Internet 20 years later:
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What size was it?
The internet and our vision for the internet 20+ years ago was awesome because only nerds, visionaries, and weirdos were willing and capable enough to stomach the (relatively) terrible UX. The assumption being that the lowest common denominator of people could be thought that vision while the UX could be improved.
Turns out that’s wrong. The mainstream is online, and instead of adapting to the possibilities and new ways of thinking afforded by the internet, the mainstream instead choses to adapt the internet to cater to the needs of the lowest common denominator and keep doing things the way we’ve always done them. It’s a complete compromise.
I’m note sure if the nerds and visionaries and weirdos just stopped fighting for the vision of the internet, or if they are being outvoted.
I’m not even sure that’s the case. I think who technology is catering to are a couple corporation and marketing people. Look at forced light mode on web sites that started at mid-00’s or the typical soulless 2D logo design of the 2010’s. Or non-removable batteries… Is this good for anyone? No, it’s only because of some people decided that’s how it’s gonna be, or to sell more shit.
Large corporations are making decisions on behalf of users, yes, but those decisions are ultimately still dictated by the users, because those users choose to use those systems and products instead of learning and adapting to the new possibilities afforded by the internet and community-driven enterprise. The non-removable battery example you share is an interesting one. I guess people are not incentivised to care/incentivised not to care (e.g. slimmer phone, cheaper manufacturing). We’ve got the same problem with the environment and climate change: lack of incentive to make good, sustainable decisions.
Scaling is a really hard problem to solve. The hardest part isn’t even the technology. It’s the user. It’s PEBKAC. Bad actors, catering to techno-phobes, competing/conflicted interest, teaching hard lessons and new concepts at scale. This takes a very long time. And unfortunately, even then people forget history and the lessons that come with it.
I am excited for fediverse though. It’s an opportunity to start fresh again, but most importantly the federation/defederation nature makes the dissolution by the masses slightly less of a concern.
Nobody can know everything, or have the time to care about stuff that’s not of major interest to them.
A stay-at-home parent with 6 adopted kids, or someone who just started a new furniture business, or a granpa who still drives a truck from 1950’s, simply don’t have the time to learn and understand every little aspect of modern technology, never mind the privacy implications or such.
Which is fine, problem is that the corpos then take advantage of the people. That’s what it is, not catering to them, taking advantage. Take the typical T&C one needs you neednto “agree” on to use the damn phone you just bought - is that designed to be useful to the user? Is that catering? No, it’s about stripping every bit of money, privacy and data legally and illegally possible while providing just enough service that the user is incentivized to stay on the chains and to buy more shit.
And if you don’t wanna, you just get punished or at least inconvenienced. This Cloudflare and other captcha shit - does it actually “check the security”? Bullshit, but if you come with a Chrome browser logged in to your Google and MS accounts like a good little user, you don’t get this kind of inconvenience.
Garbage tech. Makes me hate the sites using it, just like Google’s dumpster-juice tier captchas. Might not be so awful if they made it stick, but these tech leviathans can’t manage it apparently. I click over to a site I’ve never been on. Cloudflare: 😲🫴🦋 is this a botnet?
I like your smiley based butterfly meme! 😁
Same. Will be using this in the future.
Cloudflare’s pretty cool, actually! This is a case of the bearer of bad news getting shot.
Normally a site using Cloudflare shouldn’t show a page like this at all, it’ll just load normally. But, then, let’s say there’s a giant traffic spike or some script kiddie pays for a botnet-provided DDoS attack.
Without Cloudflare (or the like): You see: The server is overwhelmed and the site doesn’t load, except maybe very rarely. You think: The site is crap and they can’t keep their servers up! But you should blame: the botnet or the lack of server capacity
With Cloudflare (or the like): You see: an (admittedly annoying) interstitial, and then the site loads (probably) You think: Cloudflare is garbage! It’s making me wait to access this page! But you should blame: the botnet or the lack of server capacity
So, yeah, it’s annoying, but less so than not being able to access the site. Also, Cloudflare is a big fan of net neutrality and helps certain sites at times, too.
I get cloudflare every time i visit some websites
The site owner can configure how often it should show, or maybe Cloudflare just considers you risky.
or maybe Cloudflare just considers you risky
Jokes and whinging aside, you’ve touched on the real complaint, or mine anyway. They should toss me a cookie or whatever. OK cloudflare, my request is coming from a nasty network; but you declared ☑ my browser to be fine and me to be human and our “connection secure” two minutes ago. Remember my browser, pretty please?
The ‘Challenge Passage’ is another site owner configurable setting and it ranges from 5 minutes to a year (I believe the default is 30 minutes).
Basically Cloudflare has heaps of settings for everything they do, most of the things people complain about are on the site owner, usually not Cloudflare.
There’s also Privacy Pass, which stores the result of your CAPTCHA for the next 30 CAPTCHAs IIRC, but as you might guess, the site owner can disable it.
fuck Cloudflare
Immediately hitting the back button.
Try again 8x. Nine successful answers later, “we’ve detected unusual traffic from your IP, thanks for the answers sucker”
Clownflair is the ultimate cancer. Google, Amazon and Facebook were not enough, Clownflair had come and enshittyfy even those sites not contaminated by the big players.
