* My current ISP offers greater than 1000/1000 fiber for a smaller monthly payment than my first home broadband connection in 2003. Adjust for inflation it's probably 1/2 the cost while being over 50 times better. It's incomparable to the dial up before then.
* I don't see a lot of ads on the internet. If I see an ad on a website I either upgrade my adblock or I stop going to that website.
* I don't have a ton of subscription services. If you were to tally my subscription services and weigh them against what I previously used for competing services I am saving a ton of money. Cable TV, DVDs, and CDs were expensive.
* It's so casual and fun to jump on a voice call with a group of friends to play a game, or someone shares a screen of an anime and we have a little movie night. It's so easy to see what games my friends are playing. It's so easy to watch any movie I want, or listen to any song that I want, or play any game I want. The tools to have fun online are way better than ever.
* It's possible to learn about anything I am curious about. You can do everything, from getting a highschool level lecture to read the latest research from the top researchers. I often find experts willing to answer my questions, even though I am coming in as a complete stranger.
* I absolutely love the move towards more independent publishing. The number of interesting people I follow on twitter, or youtube, or watch on twitch is insane. Before the internet media felt like a monoculture with everyone watching the same 40 channels on TV every night. I'm subscribed to indie newsletters instead of magazines. I'm watching Starcraft 2 tournaments instead of the superbowl. Some of this was around before the internet, but it's much more now and the long term trend is looking great.
* I can get involved in so many interesting conversations, and I rarely have problems finding interesting conversations to listen in on or join in on. People from all walks of life, with all kinds of perspectives.
- If the industry gets its way, adblockers will become illegal or practically unusable.
- I get the impression you don't shy away from pirating. For those that don't engage in it, for one reason or another, it's a lot harder to e.g., watch any movie they want. What service is it? How much? Is it available in your country? Is something you saw was on there last week still there? Etc. This also generally applies to most other forms of media (games, music, etc)
- Screensharing for movie nights and such is slowly becoming more difficult, as more services implement DRM which disables capturing video (or even screenshots?!) from a stream
Again, I don't agree that the Internet is dying, or it's become a "monoculture," or anything like that - but we do have to be wary of the direction some groups would love to take it.
But at the least some providers are helping it with "watch together" offerings. Although at moment its pretty limited and not great experience. But it's not like they aren't making progress toward improving that (though glacier and painfully slow)
100% agree, and this has been true since I've been a netizen.
I think aside from GSL, the only major SC2 tournament still standing is ESL which got bought by the Saudis.
Personally, I watch ASL, the major Brood War tournament. But even though that has more Korean viewership than SC2, it's still declining in public interest and increasingly becoming unsustainable.
Internet pricing really hasn't changed at all all that much and my speeds have improved drastically from the "internet of old". Not to the speeds your getting but enough to show a dramatic improvement from what was before (50/50mbps).
Apart from the quality of websites themselves with ads, what we can do with the internet has improved immensely.
I follow one and the missus another, and inevitably both have their rights bought by different companies so (at least) two subscription services are required for following live events.
Sometimes I'll randomly open something with Chrome by mistake and just seeing 70% of the article filled with pop-up ads makes my brain just shuts down thinking about regular people.
The only real exception I can think of is that Google Meet's audio quality has recently been worse under Firefox than under Safari's. My guess is that the issue is on Google's end (since Firefox used to be fine), or that maybe Safari has access to some special microphone APIs.
For example, the audio in FF outside of Apple sounds real clear and overall great in my experience.
Some Javascript or maybe Canvas heavy pages run much more slowly on Firefox and are almost unusable on Firefox for Android. I find that this is rare, though.
I'll keep using Firefox + uBlock + Personal Blocklist + Dark Reader + Disable Javascript + Disable CSS + Tampermonkey + Old Reddit Redirect + CORS Everywhere + Consent-O-Matic + Hide YouTube Shorts + Load Reddit Images Directly + ...
Please cite some actual examples.
Not even in the slightest.