Dollar Tree.
It used to have been an unreal experience witnessing the existence of these stores when they came out. Everything for a $1. No joke. The quality of some things have had corners cut and the quantity might’ve been laughable, but there was a good solid purpose for these stores.
And then I started seeing the signs after a few good solid years of shopping there. The first sign was how they stopped selling eggs. This was before the Bird Flu. They stopped selling eggs because they simply couldn’t afford to buy stock and then the price hike to $1.25 happened.
And now they’ve hiked the prices again to $1.50 for some products in a handful of stores. Additionally, they’ve incorporated items going from $2 ~ $15 so they have long lost the role and title of being the most affordable places to shop.
Gone were the days.
The internet. We’ve had a solid few years, but it has become a giant heap of shit for the most part.
Back then, not everything was an AI generated, SEO, ad riddled, interaction fishing, time wasting, data collecting nightmare with auto-playing videos and a dark pattern employing cookie banner.
Not enshittified. We still pay a monthly fee for access to the internet and it still operates in the same way as it did back in the 90s.
There was auto-playing music, auto-playing gifs, auto-playing banners all over the place, and it was always for time-wasting. It’s literally not changed. Maybe its inhabitants have changed, but it’s largely exactly the same as it was.
The days of randomly happening on goatse from clicking some link in a chat room are basically gone, and places are far more moderated than they ever have been. Open source software exists for anything and everything you could possibly do, and with an adblocker, you see none of that shit - which you should have been running 30 years ago, as well as today.
Additionally, everyone keeps piling onto this “AI Generated” bandwagon even though a bunch of it isn’t. Any time they see a mistake, they think it’s AI and not some basement-grown dweeb with a inferiority complex.
The term “Enshitification” encapsulates when a high quality service exists, and is reduced in quality for the purposes of profit. If anything, the internet grants higher quality access to things today than it ever has; for cheaper prices, and faster speeds…
I’m paying $60 a month for symmetrical gigabit fiber access to the internet. Gigabit upload speeds! For 60 a month! How in tf world is that worse than what we had before?
it still operates in the same way as it did back in the 90s
IT guy here, this is just not true.
Back in the 90s, HTTPS was released in 1994, I remember in the early 2000s that Internet Explorer would warn you that a page was using HTTPS, these days it just the opposite.
The internet has been encrypted, where is mostly ran in plaintext before.
Then we have the content on the internet.
We used to read webpages, mostly static HTML, these days the vast majority of websites is running a content engine, say Wordpress or other backend system that you push content onto. This is a gigantic shift, especially for private websites, sure many people used geocities, but many, many built their own webpage as HTML using a WYSIWYG editor, and just uploaded the file to a server.
Plenty also wrote their own HTML code and built the webpage like that.
These are just two examples of how the internet has massively changed since the 90d
Also the traffic is monopolized in platform silos
I think both of you are right.
I agree with the three of you.
How fast it is doesn’t matter. We can “do” more on the internet today, but the experience is absolutely more annoying and shitty than it was in the 90s.
Most of my time on the internet I e generally been able to avoid disruptive tracking and ads. No more. Even for subscriptions: Boston Globe online games require that ad blocking be disabled.
Most importantly, I just got a new iPad. I paid a crap load of money for something like ten times as fast as the old one, desperately needed …… to look at web pages. Video and games were fine with the kid one, but web pages were not. Now I can browse again
AI is definitely a problem. I can’t remember the last time I tried to Google something technical and didn’t have to wade through 2 pages of links to more or less the same slop that didn’t actually answer anything. The internet peaked in like 2013.
Google Search. Or search in general. Now it’s all shit and you have to convince it that you actually want to search what you want and not what it thinks you want. Which is sometimes hard and other times impossible. I miss Google Search, it seriously was the best.
Man, Google search back in the day was great. No search categories like images, shopping, videos, etc. Just give it a query and you get what you wanted. God had no idea what was on the second page of results because the first page had what you wanted in the first half. Your ability to find what you wanted depended on your ability to use the search terms and modifiers.
The week I changed from HotBot to Google was a revelation. The jump from barely scraping the surface of the web to being able to find anything was like finally getting the full promise of the internet. Can’t be undersold how great Google was from 2001-03 until around 2013-16.
It was so good that “googling it” is still in common parlance, even though the phrase has baggage and isn’t used in the same case-closed tones as it once was.
Oh man, and when all the Boolean operators were revealed to work on search, doing some “Google-Fu” was laughably easy, but blew people away. Back before there was so much noise, anything online was possible to find.
I know they took away my negative operator, which is the main one I used. The anger is still fresh years later.
Yeah, that was the last straw TBH.
I occasionally have to do some OSINT-ish research online, and it keeps getting harder and harder to get what I nerd from Big G. So much noise and trash. 2019 was the year they jumped the shark.
I haven’t used Google in a few years (in fact all Google servers are blocked on my network) but I still can’t stop saying “I’ll Google it.”
Wow, I recalled AltaVista, Lucia and Excite but have not thought of HotBot in forever.
I’m sorry I came to this late, but this one’s really the best answer.
We talk a lot about how kids are struggling to recognize fake news, find reputable sources, etc… but I also think about how hard it is to find decent sources these days! I honestly can’t comprehend how kids are learning to do research projects and so on without the ability to easily search for stuff on the internet.
And while there’s lots of stuff on this threat that was cool while it lasted, I think search engines are one of those things where we never even considered the possibility it would change. Businesses fail, prices go up, experiences get skimped on, but search engines were goddamn magic. They just were. Why would anyone ever want to make them worse? The idea never even crossed out minds.
It goes deeper IMO. Search no longer respects the user as an autonomous individual with self determination. It has stollen your digital citizenship.
Yeah it’s just starting to look like where no matter what search engine you use almost, they just spit out garbage results. And they try way too hard in being the swiss-army knife of everything.
I have switched from google to a SearXNG instance and i am more than satisfied. For german stuff i use another instance which gives me more local results. I am thinking about hosting my own instance in the future.
Definitely did not take this for granted. Between 2004 and 2010ish it was remarkable how effective Google was. It’s still alright, just not as good as before.
Kagi Krew represent
Haven’t had the time to try it yet, but really doubt it’s better than Google at its peak performance.
Is Kagi the AI powered thing? Or am I mistaking it with something else?
No, not AI powered. Just a great search engine. The closest you’ll get to OG google.
Netflix back in the day. A near-limitless catalog of ad-free movies and TV for $8/month. If you tried selling that today, people would think it was a scam
I remember first hearing about Hulu sometime around 2007-8 and thinking it was a scam. Free (good) TV for one 30 second ad.
I first watched Sons of Anarchy for free on Hulu!
For me it’s not so much that the price increased. It’s that what you get for the money vanished.
I’d pay $40 a month to have a modern version of the Netflix that existed back in 2013.
Now if you want to have that you’ve got to have netflix, hulu, HBO Max, Showtime, peacock, and 15 other services and spend $35,400 a month for all of them and it’s just not worth the money, time, and hassle.
And even if you did get all of it, the experience would be awful trying to figure out which service has what you want to watch
I knew Netflix existed as a dvd service but back in like 2009 the first streaming ads I saw were on flash game sites so I thought they were scams.
You know those like sign up for blank free trial and you’ll get 5000 fun bucks in shellshock or whatever
It didn’t help that Netflix was also one of the big users of pop-up ads back when that was a thing. I’ve never forgiven them for that either.
