Something is wrong on the Internet
lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com
lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com
Two ways that instantly hit me with Google is:
1. In Google Play search is now moved to the bottom. My muscle memory still keeps trying to tap the now empty bar on the top 2. Google revoke permissions of Nextcloud app to access all files (https://github.com/nextcloud/android/pull/14099) breaking some of it's functionality. I moved to Nextcloud from F-Droid where everything is working as expected. As a revenge to Google I disabled (because I can't uninstall) all apps from Google I could replace with Fossify versions https://github.com/FossifyOrg even apps like calculator and gallery. These are good quality apps, try them too. Free on F-droid https://search.f-droid.org/?q=fossify&lang=en
I'd be fine with this change if they made it so that when you tap "Search" at the bottom it actually pops up the keyboard to start inputting in the search bar, which shows up at the top. Instead the Search button appears to open a new app page for searching, and then you have to tap the top search bar anyway to start inputting text.
This new search page has its own trending/suggested/sponsored sections that it wants you to look at before you start searching. It's such a blatant anti-pattern to push more ads in front of you that it just pisses me off.
>> I have a lot of thoughts about both, but here I’m just going to throw out a few quotes, encourage you to read them, and suggest a couple of things.
Most users just don’t care, and power users will eventually learn to use better tools.
It’s the exact same rational behind airlines charging the same, but offering ludicrously valuable loyalty programs.
User behavior changes based off of these outcomes, and the short-term hyper focus on metrics to the detriment of the long term usability will eventually have detrimental effects, and behavior will change, and we’ll get better alternatives.
Re: Netflix. Actually, most people just want to consume slop. The popularity of reality TV proves this. Now they can consume slop with their whole family for $16/mo instead of $80/mo with cable. This is an objectively better outcome, and does not preclude studios from putting out genuinely incredible works of art. I have seen some incredible movies. A24 keeps pumping out bangers, Perfect Days and Look Back were some of my other faves from this year.
But I agree with the author that the state of things isn’t “ideal”. I’m just offering a perspective that the whole world doesn’t fucking suck completely and maybe you’re being melodramatic and overly pessimistic.
This goes triple for the fact that Netflix now apparently designs their shows on purpose so you can follow along while looking at you're phone. Like holy fuck, just watching television is apparently too demanding an activity for some people now.
I’m an avid reader and it’s 80% shit there too. Nice thing about that is you can usually tell after chapters one or two and Kindle lets you have free samples before you buy. The main giveaway is poorly crafted prose or cliches. If I make it two or three chapters and the prose is not shit and the plot and/or characters are interesting it’s generally a decent book.
I fly like 3-5 times a year, am I missing out on something?
If we are moving towards a world where everything has the consumer experience of airline travel, then yes, we should burn it all the fuck down.
I think most popular services have reached an equilibrium where they’re providing more or less what their user base wants to consume.
I’ve read a lot of elaborate theories about how companies are making big mistakes in their product offerings because they aren’t catering to exactly what the author thinks they want. However, most times the author just has different preferences than the average consumer.
This story repeats across industries. I see complaints about shows on Netflix, content on YouTube, trending topics on TikTok, and even the food selection at McDonald’s. Most of the time the answer is simply that these companies know what customers want better than random bloggers and pundits.
HBO has a habit of canceling my favorite shows, because my taste runs to challenging high budget shows which have trouble maintaining the viewership required to justify the cost. Examples: Carnivale and Raised by Wolves.
They are companies; their business is making money, not art. The latter is the means to the end.
1) Bad life experiences
2) Other restaurants being busy
3) My wife and I are too mentally wrecked to cook food
Has occurred. It's not a good thing. We're there because it's (relatively) cheap, it probably won't make us sick, and it's reasonably fast.
It's also worth noting that a bunch of the above happens specifically because both ourselves and every other business we engage with, including our employers, is also subject to the profit motive, and that's probably contributing to our being in a McDonald's in the first place. Anyway...
The McDonald's franchisee wants to own a business, for their own economic benefit. Would they have started a McDonald's if not for the profit motive? Or would they have started a different business, one they'd be more proud of or innately interested in?
The McDonald's worker certainly doesn't want to be there. The pop culture version is this is a pimply kid wanting money for high school parties and the like, but they're also increasingly comprised of working low-income adults. They don't wanna be there, they have to be, or their landlord's profit motive will cost them their home. And they're certainly not happy to be doing what they're doing. I've never seen a McDonald's worker in my life who's proud of the product they serve. And they shouldn't be, it's minimum-viable-food.
I say all of this to say: the person who owns the McDonald's isn't happy about it, apart from the money they make from it. If they do. The person making and selling McDonald's food isn't happy. The person buying McDonald's food isn't happy (unless they're a small kid). So like... what is this for? How many of these restaurants operate? A quick google says 41,800. 41,800 restaurants, owned by people who don't necessarily want to own a restaurant, staffed by people who don't want to staff one, selling food people don't like, to people who probably don't want it, apart from it being a good alternative to not eating.
How much human effort goes into the concept of McDonald's on the daily? To do something nobody wants to do? To make and distribute food that nobody seems to actually like?
Sure everyone wishes they were wealthy enough to do whatever they want but that isn’t reality.
Flipping burgers is better than working at the slaughterhouse. Owning a McDonald’s is better than 9-5 desk job. So in that sense yes these people very much want these roles.
GP made fair points and I don't see how you concluded that they are out of touch or elitist. Maybe check yourself.
You should leave yours to be honest. I'm not talking expensive restaurants here. There's a bunch of places I can think of off the top of my head in my relatively small and semi-rural tiny ass city that would cost ballpark the same as a coupon-less McDonalds that utterly wreck McDonalds.
There's a hole-in-the-wall burger joint about 10 minutes from my house by bike, that serves the best smash burgers I've ever had, and if you're feeling spendy they have an angus steak burger for like $12, the most expensive thing on the menu, and it tastes like ground angel wings. So good.
If you're not feeling a burger, we have 2 different local Mexican places. You'll definitely pay more than McDs but you can also easily leave with enough leftovers for 2 additional meals if you portion it out correctly. That's the hardest part though because I've ordered probably 2/3 of what's on their menus at this point and it's all incredible.
Or, if you're really hard up for cash, to be honest our go-to is increasingly Taco Bell, the only fast food titan still standing that respects your wallet in my experience, that hasn't jumped on trying to be Chipotle with shittier ingredients. And yeah the food isn't great, sure, but they rotate menu items in and out so there's usually something new, and the prices are shockingly reasonable.
Like I'm not even saying McDonalds is bad. It's... aggressively fine. I don't think it's good enough for the prices they are asking now, I think it was in about 2007? But nowadays if you and your spouse both get a combo you're looking at easily breaking $25, and I'm sorry, it is not that good at all IMO. Especially since it's not low odds at all your sandwich is gonna look like someone assembled it from across the room for a TikTok video.
Complaining doesn't matter here.
Fortunately there's still the ol' good email!
I recall Robin from Teen Titans Go! at one episode saying something on the lines of "there's only one way to fight people with money: with more money!" - and it seems we haven't been able to find another way indeed.
The protests and boycott on Reddit at the end did absolutely nothing to improve it or turn people to its alter atives (at most some power hungry mods were sacked, like that one from r/art who banned someone because they said their art was done by ai). The "mass" migration of people to Bluesky seem to lose its momentum already. The Cambridge Analytica scandal did nothing to make Facebook less miserable.
It seems we are stuck in this worst version possible of internet and all things around it as long as there is absurd amounts of money governing it.
All of this is propped up by the middle and lower class, and even lower class in nondeveloped countries.
People don’t use them, and continue to donate content to Instagram and TikTok.
There are hundreds of phones that still have headphone jacks and large batteries, too.
Let’s not pretend that this isn’t an ongoing choice by consumers.
And the author is not the sole owner of the site, anyway, and likely has little control over the site's overall aesthetic or monetization.
Plus---what's with all the conspiratorial language? "Beg"? "Conscious choice"? "makes a profit"? "Spying"? Like... fuck off. Maybe none of that applies at all? You have no way of knowing. There's no point in seeing the complete worst in it.
But on the other, a person with a few thousand dollars of hardware and some know-how can produce feature length films in their home and distribute them on video sharing sites. This capability is only going to get better.
The next generation of Indie films may be good art like we used to get in theaters. Exploring weird ideas and themes deemed too risky for the mainstream.
Nowadays that style and quality is just expected from one of the bigger drama series in any streaming service.
Agree with you it's quite strange how people seem to have rose coloured glasses from that era.
So much of what is on Netflix feels like a Hallmark Special with better writing and cinematography. It’s still empty calories.
Black mirror was a British show first. I don’t know the others except for Man on the Inside - I’m skeptical, but if it turns out to as good as The Good Place, it will be impressive for Netflix.
Before the internet, Mills & Boon used to sell a hell of a lot of cheap paperbacks with much the same story in them. Or Arthur Hiller books. None of it was even approaching art but it sold well and people liked it.
A lot of the accusations that "Netflix is 99% dreck" is reflected in the top 10 list they handily generate for you. It simply means to me that I don't look on Netflix for something to watch, having seen the garbage getting watched on there. It says more about me than Netflix though and being judgy about other peoples taste shouldn't be mistaken for diagnosing the internets enshittification. These things are not the same.
1994 Top 50 Movies https://www.imdb.com/list/ls076329509/ You can recognise every of these movies by title
Here TOP 50 movies list has no title from big streaming services: https://www.imdb.com/chart/top/
I don't know what the point of your second list is. It's never been the case that streamers or cable channels (their nearest antecedent) were big producers of movies. But streamers --- unlike cable channels --- did manage to produce CODA, Killers of the Flower Moon, The Irishman, Buster Scruggs, Roma, Dolemite, and Glass Onion.
(I will stick up for Heat, but my god, the shoulder pads).
No, they're almost all terrible and as far as I can tell most people can't find anything new to watch, or if they're lucky they can find one or two things to almost get into. The trick is that there's no way to find out how many people are watching things any more, and that keeping your subscription going is binary. You can accumulate a huge amount of personal dissatisfaction before actually cancelling.
The main thing I'm hearing about these grossly padded, awful series, is that after people get interested by the pilot, they increasingly start fast forwarding through more and more of the episodes until they're consuming them so quickly they might as well be watching a digest of the "previously on...", until they get so disgusted by the repeated slights to their intelligence that even this they can't even stomach. Giving up a subscription also means giving up the archive of the "vibrant film and television" from "the era immediately preceding streaming," that even though they may have seen it before, is pleasant to leave playing in the background.
Production values are very high. Dialog is sometimes very good. Series are high-concept, but empty, endless and awful, and I even feel sorry for the writers that have to keep generating scenes with one character walking up to another character who is busy working on something and says: "how are you holding up?" There are going to be five of those in this episode, and maybe one thing that advances the plot.
Apple TV has all the money in the world, and just generates clumsy high-priced disasters. I have no idea how bad the corporate culture can be in these places to actively repel any story that is any good. I think the problem is that they're not making enough cheapo series where talent could accidentally sneak in because no one was paying attention.
It would be interesting if sending an email to an address would cost money, and the owner of the address would set the price.
I'm certainly not saying "blame the consumer", but if people really don't like ads so much (to the extent that they stop clicking on them), really dislike the subpar streaming services so much (to the extent that they unsubscribe) — then why haven't they abandoned these products?
There are other countries where valuing quality seems to be more deeply embedded in the culture, and most people in these countries will reject subpar offerings altogether. I think the U.S. has had a uniquely precipitous fall in this regard — the average person just doesn't seem to care that much. Why this is the case, I'm not sure, but it's not surprising that since Silicon Valley is located in the U.S., the region simply optimizes on whatever (revealed) consumer preferences return the most. Tech companies are certainly not unique in this regard.
In my observation/bubble, people actually do:
- I rarely click on ads (though I admit the reason is typically much more mundane: nearly all ad networks don't really "get" my interests. When they (rarely) actually do, the common situation is that I recently bought such a product, and thus clearly don't need another one when the advertising networks realize my interest and show me ads).
- Many people install ad blockers.
- Many people that I am aware of who are annoyed of streaming either did cancel some subscription(s) or never got one.
Well I thought so too. I match those behaviors, and I don't even watch television. But then I worked at a tech company where I could see the actual data on consumer preferences and behaviors, and it's fairly undeniable: most people aren't like you, me, or the average commenter on Hacker News.
Why not? You’re exactly right that people will rant and rave about wanting a higher quality option all day long, but as soon as one comes along very few people will actually pay for it.
This happens with niche product preferences too. For years it felt like the consensus across the internet was that phones are too big and if Apple would make a smaller phone it would sell like hotcakes. Apple finally did make a smaller phone and it had relatively few sales.
> I think the U.S. has had a uniquely precipitous fall in this regard.
I disagree about this, though. The more I’ve traveled and been exposed to other cultures, the more I appreciate how much choice and opportunity we have. I have slowly learned that U.S. consumers have some of the most insatiably high expectations, though. It leads to a lot of disappointment, but when you go below the surface you discover then wants are for something that checks all boxes without any compromises (good, fast, cheap) or they want we already have but think the cost should be negligible or even free. There’s another variation where we want quality to go up, the workers to be paid more, but the prices to go down.
Complaining about how terrible private company is doesn't change anything.
There's no good reason why the internet needs to be this bad.... aside from an irrational demand for continual returns, damn the cost to humanity. There are, in fact, better ways to run society than begging the rich to care about the rest of us. Anyone who says alternatives to capitalism are unrealistic are lying to your face.
What I haven't seen is Socialism scaling in any sustainable way above, roughly, Dunbar's Number[1].
I submit, looking at human history, that the non-scalabity is intrinsic, and that capitalism is relatively less-worse approach.
The Socialists seem to do a better job of providing a crypto-religious veneer.
Socialists and Communists certainly tried to take control of Germany, but they never succeeded. As the Nazi party took power, they were opposed every step of the way by communist forces, even as nearly every other major pillar of German society (excepting a few segments like the Catholic Church and, for a time, the Wehrmacht) fell totally in line. It was the conservatives, not the communists, who betrayed Europe to fascism, war, and genocide.
Bitte. Please.
The KPD paramilitaries (with their various assassinations) and the the SPD (through their alliance with various reactionist forces at the time and the far greater violence they supported) did their part as well. And that's just Germany, not to mention events in Spain, etc.
It was a mutual effort.
When people talk about their dream for an 'evolved capitalism' it often comes down to New Deal America plus free healthcare. Yet even setting aside how the post-WW2 economy was a singular moment that we cannot hope to recapitulate, you have to ask: if we _had_ this, and everyone thought it was great, why did we give it up? Or rather, why was it taken away from us?
This is the second fork of 'why not capitalism'? The first -- that capitalism, left to its own devices, produces increasingly terrible ('misaligned') results, is not enough. The second -- that capitalism, as a system of power distribution, strongly incentivizes people to work against any attempts at regulating it, and indeed to roll back those regulations -- is what cinches the issue.
Or you can look at the top X stocks on Wall Street and see how many exist in subsequent decades.
The constants here are human nature and the capitalist/socialist tension.
Like, if I take HTTP and then change the port number to 8080 (lower layer change), or use it to host interactive videos (higher layer change), it's not an evolution of HTTP, it's still just HTTP.
Worked until technology shrunk the world and WWI happened and the Administrative State began building a Progressive Tower of Babel under Woodrow.
If you are interested in affecting substantive improvement, see https://conventionofstates.com/
Capitalism is the worst, and it’s the best we’ve got (so far).
Which is a lot like the title text of XKCD 1357.
People do not scale in a linear fashion.
Ignore reality at your peril.
Oh, and: "Merry Christmas".
Merry Christmas to you too.
Compare how bad things are in the US for many people, directly due to a lack of regulation in many instances. Healthcare pre-Obamacare is a great example.
Compare that things are generally better in countries with more regulation like NZ and Norway.
Consider then that even more regulation is possible to improve things.
Yeah, sure. You keep believing that.
>Compare how bad things are in the US for many people, directly due to a lack of regulation in many instances. Healthcare pre-Obamacare is a great example.
The regulation has done so well to reign in healthcare corporations that people are shooting healthcare ceos in cold blood on the streets and people are cheering about it.
It's not a question of belief, the evidence is clear as day.
> The regulation has done so well to reign in healthcare corporations that people are shooting healthcare ceos in cold blood on the streets and people are cheering about it.
The GOP is extremely resistant to any regulation and went out of there way to cripple Obamacare as much as they could.
If your takeaway from my previous comment was that regulation in the US is working well, I invite you to re-read it.
Yeah, sure. The economic system that is boiling the planet and will make it unlivable is the best thing ever!
You can’t patch a fundamentally failed system.
The claim that capitalism is fundamentally failed is one that needs support, given that it is capitalist countries that have the highest quality of life and are highest on the happiness indices.
You wouldn't use past failed examples of socialism to argue socialism is fundamentally flawed, would you?
I understand you disagree with me and may be dismissive of my position, but let's try to assume good faith and keep this civil, please? We may end up finding we agree more than disagree.
I simply disagree. Read the book.
> Compare that things are generally better in countries with more regulation like NZ and Norway.
I don't think they fixed the problem either.
I've read plenty of books criticizing capitalism. How about you read some in support if it?
> I don't think they fixed the problem either.
Twist: They did.
This is exactly what is discussed in this great article: https://www.wheresyoured.at/never-forgive-them/
tl;dr: I find the author's reasoning very similar to the one by Cory Doctorow about enshittification, however this goes more into precice details how users suffer.