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.

I also made the mistake of eating while watching The Substance.

I hear it too. They are calling out to us.

The star.

I’ve just watched the three movies I was really looking forward to. The only film that has topped all 3 in how excited I am to watch is 28 years later, which I will be rebooking a seat for at the cinema as soon as I can. Not much is known about the film yet but I love to imagine they are gonna really lean into the folk horror vibe I got from the trailer. Here’s hoping.

On one of my days off I had a nice triple bill of horror to watch.

The Substance, which was a very good body horror film. I fell in love with Margaret Qualley and Demi Moore (not literally but they were both amazing in it). I feel like the movie released with great timing as influencers are starting to push weight loss drugs such as Ozempic.

Heretic, which I found Hugh Grant to be terrifying and well spoken, as he played a strange and seemingly harmless (at first) man that has some pretty interesting insights into religion. I found the cat and mouse type environment to work well with the verbal riddles regarding religious hypocrisies. The third act could have been better but it was still a decent watch overall.

Finally, Alien Romulus, which was the best alien film since the first two, if they didn’t shoe horn the line “get away from her you… bitch” it may have been better than the second one also but, alas it was still a great watch. I particularly liked the character of Andy and the face hugger sections were the most intense scenes until the third and final act, where Mark Zuckerberg made a cameo.

I appreciate your response. I think you are better at expressing some of the things that brought me down this avenue of thought, I’m working on getting better at putting my thoughts into words though. I believe there must be some sort of balance between nomadic tribe member and modern man, yet we may have gone past the tipping point somewhere in the past. Now menial work is the bigger part of life whereas before, essential work was the bigger part (hunting for meat or gathering berries).

It’s fine. Downvotes mean nothing really, it’s just a variable stored on a web server somewhere. I’m happy that at least someone engaged in good faith though. I think I romanticise a simpler living but not because it would make me happier, I just imagine it would. I have just read “earth abides” by George Stewart and the main character goes through the motions of trying to restart civilisation after a disease wipes out humanity. It just set me off down a path of similar thinking.

Man became aware at some point in history. Now I have to work 40 hours a week. I think I need a holiday…

I am assuming, of course. I don’t have any proof to back what I said, it was a showerthought. Isn’t the purpose of a showerthought post to share it with other people? I’m open to accepting new viewpoints and hearing others, I think the post was downvoted anyway so it was probably not a great pov but I accept the naturalistic fallacy as the right answer, you win!!

Not to say that advancement is negative, just that I seem to come across more unhappy and unfulfilled people in each day, mostly due to the work/life balance, at least in the country I’m in.

Compared to our ancestors I guess. The hunter gatherer tribes probably had more satisfaction in life that didn’t rely on systems of finance such as amassing wealth and investing in cryptocurrencies. Granted they probably starved to death a lot more, but I imagine they led more fulfilling lives overall and had a greater sense of community.

The odds never stack, so it’s not like you are due a win just because there were so many “nope!”s. It’s always 1 in 4, which is 25% chance (0% in xcom terms).

My favourite flawed thinking genre.