Infosec friends are unanimous: if you're using Chrome, you want to visit chrome://settings/adPrivacy and turn off Ad Topics, Site-Suggested Ads, and Ad Measurement.
IMPORTANT: you must do this for each of your Chrome profiles, since it's not a global setting.
My real worry with Google's voyage into enshittification (thanks to Cory Doctorow @pluralistic the term) is YouTube.
Through YT, for the past 15 years, the world has basically entrusted Google to be the custodian of pretty much our entire global video archive.
There's countless hours of archived footage — news reports, political speeches, historical events, documentaries, indie films, academic lectures, conference presentations, rare recordings, concert footage, obscure music — where the best or only copy is now held by Google through YouTube.
So what happens if maintaining that archival footage becomes unprofitable?
"Ad blockers are unethical—ads are how they pay to keep the lights on!”
Exactly. It's how THEY pay to keep the lights on. It's not how I pay for anything. I didn't agree to see ads, although I'm ok with some ads; what I definitely didn't do is agree to be tracked and profiled and have arbitrary third-party code running on my computer just so I could read this awful, pointless, SEO-ified shitfest of an article that doesn't come close to answering the question I was googling.
In an age of LLMs, is it time to reconsider human-edited web directories?
Back in the early-to-mid '90s, one of the main ways of finding anything on the web was to browse through a web directory.
These directories generally had a list of categories on their front page. News/Sport/Entertainment/Arts/Technology/Fashion/etc.
Each of those categories had subcategories, and sub-subcategories that you clicked through until you got to a list of websites. These lists were maintained by actual humans.
Typically, these directories also had a limited web search that would crawl through the pages of websites listed in the directory.
Lycos, Excite, and of course Yahoo all offered web directories of this sort.
(EDIT: I initially also mentioned AltaVista. It did offer a web directory by the late '90s, but this was something it tacked on much later.)
By the late '90s, the standard narrative goes, the web got too big to index websites manually.
Google promised the world its algorithms would weed out the spam automatically.
And for a time, it worked.
But then SEO and SEM became a multi-billion-dollar industry. The spambots proliferated. Google itself began promoting its own content and advertisers above search results.
And now with LLMs, the industrial-scale spamming of the web is likely to grow exponentially.
My question is, if a lot of the web is turning to crap, do we even want to search the entire web anymore?
Do we really want to search every single website on the web?
Or just those that aren't filled with LLM-generated SEO spam?
Or just those that don't feature 200 tracking scripts, and passive-aggressive privacy warnings, and paywalls, and popovers, and newsletters, and increasingly obnoxious banner ads, and dark patterns to prevent you cancelling your "free trial" subscription?
At some point, does it become more desirable to go back to search engines that only crawl pages on human-curated lists of trustworthy, quality websites?
And is it time to begin considering what a modern version of those early web directories might look like?
#Enshittification is the process by which a #platform lures in and then captures end users (stage one), who serve as bait for business customers, who are also captured (stage two), whereupon the platform rug-pulls both groups and allocates all the value they generate and exchange to itself (stage three):
so, I learned that #threads can not only get your posts, even if you blocked them (via different servers that didn't and that store your posts cus people there may follow you or interact with you), they can also monetize those posts by showing ads next to them. Thus making money off of you. Put that together with all the genocidal and fascist and other harmful activity. It makes me think that the #enshittification of the #fedi has begun. The cycles seem to move faster and faster. I love it here and I've had many elightening convos and beautiful connections. Today I read that 41% of servers have blocked threads. Maybe there is still hope.
Esp. the neurodivergent community on here is the best I've ever experienced. @actuallyautistic
#Enshittification isn't inevitable: under different conditions and constraints, the old, good internet could have given way to a new, good internet. Enshittification is the result of specific policy choices: encouraging monopolies; enabling high-speed, digital shell games; and blocking #interoperability.
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
From 2015 to 2022, I spent hundreds of hours on Duolingo, translating articles, answering language questions on the forums, and helping to improve the smaller courses by reporting mistakes.
There are thousands of volunteers who donated their labour to Duo: the course creators who wrote their courses, the volunteers who created grammar guides (some smaller languages had an entire second course in the forums), the wiki contributors, the native speakers who answered questions in the sentence discussions.
All of their work made Duolingo the powerhouse it is today. Duo was built by a community who believed in its original mission: language learning should be free and accessible.
Bit by bit all of our work was hidden from us as Duolingo became a publicly-traded company. And now that work is being fed into their AI as training data.
Well, I've learned the true lesson of Duolingo: never give a corporation your labour for free. Don't ever trust them, no matter what they say. Eventually greed will consume any good intentions.
Link to the NCD mod's post about the matter via teddit (aka, reddit doesn't get any value from your visit): https://teddit.adminforge.de/r/NonCredibleDefense/comments/14s8l4g/re_the_nastygram_that_umodcodeofconduct_just_sent/...
(Of course, if you're not in the US, they've already made the choice for you. Thanks terrible international intellectual property laws!)
Until today, my experience buying #ebooks from Humble Bundle was they were always available unencumbered by #DRM. I have hundreds of #DRMFree#epubs built up over the past decade.
The #PratchettDiscworldHumbleBundle is through #Rakuten#Kobo's ebook shop, and all the books are encumbered by #Adobe and the #AdobeDigitalEdition DRM. There is zero indication that this DRM is included on the bundle page itself. and it explicitly says "Use on Any Device". On the #RakutenKobo page itself, the only indication the file has DRM is some small bottom-text that says "Download Options: EPUB 3 (Adobe DRM)".
Also, DRM Digital Editions will also "helpfully" install Norton for you as well. It's like the dogshit you just stepped in offered to stab you in the kidney, too.
This is shameful and disgusting from Humble Bundle. I know Humble Bundle got acquired years ago by IGN/Ziff Davis, but they'd avoided the levels of #enshittification to make me stop using them.
It's funny, when the web and personal computers first got started, recipes were often cited as the 'killer app' hauled out whenever an enthusiast wanted to explain why regular people would want a machine in their home, or why they'd use the 'net.
Now some 30yrs later, it seems like recipe sites are the harbingers of everything wrong with the web. So many of them are now mostly SEO-laden link-farms, and ad-revenue trash.
Zawsze, ale to zawsze jest tak samo... Z każdym serwisem prowadzonym nie dla ludzi, a jedynie dla zysku... #zgównienie#enshittification
"Użytkownicy #Slack-a są przerażeni, gdy odkrywają wiadomości używane do szkolenia AI. Slack w obliczu ostrej reakcji twierdzi, że zmiany polityki są nieuchronne."
"Ohai, this is Windows. You may have noticed that I killed all the long-running jobs that you left going overnight and restarted your computer so that I could inject some AI-flavored bullshit you never asked for into your (*) operating system. You're welcome!!!”
(*) “It's not actually yours, of course. The OS now works for our Marketing Department rather than you. kthxbai.”
#enshittification, anyone? Perfect example from publishing. A publisher is using AI to write crappy nonfiction, then assigning author names that almost match leading experts in that field (to trick search engines). No doubt other AIs will now search those texts as authoritative. This is done solely to make money and only makes the world a worse place. #books#reading#ai#bookstodon@bookstodon@pluralistic
What I learned today about “smart” door locks: There are some really cool products out there, like the ILOQ S50, NFC, no batteries needed, and the Dormakaba digital cylinder, but all of them suffer from #enshittification as they need apps, clouds and weird business models like having g to pay per device added. A simple lock, with NFC, so I can use one of my existing g cards, mobile phone or Apple Watch that works without app doesn’t seem to exist. Le Sigh.
On the web interface PayPal just introduced a new dark pattern #enshittification to the transfer-balance-to-bank-account process to trick the user into electing the premium and quite expensive "immediate transfer" option, instead of choosing the free 1-3 day option.
When you initiate a transfer, this is now what shows up:
Reddit CEO Steve Huffman is fighting a losing battle against the site's moderators (qz.com)
The company wants to charge for API access. Its volunteer moderators have other ideas
OC /r/NonCredibleDefense recieves automated notice from the admins to remove its NSFW designation, or else. Mods respond by messaging the admins a bunch of death and porn.
Link to the NCD mod's post about the matter via teddit (aka, reddit doesn't get any value from your visit): https://teddit.adminforge.de/r/NonCredibleDefense/comments/14s8l4g/re_the_nastygram_that_umodcodeofconduct_just_sent/...