it.
Nothing about this is recent, those who pay attention to the standards process have been screaming for ages about the Google problem. It’s just that now between interest rates being what they are and them having a monopoly on the browser market that they’re cashing in on their investment.
and now Google of all companies wants to lock down the whole internet?
Of all the companies, Google always seemed the most likely, both to want to and to be successful. They’ve tried before, sometimes in small ways, sometimes in larger more obvious ways (AMP, the implementation of content filtering in Chrome etc.).
They’re the world’s largest advertising and data harvesting company. It’s their business. Of course they want to lock the internet down to serve their goals of learning as much about you as possible and using that data to shove ads in your face.
Whenever using any Google/Alphabet product you have to ask yourself, “am I ok with this thing I’m about to use being built by the world’s largest advertising company?”. The answer should be “no” more than it is “yes”, particularly for things that have access to lots of your data, like web browsers, phones, home speakers etc.
Because for the first time in 14 years money is no longer free.
Right now the interest rate sits at 5% and it will remain there for the foreseeable future. Investors no longer have the patients to wait for growth because bonds are actually investable now, so all your “get user first find business later” companies began to panic and tries to squeeze everything out of its users.
Hilariously, the only social media company that will come out of this relatively unharmed is probably Facebook, because their unethical practices actually makes money
Recently? This is a long time coming. Users have been accepting all kinds of shit from big players without complaint. Even if they protest it’s usually just performative and they keep using the services, sites and software that violates all kinds notions of user and privacy rights. Most people unfortunately are (understandably) not equipped to really even understand the kind of shady shit these companies pull on the daily. The internet is going to shit and its users will gobble it up and ask for more. It has been frustrating watching this happen, but there’s really very little that can be done.
The main problem with us users is that we are god damn lazy. We want everything to be the most convenient it possibly can be.
Remember when Apple updated iOS to allow users to stop cross-app tracking, which severly upset the Zuck, that absolute manchild?
Turns out that if you actually inform people and give them a clear choice to make, the overwhelming majority of users do in fact not agree with being tracked, as an example.
I haven’t read the replies but there was a very interesting episode by Derek Thomson’s Plain English podcast which I found incredibly interesting.
Derek made the conjecture that we were on a cusp of a big paradigm shift in the Internet.
For the last 20 years, it was essentially about building a consumer basis. So companies like Netflix and Facebook and Amazon did not care about current profits. The point was to just get consumers, drive out the competition, and commandeer the monopoly.
Now and especially post Covid companies like Twitter are realising that this isn’t going to work. The next movement is going to all be about paying models. This is what we’re seeing with Twitter. This is what we’re seeing with OnlyFans or Patreon.
So in light of the above comments, none of this is surprising. The next era will be about paid models of the internet.
Sounds you might enjoy the Enshittification of TikTok article floating around. It explains quite well the mechanism why a site have to becoming worse and worse over time.
Google has already been a worthless pos for years. Impossible to get relevant results, even with operators. You just get ads and irrelevant SEO sites. And adding "reddit" at the end of the query will probably not work so well in the future either, seeing how that site has also gone to shit.
And they have already tried monopolising the entire internet with their amp bullshit.
So this is just in line with their vision of making the whole internet into a pile of burning shit under their total control.
Then i’ll scrape the songs i currently watch on youtube with jdownload and stop using the page otherwise.
All they do is make the internet less attractive. Now that works to increase profits for a while, but eventually the content creators withdraw, the platforms become worse and eventually uncool and people stop using it, or use it less. Facebook is on a decline in western countries. We went through multiple video snippet apps already and tiktok and instagram too will be declining eventually.
We dont have to win the war because the war will never end. We just gotta make the best out of the battlefields we win.
I built a Python script that scrapes metadata from Spotify and apply it to songs downloaded off YouTube so it looks identical as if you bought the album.
I’ve been thinking to post it on like GitHub cause it’ll be useful for tons of people but I also don’t want to get sued
That is super awesome, but yeah, sounds like the kinda thing you should keep underground. Too many cool projects have been killed because they went public.
But a small minority of really determined people is enough to change the world 🙌
I love to see how people nowadays find easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism… That’s how they’ve been brainwashing us till now.
Honestly, this second half of 2023 for me has been about finding FOSS options for literally everything. And eventually I’ll have a home server I can use for the things I can’t use on the cloud
It’s like in Silicon Valley when the VC tells them they don’t need to be profitable they just need to market, then as soon as he dips below technically being a billionaire he demands that they focus on being profitable immediately
Rich idiots threw money at anything because while a million dollars is more than the vast amount of us will ever have, to them it’s like buying a lotto scratcher.
And one of the primary reasons they never had to make a profit was that, so long as interest rates were functionally zero, it didn't really cost the investor class much of anything to park money in a money losing operation while waiting for it to become sellable.
With interest rates back to pre-2008 levels, though, there's a price to money again. And a real opportunity cost. So, compete with bonds or watch your investors walk.
That wealth imbalance also pushes companies to force dumb shit like this on thier customers.
If Google were to just come out with a $10 a month plan that removed all the sleazy ways they try and profit from you, the overwhemling response would be “Oh great yet another subscription”, because these subscriptions have become a significant chunk of people’s income each month.
But what if greedy neoliberals hadn’t been pocketing our pay rises for $20 years and that subscription was functionally $1? Most people would be happy to blow $20 supporting 20 different content providers.
Unfortunately, their greed is insatiable. There’s always a room of executives doing their grubby little sums. “If people have $1, they probably have $2. We could double our profits! Then double our salaries!”.
Inflation just means “If rich people find out you’ve got more money, they’ll fuck you out of that too”.
The $1 will never be enough. They’ll keep charging more and more until people have nothing left to hand over. Then they’ll figure out more ways to squeeze a profit out of you. Manipulating you with ads, selling your private data, turning your body into expensive dogfood – whatever makes them a few more cents.
I know, right? It’s so weird. In every single instance of some bullshit happening it’s easy to brush it off as incompetence or an attempt at profit maximization, but overall it feels a lot like some kind of targeted disassembly of whatever made the internet great and facilitated open discussions.
I don’t think it’s coordinated, I think it all starts from the same root cause: Silicon Valley Bank failed. These companies all need to do something they’ve really not done much of in the past: turn a profit. But these companies are not run by the business geniuses we were once convinced were running the show. Most of them live so far removed from a normal persons life that they don’t understand what motivates us, what we want in a platform, and as soon as we provide feedback after they’ve already made a decision, they decide it’s because we don’t understand the squeeze they’re under to make money.
Twitter: Elon Musk thinks he could make more money from subscriptions than advertisements. The whole thing’s a disaster because that’s really dumb. This case may be a little different though because there’s some evidence Musk just wanted more people to see his tweets and to pay people to be his friend
Reddit: Spez fails to see that he has multiple revenue sources available to him so long as he keeps his users around. Somewhere, there was the right balance of charging for the API at a reasonable price, performing better market research on his user base to provide a better ad platform, and keeping the Reddit coin system in place as the base liked it because the user base paid more for that than most similar online payment schemes.
Google: this is the scary one. This is the one that seems like they know exactly what they’re doing. They’re ramping up their enshittification following the fall of SVB, but the way they’re doing it is both malicious and a minor enough inconvenience that the majority of their users will stay. And they’re doing it in small quiet ways. A little bit of tweaking how YouTube bans users here. A little bit of RFCs about DRM on the web there. Some PRs to chromium and android no one will notice. All to squeeze more ads into peoples online experiences. Their search product has been utter shit for about 6 years now, but people still prefer it over Bing or DuckDuckGo (which is a wrapper for Bing). They’ve learned the following lesson: if you’re big enough, the citizens of the web will let you do it
Duckduckgo is a wrapper for bing? No wonder it sucks… I want to like it, but the results are usually pretty bad in comparison to Google. Takes me much longer to find what I’m looking for with DDG. :/
I’m using an anonymous browser and for me often DDG has better results than Google now. My Google-fu used to be on point but recently I can’t seem to find sites that aren’t SEO traps.
I have exactly the opposite experience. Google has gone to shit, and duckduckgo gets me there faster 90% of the time. Plus the results are short and concise, or immediately helpful.
The SEO of the internet has really fucked googles algorithm. At least with duckduckgo I can end the search with !g to switch to google if I need a second go, but you cannot !d in google.
I 100% would have signed up for Reddit Premium and payed monthly for Sync access if they had allowed me to hand them the money. Oh well ¯\(ツ)/¯
That's a good write up, thanks. I don't claim it's coordinated, just that it feels more and more that way.
Also, I switched to DDG a year or so ago and I haven't heard that it was a wrapper for Bing. So I went to google it (I can't not use this verb when talking about online searches, lol), and it seems like it's not really the case. It gets some results from bing and utilises their ads to make profit, but it seems like it's a small part of their output. Is that incorrect? Do you have some more info about it being a wrapper? I'm kinda curious now
DuckDuckGo is not a wrapper for Bing, but is in fact a distinct and independent search engine. DDG does grab some results from bing. but it also grabs from other sources and it's own crawler.
Elon Musk wanted to drive Twitter into the dirt once he was forced to buy it. Criticism, jet tracking, rejection of fascist-adjacent opinions that are “logical” but only if you’re a heartless engineering robot.
His hubris forced him into buying it, but once he had to, he might as well destroy it. How else do you think he got the Saudis in on it for another billion?
I laughed about this theory at first, just memeing it like “ha could you even imagine?” But every single day it seems more and more like he does the worst thing possible to “monetize” and then gripes about it like the only reason his brilliance isn’t working is because big mean liberal woke mind virus society is trying to do cancel culture because they’re just jealous he’s rich.
No, it’s not at all legal for the company to do this. Reply and remind them they have one calendar month to comply from the date of your original request, otherwise you will make a complaint to which ever information regulator is correct for the juridiction they’re operating in.
I’m a lawyer specialising in Data Privacy, reply here if you need more help on this one.
Think of the poor corporation! If they get punished for their illegal buisness practices, it’ll hurt the economy and people will be less inclined to start a small buisness. Didn’t you study piss down economics?
“WHAT ABOUT THE TRUE VICTIMS HERE! WHY DOESN’T ANYONE CARE ABOUT THOSE HARDWORKING, SALT-OF-THE-EARTH SHAREHOLDERS! ARE YOU PEOPLE FUCKING COMMUNISTS?!”
Or maybe they just want to disclose as little of their personal information, including services relied on, on an open platform like this. Idk if that’s the case, but playing devil’s advocate here
Why should they not? They posted an inquiry, looking for advice. That is their reason for posting.
They do not owe personal information beyond what is required to answer the question. And typically, with regards to anything resembling a legal matter, the less information posted publicly, the better.
My first thought was “they probably want to ensure they are who they say they are and so want an authenticated request” - while that’s against GDPR, not everyone is as educated as they should be, and not every mistake is a nefarious activity.
The individual responding isn’t the issue. They haven’t made any decision to respond like this, they are following a script.
The script is written by people who should know exactly what they are doing, so the result is either malice or negligence. Either way it’s unacceptable where the law is concerned.
There’s no reason an app should be more trustworthy than the email.
It’s pretty standard for scummy companies to make the process as annoying as possible.
Genuine question: Aren’t you supposed to say “this is not legal advice?” if you identify yourself as a lawyer but you’re not their legal council? Or am I mistaken?
The purpose of that disclaimer is for the lawyer to not expose themselves to malpractice lawsuits from OP, which seems VERY unlikely to be relevant here
That reminds me, I might have to put in a formal complaint for a somewhat similar matter.
Bought concert cards years ago, and was never able to unsubsribe from the newsletter. I sent requests to every mail address I could find, and never even got a response. Still got newsletters every now and then though.
They also just make it unnecessarily hard to contact them, so at this point I’m not sure my messages even reached them, which hopefully is what explains their failure to comply.
Don’t do that it’s annoying. If someone doesn’t want to write out curse words, more power to them. It doesn’t inconvenience you in the slightest. It’s just a patronizing comment that has been made into a meme.
Can any late teen-early 20s armchair philosophers once-over this for me?
I have a theory. Never before on the internet (going on 30 years of it) have I seen so many curses used but not fully spelled out (‘f*ck’ for example).
I believe the change has to do with social media and specifically short-form video apps (Tiktok, IG Reels, Youtube Shorts) - not all of which I am familiar with, but I know at least YT and I believe TT does as well. When curse words or words like rape and murder are used in text (or ‘subtitle’ text on screen) the video reach can be penalized in some way. I assume it’s similar in comments.
So you have a ton of the younger generation consuming hours each day of censored curse words, and in their mind it becomes just what you’re supposed to do, socially. They end up doing it with each other over text, and consequently in comments. I have a younger co-worker who will gladly say “Fck that dude hes a btch” in group chat, and when I asked him why he doesn’t just say the words he’s using, he said “I just don’t like to curse.” Which makes no sense to me, as it’s the same word and intent.
I know some Lemmy instances will remove words, but generally only ‘bitch’ and derogatory slur words.
So I hypothesise it’s simply unexamined social conditioning, where they see their peers doing it so they do it too, never questioning why.
I’ve never had the experience of seeing young people refrain from using curse words. It’s usually as people grow up they see it as an immature way to communicate. I personally use them a lot, but in formal settings I certainly don’t. Some people simply don’t turn the switch on and off and elect not to use them so much. I don’t think that’s such a bad thing even if it’s not how I operate. It’s up to each of us how we want to communicate, so frankly, I just don’t concern myself with it.
As for people self censoring online, I have seen that since my old messageboard days when I was a kid. “You can curse on the Internet“ is a pretty old meme. Literally decades.
People who see it as an immature way to communicate won’t use the words at all. People who are actually immature despite growing up will use the word and think it makes a difference if they put an asterisk in there instead of spelling it out.
Its happening with “killing” or “dead” being subbed for unalive too. I don’t inherently think its bad, just culture moving forward and changing how it always has. “Its simply unexamined social conditioning where they see their peers do it so they do it too never questioning why” Thats just society, friend. Why does anybody do anything?
I’m 36 and don’t understand plenty of young people’s shit now, but that doesn’t inherently make it scary or bad. I don’t really have a point here I guess, except that we should strive to not be the old men who yell at clouds about “those damn kids.” Life and time marches on, things change, and thats fine. 🤷
[Grandpa Simpsons voice] Back in my day, we used to say “pr0n” instead of “porn” to avoid keyword spotters, and saying it that way just got to be a habit. Nowadays e.g. twitch comments auto-mods have block lists. I think kids just do the same thing.
What’s funny is when you’re watching something like an AI summary of a movie on youtube, it’ll use euphemisms like “self-delete” instead of “suicide” and “naughty place” instead of “brothel” to avoid the algorithm penalties you mention.
That’s true, there is the Scunthorpe problem. I guess we’re just doing another 20 year cycle like we have for all of civilization. If someone centuries in the future finds this comment chain, please name the solution to your 20 year repeating fractal math problem something like the CockSyn Solution. I want to be like Shadow from American Gods. Or more accurately like Pythagoras with his stealing murder cult.
There are other things that get self-censored due to filters. The two that I’m thinking of are “suicide” and “murder” (which a lot of people reword as “unalived” or “committing game over”).
Another one that I saw was a history summary channel I watch on YouTube couldn’t get monetized because they kept mentioning Hitler (in a video about the end of WW2) so they had to keep saying “the toothbrush moustache having Austrian man” to get around the censor.
I was resistant to ending my use of reddit, but now they have nerfed the mobile site so bad I can’t even login anymore so I’ve stopped trying. I still peruse it on my PC at least once daily but I think that the moment RES finally stops working will spell the end of that.
As for Facebook. I mostly keep it around for an easy connection to family and friend and a few meme groups that amuse me. But again, only like once a day do I check in ion that site.
Edit: I should mention that I have never and will never use either of those website’s apps.
It really baffles me how often I still see it talked about. Especially on Lemmy. I never liked it myself but now the musk owns it, I would’ve assumed there wouldn’t be much controversy here: it’s dead and gone, move on, people.
I’ve found a fair amount of strong loyalty to the place from all sorts of people. I was never a twitter person, so I don’t understand it, but AFAICT, all sorts of people have a real emotional bond to the place, like for them it’s been their main internet experience in life or something.
the stinking corpses of all these corporations that don’t realize they’re already dead impact all of us, but they’re still dead, aren’t they? hnnngg die already!
Ah yes politics, the thing that can be discussed in 140 characters or less. Twitter is definitely the prime place for this discourse.
I get what you’re saying, I really do, I just think its super fucked up that our politicians have collectively decided this is THE place to engage people when there is no political topic that could possibly be discussed properly this way. I’m pretty sure I already exceeded the limit just saying this.
i'm fairly sure the point (whether calculated, or more likely, mostly not) of having politics moved there is because there is no political topic that could be discussed properly there. it makes for good, distracting noise.
it makes for a lack of meaningful critique, or for that critique to be instantly buried in bad actors. noise is a shield. noise is easily dismissable.
monetized social media, in general, is made to be clickbait, to feed negative emotions because that's what gets people addicted to outrage, it steers people towards thinking less and reacting more. nuanced discussion and thoughtful spaces are drowned out and cast aside for the loudest and most obnoxious players. this is appealing for someone trying to uphold the status quo or push society towards hate.
i don't think it's a coincidence that politicians have moved there, that spaces have become so polarized and negatively charged, and that the most prime example of both of these happenings is xwitter. everything is connected in this big, terrible, and vaguely randomly evolved system. i do think evolution is the best word for it. what lives, survives to propagate. it doesn't matter how healthy it is. the result is this blind, meandering, gargantuan worm, following the scent of blood, feeding on the worst of it all.
xwitter is easy and, notably, if you're a powerful white man, you can build your base with no accountability. it exists in this space where it's the most serious news source that almost no one takes that seriously. of course it's appealing.
i’m fairly sure the point (whether calculated, or more likely, mostly not) of having politics moved there is because there is no political topic that could be discussed properly there. it makes for good, distracting noise.
It’s more stupid than that. The idea is that 140 characters is a lower barrier of entry for a reader, compared to reading a series of paragraphs that might be able to at least talk about something, or attempt to summarize an issue. It’s why accounts like wint can pop off, and become so prolific.
I mean I just don’t think it’s so much a calculated effort by the ruling class as kind of a natural evolution of the market taking hold of and exploiting the human mind to the nth possible degree, such as they have always done.
You're phrasing this as a rebuttal when these points were an explicitly acknowledged part of my original stance. It is a bit odd.
whether calculated, or more likely, mostly not
everything is connected in this big, terrible, and vaguely randomly evolved system. i do think evolution is the best word for it. what lives, survives to propagate. it doesn't matter how healthy it is.
Both quotes from my original posting, here. If you want to point out something that I had missed, it would be more time efficient to have picked something I had missed?
I'm bemused.
I’m gonna be honest most times when I write a response I’m taking a shit and not paying very much attention to the thread which it belongs beyond my vaguest recollection to what was said
I made accounts on Mastodon and Blue Sky but most people still use Twitter, so if there’s info you’re looking for, or if you want to share things, you’re forced to use what most people are using.
I hear you … most people are still there (I’ve claimed in the past that it will be the MS Windows of social media, that no one really openly talks about using but is actually everywhere).
But I feel it may be useful to distinguish FOMO and social media gossip from actual useful information. I’m not saying there’s nothing useful on Twitter (I don’t actually know). But we’re talking about microblogging and social media here.
I just accepted I'm not getting the information now; but a whole bunch of small creators will basically only talk about their content and schedule on twitter. Like if something is going to be late, they are going on vacation or they are doing an extra stream or etc.
I’m not sure, but wanted to add another hot take: if you’re a journalist and you use Twitter as a primary source for your work, you’re not a journalist.
I deleted my 2007-era Twitter account in 2022 and not once have I felt like I was missing out on any “info” or felt like I wasn’t able to share things.
I’ve never had a Twitter account and never felt the need for one, also haven’t been missing out on that junk. I’ve read lots of tweets, on occasions when I was offered a twitter link for whatever, but just never felt like I needed to join up at all. Just seems like a waste of time to get on social media where all the posts are just small bits of opinionated content without much depth.
Definitely. Ads are eye cancer at best, and infiltration channels for malware at worst. Compromised ad networks pumping out executable code via javascript (or back in the days, Flash) are still a major source of trojan infections.
if ads were just static PNGs with a link you went to if you clicked I wouldn't have ever bothered. but ads became a major malware and tracking risk so plugging that security hole became mandatory.
People are gonna say I’m being hyperbolic or crazy, but I swear that the internet died the day the first line of production Javascript was ever written.
Yeah, there’s no proper screening process and companies aren’t help liable for malicious advertisements. It’s the Wild west out there, and companies take money from anyone due to there being no consequences. Internet advertising has no proper screening process like network television.
And just to add to your important point, Ad Blockers are really Content Blockers. They allow the user to delete annoyances that have nothing to do with advertising. We should all start calling them Content Blockers.
I have said it before, snd I will repeat it as many times as it takes.
Adblocking is security, untill website owners take legal and financial responsibillity for the harm that a hacked ad spreading malware or attenpting any kind of deception, I won’t even consider removing my adblocker.
If this changes, I will consider it, but will still not do it, the risk to my data is too large.
It’s true. I work in a computer shop and we see literally thousands and thousands of dollars lost from people clicking on ads that look like normal buttons (things like “Download”, “Next”, etc). And not just the elderly either. Everyone has a a combination of inputs to get scared and comply. Folks that are otherwise extremely competent and savvy can get scammed too.
The best security you can have online is adblockers, only beaten by using trusted websites.
Edit, fair points with sites being slimy these days. I meant using legitimate versions of websites rather than copy/fake websites designed to steal credentials.
Yes, these exactly. There does seem to be a bias towards sites with multi-page articles (think Yahoo news, BuzzFeed type stuff), and what I’ll call “disposable income listings” like boat and sports car-listing websites.
One comment mentions possible incompability with article 22 of the GDPR, and I sure hope the EU will stand their ground on this.
I can only imagine noyb letting all hell break loose. We need more people like him, dissecting corporations legal bs to find every last little thing we can possibly hold against them.
No way. Why should I feel obligated to use something I feel has inferior UX and UI than the browser I’m using now? For Mozilla’s CEO to rais her wage (again): calpaterson.com/mozilla.html ?
You people are really delusional if you really think that Mozilla are the only good guys (or good guys at all, for that matters).
Inb4, unimaginative people downvoting just because they can’t stand different opinions.
I surely deserve death for using a browser you don’t like.
I’m not sure how you managed to come to that conclusion. You claimed Firefox is a poor choice, I’m demonstrating why I believe your alternative choice is worse. Nevermind the fact that use of Chromium is effectively an acceptance of Google’s monopoly over the web standards, which is the point we’re all arguing here. If you can’t handle criticism you should reconsider making such hyperbolic remarks.
Someone just insulted me and called me “alt-right” person or “crypto bro” (I’m neither of both). So, do you really think that I’m the pathetic one?
And… Which “claims”, by the way? I just said that I’m annoyed by people telling me “I should” do something and that I’ll decide by myself. Full stop. Coherently, I’m not giving you alternatives nor have I to disclose anything.
Sometimes it looks like one has to apologize for using Brave or Vivaldi or any other shit that didn’t come out from Mozilla’s ass. Keep using FF if this makes you happy. It made me happy for 20 years, but then I got fed up by 1) Mozilla, 2) Mozilla’s community 3) The browser itself.
Don’t worry. One day Mozillians will receive a reality bath and realise the farce they have supported.
People should be attacking your idea, not their perception of you based on your choice in browser.
My objection with Brave, Vivaldi, and other other browser that is just Chrome with a different skin of paint is they are all signalling an acceptance of Google’s monopoly over the web standards ecosystem.
Mozilla is a shit organization run by a shit CEO, but they’re the only alternative we have to the megalith that is the advertising company known as Google. It really shouldn’t be a hard argument to understand that putting an advertising company at the head of the web standards process is a really bad idea if you care about anything other than Google’s revenue streams, ie a free and open web.
Chromium only exists as a way for Google to keep antitrust regulators from coming after them like they did to Microsoft when IE had a monopoly. It’s source-available, not open source, they don’t accept commits from non-Googlers. The moment they feel safe closing down the Chromium repos without having to lose too much money in fines or blowback, they absolutely will.
We’re literally watching this happen right now with Android, another formally open source project from Google that is slowly having all of its open source components clawed back so that they can maintain their control over the ecosystem and protect the revenue stream that is their data collection and app store.
When Google inevitably decides to pull the plug on Chromium the collective of forked browser developers is not going to be able to keep up with the massive engineering effort required to keep a modern browser going. Especially when a corporation like Google can and will push forward complex and difficult to implement standards expressly for the purpose of making those forks obsolete. They have the manpower, capital, and control over massive web properties to effectively push out anyone they don’t want.
All it takes is them making a change to Youtube that hinders alternative browsers and that will be the death of that open source ecosystem. They’ve literally pulled this exact move before with Youtube by hindering Firefox’s performance by pushing through the implementation of shadow DOM.
All of this has happened before and all of this will happen again. Trusting an advertising company with control of the open web is the nerd equivalent of leopards ate my face
I feel obligated to raise awareness about these topics. I won’t prevent anyone from choosing Chrome, but at the very least it’s important for people to know what their choice can entail, and base their decision on that.
I won’t prevent anyone from using FF, either. I just think that the “obligatory use Firefox” is quite arrogant, to say the least. And, to be honest, I’m quite happy it’s not going to happen until FF is managed by Mozilla and their poor choices.
The obligatory use Firefox has been a running gag in the FOSS community for ages now. Nothing arrogant about it, though it does come across as a bit blunt and brazen, to be fair.
It’s just that letting a single entity be the ultimate authority on how the internet (or anything, for that matter) should look like is objectively a bad idea.
Especially when that entity is widely known for being insidiously self serving, malicious and manipulative.
That being said, enough people have explained this already, so I’m gonna leave it there.
There is a huge difference between mozilla and google. That’s quite obvious to most. The ceo raising his salary is a problem for you, and you prefer Google, where they have enormous salaries and incomes? It’s one of the richest companies in the world.
Firefox doesn’t have inferior UX at all. It has more functions and features than chrome. It also has very good default privacy and the plugin system is amazing.
I downvoted you because you made a terrible case for yourself. Learn to make a salient point, or learn to love being “edgy”. the choice is up to you, but the internet already has plenty of the latter, why not become the former?
use dark patterns in their software to make users accept their TOS to spy
repeated lies about how their data collection works claiming anonymity
forcing users to use their Play Services which is spyware and scareware
monopolising the web and internet via AMP, FLOC and now DRM proposal
use of non standard web browser libraries and known attempts to cripple lone standing ethical competitors like Firefox and Gecko web engine (now with Microsoft making their default Edge Chromium-based too)
Moreover, Firefox’s UI is incomparably superior to that of Chrome, even without considering the infinite userchrome.css customisations. The fact that you can have a dedicated search box, extensions movable and a download list button on the toolbar makes Firefox incomparable.
That’s just how it goes now it seems, we just have to go with the lesser of the evils for everything. Sure there is FOSS for some stuff but even then FOSS has its fair share of issues
Moreover, Firefox’s UI is incomparably superior to that of Chrome.
No. It’s crap. Utter crap.
without considering the infinite userchrome.css customisations.
“Unsupported” and surely an incentive for less tech-savvy people to look elewhere. But whatever. I’ won’t bother to reply to anything else, as you’re statistically one of these persons that spend their life watching crappy youtube videos and buying shit on Amazon.
I see no reasoning from you on why Firefox’s customisable UI is crappier than Chrome based browsers’ UI, or on double standards of morality regarding Brave CEO’s anti LGBT right funding, or on all the other stuff you are saying. Nothing sounds coherent or reasonable. I am not your r/privacy mod who uses iPhone and Google Chrome on Windows, I daily Debian and write guides.
“Unsupported” and surely an incentive for less tech-savvy people to look elewhere
How is userchrome.css unsupported on Firefox? And where is this customisability on Chrome based browsers?
spend their life watching crappy youtube videos and buying shit on Amazon
Interesting approach to convince people.
I have received about a dozen reports against you for trolling. If you want to be Brave™ here, will you take the L and move on, or do you need the hammer? I will not hesitate in the future, unlike now.
They’re not saying you should feel obligated to use Firefox. It’s a tongue-in-cheek joke about how everything FLOSS, Privacy or GDPR related always includes a comment thread about using Firefox. I use Brave too but you gotta read the room. Lemmy users in general are going to be much more pro-Firefox than anything else.
EDIT: Oh I just found in the profile. It’s Brave. I used it for half a year before I got tired of the crypto ads sneaking into my home page’s links no matter how many times I deleted them and of some other stuff. I prefer Firefox’s UI. Also I don’t expect any browser to be 100% ethical but Brave is below Firefox in that list for me
It’s not irrelevant since you stated Firefox is less good than what you are using now. Of course people are interested in a feasible alternative. So, since you introduced it, what are you using instead?
I said that I feel it’s less good. I’m not going to tell people what they should use and I surely won’t tell them to use the same browser I use. People should simply use whatever they prefer/suits them best.
I didn’t know I was so evil that I’m doing the world a worse place just because I prefer a different browser. And I’m ideologically far form alt-right, btw.
that is a funny graph. Even assuming the data is true, it deliberately missrepresents market share as usage. Which pretty much neglects the fact hat maybe a person or two and a device with a browser or two have entered the market since then.
Also it does not have any information on source of the data, methodology, definition of the terms etc. So it is pretty much worthless as an argument.
that is a funny graph. Even assuming the data is true, it deliberately missrepresents market share as usage. Which pretty much neglects the fact hat maybe a person or two and a device with a browser or two have entered the market since then.
Fine, so on the same basis we can also reject the “chromium dominance” argument, which is the main selling point of Mozilla.
I guess now is one of those famous best times to do it. If you want even more privacy and security ootb, you can try Librewolf. Recently released Mullvad Browser seems to be pretty up there too, at least from what I’ve read so far.
And if you’re on Android, Mull is pretty much for Smartphones what Librewolf is for Desktops.
I was just thinking that I’m sure Google will lobby the US government to get this model enforced as law, making it illegal for anyone to create workarounds, or alternative browsers. And the US legislative government being what it is, will hand Google whatever legislation it wants to turn their nightmare into a reality.
What legitimacy does the U.S. government even have anymore in light of not only this, but everything that they’ve done in the 21st century? Why do we keep listening to them? Why don’t we build our own networks and design our own chips?
What legitimacy does the U.S. government even have anymore
The Constitution of the United States of America, the Bill of Rights, and the Supreme Court.
Why do we keep listening to them?
Democracy, loyalty, nationalism, trillions of dollars, global power, the Army, Navy, Marines, Air Force, National Guard, FBI, CIA, local and federal police, the largest surveillance network in the world, thousands of prisons, and a million other reasons.
Let's hope there's already a law that the EU can find to apply (since they already don't like the non-EU dominance of big tech), or that they make one in time.
The EU is rapidly becoming a neoliberal hellehole resembling the US. I no longer have any hope for existing institutions resisting corporate encroachment. Best that can be done is the support of initiatives like the fediverse and foss in general but if the current trend continues even that is in a precarious position.
How about using a programmer style variables like badCompanyName. You don’t have to be a mathematician. Sure, I can totally appreciate concise names, but some times you have to use longer names to avoid collisions.
There is some arguement to be made that Facebook was kind of good at first. It was useful and it had social impacts that were positive. Over time it became toxic.
Twitter was awful from day one though, mostly because it was bloody useless from day one. Everything that anybody used it for could have been done, and generally was also done, on Facebook, so there was literally no point in the platform.
This is misleading. Not sure if by ignorance or malice, but it's very misleading.
This isn't happening with your browser bookmarks. This is Google Collections, which is a shareable bookmarking feature, meaning it can be made publicly available. That's why it's moderated. It's basically Google's version on something like Pinterest.
If you’re going to store something on someone else’s computer (Google cloud), they have every right to control what is and is not allowed on their systems. Don’t like it? Use encryption, selfhost, etc…
They have a duty to moderate public-facing systems. This is a link/bookmark sharing system, so obviously bookmarks that are pointing to things that are illegal are going to be dealt with.
I’m pretty sure there are reasonable expectations by governments that you maintain adequate moderation, especially the EU. If Mozilla were to deploy a public facing system and not moderate it, they would catch hell from the EU and likely be fined out the ass.
So if you have a collection with political targets and the folder is just google maps links to their houses with their names as the bookmark name google shouldn’t be allowed to stop you from spreading this?
Sure google is shitty but this feature is designed to share links with other people and sometimes those links can be dangerous so imho it’s absolutely necessary to moderate them at some level.
Every single comment chain on this thread besides this chain are 100% wrong and operating on misleading information. I fucking hate how up in arms people get when they don’t even have the full picture - even the basics, like having read the fucking article.
But they’re people! Well, only in that one instance and not in any others that would allow punishments levied against people to be applied to businesses.
Like, if I sold poison that killed millions of people every year, I’d get the death penalty.
Dude. I have a group that only talks on Facebook Messenger. It’s 100% Gen X and Millennials. Don’t blame the generation, it just makes you sound like an old man yelling “get off my lawn”.
Since when? Boomers will click anything you send them, Gen X think they are too clever to be phished on their XP desktop, and Millennials will give you their entire credit history for $50 off a streaming service. The majority of every generation doesn’t give a shit about digital privacy.
millennials were doing that in their 20s though. it was a whole drama with some of my friends when i switched to android back in the day (5-8 years ago, mind). you just want to be a grumpy old.
I had a fucking Nokia brick phone in my 20s and nobody gave a shit what kind of phone I had. Maybe your friends were just…shall we say, not of the quality of person I would desire in members of my social circle.
complaining about a younger generation makes you sound old.
Complaining about any generation, as if it’s a monolith, makes you sound small minded and ignorant. This is as true for older people as it is for the young. Many Gen Zers constantly blame all the world’s problems on Baby Boomers and seems to think all their troubles will magically disappear once the oldest living generation is dead and buried. They’re gonna be real fucking surprised the day they wake up and realize the only thing they ever accomplished socially with all that ageism was to normalize blind hatred of anyone over 40, which will be them before too long.
And, yes, I know that I’m unironically complaining about a generation in this post. Or at least a segment of them.
I chose an iPhone because I didn’t want to use googles play store. Now I know there are options around that but most users (including myself at least for now) are not willing to learn how to do that and set it up.
FYI to you or anyone who doesn’t know: If you are browsing the internet on an iOS or iPadOS device you are forced to use the Webkit rendering engine. Chrome, Safari, Brave, Firefox. All of them use Webkit to display web pages because you won’t get an app on the App store if you use anything else. The EU is forcing Apple to allow other browsing tech through the app submission process, so we will see alternatives in the future.
This is why I use Brave on iOS devices. It is the best option I found. Others mention Adguard home and pihole. They just don’t work as well at blocking ads.
Doesn’t Firefox support extensions on iOS? I’m on Android and I’m currently using uBlock Origin and Dark Reader. I also use Lemmy through it, seems to work quite well.
You’re right about the first part; it’s an incognito, tracker & ad blocking browser that clears your history and everything every time you close it… but if you long press on a link, you can open it in a new tab. Multiple, even. There’s just no option I’ve found to open a blank new tab and navigate to a website that way. So I totally understand why you’d think that!
(I hope this doesn’t come off as pedantic or rude or anything. That’s definitely not my intention here - I just want people to be able to make informed decisions with correct information, ya feel?)
Thanks I didn’t know about that one and I thought I went through all the alternatives. Currently I’m primarily watching YouTube vids through invidious in safari but will use brave when I watch my saved playlists.
It’s not something the average person can or will do, but if you’re so inclined you can run Pi-Hole or AdGuard Home and have all your iOS devices go through it.
I even set up a VPN for when I’m away from home that I can connect to and get routed through my home internet connection which gives me ad blocking on the go.
Or if you want a simpler answer, look into using the AdGuard app on your iOS device.
Thanks I didn’t know you could do this with pi-hole. I’m currently testing out AdGuard but it seems you have to turn it on every time you open a new yt vid
As I stated in a previous post, if you are using an iPhone you’ve basically given up on having privacy. For ad blockers you could use AdGuard and Safari, it’s better than nothing. You could also use something like Mullvad VPN, it has DNS ad blocking.
The difference is iOS is iOS, and there is only one. Whereas Android is open source and comes in thousands of flavors. You cannot install another OS on your Apple devices. You get what Apple gives you, and nothing more or different because that’s the way they like it. They want control over your devices.
Some flavors of Android are Graphene or Calyx OS which are not only better and more usable than iOS but also 10x more secure and private.
An iPhone is a give-up on privacy because you don’t get alternatives. If you don’t like your stock OS on an Android phone you can just switch OS (for example GrapheneOS, CalyxOS, ect.). If you don’t like the normal YouTube app you can just sideload a different one. You don’t get this kind of freedom with an iPhone. A prime example of this is when, during the Hong Kong Riots where Apple pulled an app that assisted protesters.
Too many people only care about the openweb or shitty companies in the comments. They have no fucking willpower, no patience, and no follow through. Their complaints are utterly meaningless because they utterly refuse to stick to their guns.
There’s one and literally only one browser that actually stands for all the things the most vocal people around here claim to care about.
Ehh there is only so much a single person can care about. If you have a life and aren’t effectively an activist/lobbyis by profession you can’t care about politics both local and global, preserving nature and ecolody, world hunger & disease, and a million other things like which software company is less evil all at once and follow through 100%, supporting all of the causes meaningfully.
Not to mention we have to make compromises, too.
There’s one and literally only one browser that actually stands for all the things the most vocal people around here claim to care about.
Hard disagree. Firefox had its fair share of controversies, it’s still technically funded by Google (while not accepting donations), and Mozilla Foundation as a nonprofit is pretty questionable too.
The leadership of Mozilla Corporation is shit too like any other corp; they lay off engineers and give themselves huge bonuses.
It takes them years to even acknowledge simple bugs, let alone actually getting to fix them.
A huge part of why Firefox lost the “browser wars” is also that they failed to make it easy to build into other apps so it could work more like Electron, while also pissing off users with surface changes that break their workflow.
Overall it’s better than Chrome especially if you care about privacy, but it’s not a huge win.
Not a fan of that either, that really is unfortunate. But with a bit of common sense, a person should then ask about that, if the Play Store is not an option. It’s still not a reason to download it from a source you haven’t verified to be official
No thats absolutely a reason. Signal is 100% to blame that they have no fully FOSS code repository that could then simply be compiled by FDroid and shipped there.
Instead I have to rely on some Dude I know nothing about, Twinhelix could just as well spread Malware. But I like my updates through FDroid, I like a blob Free Signal
Call it blame, but that decision is fully within their right, and what Twinhelix does technically violates F-Droids’ guidelines. If a creator doesn’t want their app on there, F-Droid calls to respect that.
The official Signal apk updates itself, so that’s not even an issue.
If your unoffical build from a third-party gives you issues one day, you are fully responsible for that.
Huh? They could just as well provide a blobfree APK themselves. They have their Google Play crap already, everyone not using that will probably also have a googlefree OS.
They have a FOSS client and provide no FOSS binaries, which is totally their right. I heard their Desktop clients are not reproducible though, maybe because of Electron?
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