And since you won’t be able to modify web pages, it will also mean the end of customization, either for looks (ie. DarkReader, Stylus), conveniance (ie. Tampermonkey) or accessibility.
The community feedback is… interesting to say the least.
What the fuck is happening to the internet recently?
Twitter and Reddit CEOs completely losing their minds, and now Google of all companies wants to lock down the whole internet?
This isn’t even close to being okay. It’s 100% bullshit.
Interest rates going up means investors are demanding more profit so all the tricks web companies have held off on till now are coming out.
A lot of them never had to make a profit before.
Rich idiots threw money at anything because while a million dollars is more than the vast amount of us will ever have, to them it’s like buying a lotto scratcher.
The underlying issue is wealth imbalance.
That wealth imbalance also pushes companies to force dumb shit like this on thier customers.
If Google were to just come out with a $10 a month plan that removed all the sleazy ways they try and profit from you, the overwhemling response would be “Oh great yet another subscription”, because these subscriptions have become a significant chunk of people’s income each month.
But what if greedy neoliberals hadn’t been pocketing our pay rises for $20 years and that subscription was functionally $1? Most people would be happy to blow $20 supporting 20 different content providers.
Unfortunately, their greed is insatiable. There’s always a room of executives doing their grubby little sums. “If people have $1, they probably have $2. We could double our profits! Then double our salaries!”.
Inflation just means “If rich people find out you’ve got more money, they’ll fuck you out of that too”.
The $1 will never be enough. They’ll keep charging more and more until people have nothing left to hand over. Then they’ll figure out more ways to squeeze a profit out of you. Manipulating you with ads, selling your private data, turning your body into expensive dogfood – whatever makes them a few more cents.
And one of the primary reasons they never had to make a profit was that, so long as interest rates were functionally zero, it didn’t really cost the investor class much of anything to park money in a money losing operation while waiting for it to become sellable.
With interest rates back to pre-2008 levels, though, there’s a price to money again. And a real opportunity cost. So, compete with bonds or watch your investors walk.
It’s like in Silicon Valley when the VC tells them they don’t need to be profitable they just need to market, then as soon as he dips below technically being a billionaire he demands that they focus on being profitable immediately
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Honestly, this second half of 2023 for me has been about finding FOSS options for literally everything. And eventually I’ll have a home server I can use for the things I can’t use on the cloud
The enshittification of the internet shall continue.
We will fight and we will lose, as depressing as it sounds. The vast majority of people just don’t and won’t care.
We’re on Lemmy. We’re already winning!
We may win a battle or few, but not the war.
Then i’ll scrape the songs i currently watch on youtube with jdownload and stop using the page otherwise.
All they do is make the internet less attractive. Now that works to increase profits for a while, but eventually the content creators withdraw, the platforms become worse and eventually uncool and people stop using it, or use it less. Facebook is on a decline in western countries. We went through multiple video snippet apps already and tiktok and instagram too will be declining eventually.
We dont have to win the war because the war will never end. We just gotta make the best out of the battlefields we win.
But a small minority of really determined people is enough to change the world 🙌
I love to see how people nowadays find easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism… That’s how they’ve been brainwashing us till now.
You’ll finish your enshittification and you’ll like it!
I know, right? It’s so weird. In every single instance of some bullshit happening it’s easy to brush it off as incompetence or an attempt at profit maximization, but overall it feels a lot like some kind of targeted disassembly of whatever made the internet great and facilitated open discussions.
I don’t think it’s coordinated, I think it all starts from the same root cause: Silicon Valley Bank failed. These companies all need to do something they’ve really not done much of in the past: turn a profit. But these companies are not run by the business geniuses we were once convinced were running the show. Most of them live so far removed from a normal persons life that they don’t understand what motivates us, what we want in a platform, and as soon as we provide feedback after they’ve already made a decision, they decide it’s because we don’t understand the squeeze they’re under to make money.
- Twitter: Elon Musk thinks he could make more money from subscriptions than advertisements. The whole thing’s a disaster because that’s really dumb. This case may be a little different though because there’s some evidence Musk just wanted more people to see his tweets and to pay people to be his friend
- Reddit: Spez fails to see that he has multiple revenue sources available to him so long as he keeps his users around. Somewhere, there was the right balance of charging for the API at a reasonable price, performing better market research on his user base to provide a better ad platform, and keeping the Reddit coin system in place as the base liked it because the user base paid more for that than most similar online payment schemes.
- Google: this is the scary one. This is the one that seems like they know exactly what they’re doing. They’re ramping up their enshittification following the fall of SVB, but the way they’re doing it is both malicious and a minor enough inconvenience that the majority of their users will stay. And they’re doing it in small quiet ways. A little bit of tweaking how YouTube bans users here. A little bit of RFCs about DRM on the web there. Some PRs to chromium and android no one will notice. All to squeeze more ads into peoples online experiences. Their search product has been utter shit for about 6 years now, but people still prefer it over Bing or DuckDuckGo (which is a wrapper for Bing). They’ve learned the following lesson: if you’re big enough, the citizens of the web will let you do it
That’s a good write up, thanks. I don’t claim it’s coordinated, just that it feels more and more that way.
Also, I switched to DDG a year or so ago and I haven’t heard that it was a wrapper for Bing. So I went to google it (I can’t not use this verb when talking about online searches, lol), and it seems like it’s not really the case. It gets some results from bing and utilises their ads to make profit, but it seems like it’s a small part of their output. Is that incorrect? Do you have some more info about it being a wrapper? I’m kinda curious now
I 100% would have signed up for Reddit Premium and payed monthly for Sync access if they had allowed me to hand them the money. Oh well ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
DuckDuckGo is not a wrapper for Bing, but is in fact a distinct and independent search engine. DDG does grab some results from bing. but it also grabs from other sources and it’s own crawler.
Elon Musk wanted to drive Twitter into the dirt once he was forced to buy it. Criticism, jet tracking, rejection of fascist-adjacent opinions that are “logical” but only if you’re a heartless engineering robot.
His hubris forced him into buying it, but once he had to, he might as well destroy it. How else do you think he got the Saudis in on it for another billion?
I laughed about this theory at first, just memeing it like “ha could you even imagine?” But every single day it seems more and more like he does the worst thing possible to “monetize” and then gripes about it like the only reason his brilliance isn’t working is because big mean liberal woke mind virus society is trying to do cancel culture because they’re just jealous he’s rich.
Duckduckgo is a wrapper for bing? No wonder it sucks… I want to like it, but the results are usually pretty bad in comparison to Google. Takes me much longer to find what I’m looking for with DDG. :/
I have exactly the opposite experience. Google has gone to shit, and duckduckgo gets me there faster 90% of the time. Plus the results are short and concise, or immediately helpful.
The SEO of the internet has really fucked googles algorithm. At least with duckduckgo I can end the search with !g to switch to google if I need a second go, but you cannot !d in google.
I’m using an anonymous browser and for me often DDG has better results than Google now. My Google-fu used to be on point but recently I can’t seem to find sites that aren’t SEO traps.
It can be a combo of several objectives:
- make a shitload of money
- stop people from realising we’re making a shitload of money off of their backs
- keep people poor so that even if they do realise there’s nothing they can do about it
Google has already been a worthless pos for years. Impossible to get relevant results, even with operators. You just get ads and irrelevant SEO sites. And adding “reddit” at the end of the query will probably not work so well in the future either, seeing how that site has also gone to shit.
And they have already tried monopolising the entire internet with their amp bullshit.
So this is just in line with their vision of making the whole internet into a pile of burning shit under their total control.
What the fuck is happening to the internet recently?
Capitalism is spreading further into the dark reaches of the internet.
Because for the first time in 14 years money is no longer free.
Right now the interest rate sits at 5% and it will remain there for the foreseeable future. Investors no longer have the patients to wait for growth because bonds are actually investable now, so all your “get user first find business later” companies began to panic and tries to squeeze everything out of its users.
Hilariously, the only social media company that will come out of this relatively unharmed is probably Facebook, because their unethical practices actually makes money
Recently? This is a long time coming. Users have been accepting all kinds of shit from big players without complaint. Even if they protest it’s usually just performative and they keep using the services, sites and software that violates all kinds notions of user and privacy rights. Most people unfortunately are (understandably) not equipped to really even understand the kind of shady shit these companies pull on the daily. The internet is going to shit and its users will gobble it up and ask for more. It has been frustrating watching this happen, but there’s really very little that can be done.
The main problem with us users is that we are god damn lazy. We want everything to be the most convenient it possibly can be.
Remember when Apple updated iOS to allow users to stop cross-app tracking, which severly upset the Zuck, that absolute manchild?
Turns out that if you actually inform people and give them a clear choice to make, the overwhelming majority of users do in fact not agree with being tracked, as an example.
The tech sector just hit a major correction recently. Wall Street found companies like Google to be overvalued and as such their stocks suffered. This is Google trying to claw back some of that value. See step 3 in the enshittification process. This isn’t just Google. It’s the entire tech sector.
and now Google of all companies wants to lock down the whole internet?
Of all the companies, Google always seemed the most likely, both to want to and to be successful. They’ve tried before, sometimes in small ways, sometimes in larger more obvious ways (AMP, the implementation of content filtering in Chrome etc.).
They’re the world’s largest advertising and data harvesting company. It’s their business. Of course they want to lock the internet down to serve their goals of learning as much about you as possible and using that data to shove ads in your face.
Whenever using any Google/Alphabet product you have to ask yourself, “am I ok with this thing I’m about to use being built by the world’s largest advertising company?”. The answer should be “no” more than it is “yes”, particularly for things that have access to lots of your data, like web browsers, phones, home speakers etc.
Luckly we still have free platforms like lemmy, browsers like Firefox, networks like tor or i2p, torrents, monetary system like bitcoin.
We can step out of the world of and we are the ones who have the most intruments to do so.
I haven’t read the replies but there was a very interesting episode by Derek Thomson’s Plain English podcast which I found incredibly interesting.
Derek made the conjecture that we were on a cusp of a big paradigm shift in the Internet.
For the last 20 years, it was essentially about building a consumer basis. So companies like Netflix and Facebook and Amazon did not care about current profits. The point was to just get consumers, drive out the competition, and commandeer the monopoly.
Now and especially post Covid companies like Twitter are realising that this isn’t going to work. The next movement is going to all be about paying models. This is what we’re seeing with Twitter. This is what we’re seeing with OnlyFans or Patreon.
So in light of the above comments, none of this is surprising. The next era will be about paid models of the internet.
I need to find that episode as it was extremely prophetic. It might have potentially been this one https://open.spotify.com/episode/2zRha9y46btKdAfwfHpvQ5?si=_jkP3iX7TXOesHLsoY9Vxw
Sounds you might enjoy the Enshittification of TikTok article floating around. It explains quite well the mechanism why a site have to becoming worse and worse over time.
Their fake advert viewing numbers and YouTube’s inability to monetise without ruining itself are forcing them to think of new ways to encrapsulate user’s and drain their wallets.
Instead of, you know, providing a service people want and would pay for.
AI happened. The promises, benefits, opportunity for massive financial gain, and the clear and present danger of how transformative it can be have all caused internet-bases companies to throw out the rulebook and lose their collective minds.
Check out “enshittification”
One comment mentions possible incompability with article 22 of the GDPR, and I sure hope the EU will stand their ground on this.
I can only imagine noyb letting all hell break loose. We need more people like him, dissecting corporations legal bs to find every last little thing we can possibly hold against them.
Obligatory use Firefox
Let’s hope there’s already a law that the EU can find to apply (since they already don’t like the non-EU dominance of big tech), or that they make one in time.
I was just thinking that I’m sure Google will lobby the US government to get this model enforced as law, making it illegal for anyone to create workarounds, or alternative browsers. And the US legislative government being what it is, will hand Google whatever legislation it wants to turn their nightmare into a reality.
It is imperative to make as many people as possible aware
The EU is rapidly becoming a neoliberal hellehole resembling the US. I no longer have any hope for existing institutions resisting corporate encroachment. Best that can be done is the support of initiatives like the fediverse and foss in general but if the current trend continues even that is in a precarious position.
The EU is so utterly out of whack right now.
You got the proposal of chat control on one hand, and stuff like replaceable batteries on the other.
Like, make up your mind already, do you want to help your citizens or not? It’s almost like they do it on purpose to keep our expectations in check.
Obligatory use Firefox
No way. Why should I feel obligated to use something I feel has inferior UX and UI than the browser I’m using now? For Mozilla’s CEO to rais her wage (again): https://calpaterson.com/mozilla.html ?
You people are really delusional if you really think that Mozilla are the only good guys (or good guys at all, for that matters).
Inb4, unimaginative people downvoting just because they can’t stand different opinions.
What’s your alternative?
EDIT: Oh I just found in the profile. It’s Brave. I used it for half a year before I got tired of the crypto ads sneaking into my home page’s links no matter how many times I deleted them and of some other stuff. I prefer Firefox’s UI. Also I don’t expect any browser to be 100% ethical but Brave is below Firefox in that list for me
If you truly cared about the state of the internet youd only browse websites with wget and text editors
Or something
https://lynx.invisible-island.net/ come now, we don’t have to be barbarians, there’s text browsers out there
It doesn’t matter and it’s irrelevant here. I just despise Mozilla and their false morality. Use whatever you want.
It’s not irrelevant since you stated Firefox is less good than what you are using now. Of course people are interested in a feasible alternative. So, since you introduced it, what are you using instead?
So you’ll rather give in to blatant corporate greed?
What kind of Alt-Right logic is this?
I didn’t know I was so evil that I’m doing the world a worse place just because I prefer a different browser. And I’m ideologically far form alt-right, btw.
OTOH, talking about corporate greed:
that is a funny graph. Even assuming the data is true, it deliberately missrepresents market share as usage. Which pretty much neglects the fact hat maybe a person or two and a device with a browser or two have entered the market since then.
Also it does not have any information on source of the data, methodology, definition of the terms etc. So it is pretty much worthless as an argument.
Nice detective skills. I have the opposite view about Brave/Mozilla. But fine, we can agree to disagree and still be (virtual) friends.
Opposite view of what? Brave is peddling crypto bullshit
We don’t wanna be friends with crypto-bros here.
Cool. On my part I, as a non crypto-bro, don’t want to be friends with stupid people. So, I’ll ignore you from now on.
Nice one mate. Looks like your personality is well-received here. Maybe going back to Reddit might suit you better.
I downvoted you because you made a terrible case for yourself. Learn to make a salient point, or learn to love being “edgy”. the choice is up to you, but the internet already has plenty of the latter, why not become the former?
Nice to know that you downvoted me for no actual reason, as I didn’t make any “case”. Have a candy.
I feel obligated to raise awareness about these topics. I won’t prevent anyone from choosing Chrome, but at the very least it’s important for people to know what their choice can entail, and base their decision on that.
I won’t prevent anyone from using FF, either. I just think that the “obligatory use Firefox” is quite arrogant, to say the least. And, to be honest, I’m quite happy it’s not going to happen until FF is managed by Mozilla and their poor choices.
They’re not saying you should feel obligated to use Firefox. It’s a tongue-in-cheek joke about how everything FLOSS, Privacy or GDPR related always includes a comment thread about using Firefox. I use Brave too but you gotta read the room. Lemmy users in general are going to be much more pro-Firefox than anything else.
I understand. I just feel it’s quite arrogant ans annoying to be (indirectly) schooled by strangers on the internet who think they know better.
There is a huge difference between mozilla and google. That’s quite obvious to most. The ceo raising his salary is a problem for you, and you prefer Google, where they have enormous salaries and incomes? It’s one of the richest companies in the world.
Firefox doesn’t have inferior UX at all. It has more functions and features than chrome. It also has very good default privacy and the plugin system is amazing.
And it just became faster than chrome as well.
Keep being delusional, It’s free, after all.
The ceo raising his salary is a problem for you
It’s not for me (anymore). It should be for you. She was raising her salary while firing devs… But whatever. Mozillians are seldom rational.
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Moreover, Firefox’s UI is incomparably superior to that of Chrome.
No. It’s crap. Utter crap.
without considering the infinite userchrome.css customisations.
“Unsupported” and surely an incentive for less tech-savvy people to look elewhere. But whatever. I’ won’t bother to reply to anything else, as you’re statistically one of these persons that spend their life watching crappy youtube videos and buying shit on Amazon.
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What do you use?
Not Firefox.
I think they probably use Netscape
Indeed, I’d love Seamonkey to be a viable alternative, for instance.
You criticize but don’t even have the balls to name your browser? To back up your claims?
That is pathetic.
It’s Brave, as evidenced in their history. The browser that peddles crypto ads, has a transphobe CEO, and has been accused of selling copyrighted data
I surely deserve death for using a browser you don’t like. Jeez, people can be so obtuse sometimes…
Someone just insulted me and called me “alt-right” person or “crypto bro” (I’m neither of both). So, do you really think that I’m the pathetic one?
And… Which “claims”, by the way? I just said that I’m annoyed by people telling me “I should” do something and that I’ll decide by myself. Full stop. Coherently, I’m not giving you alternatives nor have I to disclose anything.
Sometimes it looks like one has to apologize for using Brave or Vivaldi or any other shit that didn’t come out from Mozilla’s ass. Keep using FF if this makes you happy. It made me happy for 20 years, but then I got fed up by 1) Mozilla, 2) Mozilla’s community 3) The browser itself.
Don’t worry. One day Mozillians will receive a reality bath and realise the farce they have supported.
This is the result of the world blindly using Chrome and other Chromium based browsers. Now with effectively full control over the browser that more than 90% of the world uses Google can force its will on the internet
And we saw this was going to happen at least 5 years ago. But since the majority don’t care, we get what we deserve I guess.
Let’s just hope this doesn’t go through.
Wait, is Google in the process of Embrace, Extend, Extinguish on the free internet?
Always have been, and they’re in it for the long game. They’ve already acquired a stupid amount of control on the web and web standards with everything from Chromium to Youtube, not to mention it doesn’t help that they basically control the world’s most popular mobile OS. Google wants it all if we let them.
Inb4 you can only browse the internet with Chromium.
Well, the engineers say it themselves: nothing would prevent websites developers to prevent access from browsers that do not support this “Web DRM”.
My biggest fear though is that it becomes a standard which all browsers will have to support to stay relevant. And with Google building the engine used by the vast majority of browsers, they can force this upon other browser engines (ie. Safari and Firefox).
It’s such a potent example why everyone who cares need to stop using Chromium based browsers before it’s too late. Stunts like this would be much harder to pull if there wasn’t a de facto browser monopoly.
Please drink verification can
ERROR! Piracy detected!
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Don’t give those monsters ideas
I literally swapped to Librewolf before the Rossman video was done. I was on Brave Browser before, but it’s based on Chromium. Fuck Chromium and fuck Google. Fuck this shitty amoeba that tries to spread into and control everything.
I will post stupid shit on my federated forum and you will fucking live with it Google. Fuck you. Burn. It’s time to break up the internet monopolies and do some trust busting. Someone pull FDR’s rotten corpse out of the grave and put it back to work.
So soon we’ll need uBlock Origin FitGirl Edition?
Hopefully we won’t have to deal with a uBlock Origin Empress Edition
Fuck DRMs and fuck these turds
And they went ahead and blocked comments now - “An owner of this repository has limited the ability to comment to users that have contributed to this repository in the past.”
Fucking cowards
EDIT: I went ahead and reported the distro as malware. Also, it feels like the internet is about to split in a open internet (basically just like tor) and a corporate internet where if you don’t pay the big tech you can’t access anything.
This is exactly the kind of thing that demostrates why DRM shouldn’t be part of the web standards. It’s very existence is abuse and this use even more so.
DRM needs to be illegal.
Google is hindrance to open web, like IE7 was with ActiveX.
Only difference is that IE7 wanted developers to develop for IE7, while Google also want to fully control the web and bend it according to its needs
And there’s zero chance of some other company dethroning Chrome like IE was. The only way that happens is with government intervention to protect the free market.
But of course antitrust enforcement is dead in this country, so that’s not happening. Just look at the obviously anticompetitive Activision acquisition that went through recently. Too many politicians slept through their economics classes, and they think that giant corporations are good for consumers.
I reported him on github, for all the good that will do.
I’m afraid that reporting him to another big corporation(Microsoft owns Github) is rather futile.
You’re right, why are we allowing the internet be be monopolized like this? it is futile because we’re basically giving up all control and forming a dependence on these few select tech companies.
Fediverse is the opposition to that
Next steps are getting rid capitalism
If you think that’s a realistic next step, you’re crazy.
“Please click on all the crosswalks before you can enter this site”
This is why people pirate things.Non-goals [...] Enforce or interfere with browser functionality, including plugins and extensions. [...]But guys they gave their pinky promise it’s totally fine
let’s just allow them to irreversibly make this change so that there is nothing preventing them from applying this totally Non-Goals in the future what could happen
Also
Challenges and threats to address
[...] Tracking users’ browser history User agents will not provide any browsing information to attesters when requesting a token. We are researching an issuer-attester split that prevents the attester from tracking users at scale, while allowing for a limited number of attestations to be inspected for debugging—with transparency reporting and auditability [...]Cross-site tracking
While attestation tokens will not include information to identify unique users, the attestation tokens themselves could enable cross-site tracking if they are re-used between sites. For example, two colluding sites could work out that the same user visited their sites if a token contains any unique cryptographic keys and was shared between their sites.Good to see where your priorities lie in terms of user protection when deciding to launch this into conversation. Dude idk we’ll fix it later don’t worry bro
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Same for “Security Considerations” lmao
https://rupertbenwiser.github.io/Web-Environment-Integrity/#security
Ben Wiser (Google) Borbala Benko (Google) Philipp Pfeiffenberger (Google) Sergey Kataev (Google)
Congratulations, guys. You are now internet pariahs. Your unrepentantly mercenary lack of engineering ethics is now recorded for all eternity. You have nobody but yourselves to blame.
