this post was submitted on 04 Oct 2024
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technology

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[–] [email protected] 91 points 2 months ago (3 children)

Even though not technically a rug pull, this is a rug pull. The end of real growth in the tech sector turned the internet into a cesspool. Not happy with stable returns these companies repositioned themselves as cybercriminals. They abused source contributors, collected donations as seed capital for launching for profits, and stole the data of billions. Taking inspirations from the villains in their beloved cyberpunk novels, they crafted a very real dystopia.

[–] [email protected] 46 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Kind of reminds me of this shockingly based rant I saw on /g/ once that discussed that even smartphones set computing backwards.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Honestly interested in reading this if you have it saved somewhere. I have been feeling this way as someone working in tech for close to two decades and I feel more and more vindicated every day. The web of the future looks like the web of the 80s (maybe the 90s if we can behave) because these mother fuckers kill everything they touch. Technological "progress" for progress' sake means nothing. I AM LUDDITE MAN / 410,757,864,530 DEAD COMPUTERS

[–] [email protected] 41 points 2 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 32 points 2 months ago

Don't worry investors! There's always more profit to be made finding more efficient means of killing kids in hospitals doomer

[–] [email protected] 67 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I tried to read the blog post but doublespeak and marketing crap gives me an insta-migraine so I checked Reddit.

Mozilla now doubling down on ads in Firefox

Did whoever wrote that pile of marketing gibberish actually say a goddamned thing?

Oh, they said something. They said they believe it’s right and proper for advertisers to intrude into our lives and steal our time and attention, and they’re going to help them do that while claiming to be the “good guys” by inventing some nonsense that “protects privacy” a little more. Never mind that everyone’s main objection to ads isn’t that they compromise our privacy; we object to ads because they intrude on our experience, waste our time and disrupt our ability to focus on the content we seek.

The obvious corollary to this is that ad blockers will eventually be crippled, just like on Chrome, no doubt with the same “security” excuse.

From another thread

"Advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of consumers" - founders of Google in 1998.

But the siren song of money always wins.

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[–] [email protected] 59 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (4 children)

Pack it up boyz, goin' back to books now. The internet is a fuck and everything will be an ad. uBlock Origin in all of its zeal and strength may not be enough to protect us from the endless and ceaseless onslaught that will be the internet to come.

[–] [email protected] 43 points 2 months ago

shinji-impact WHAT'S DONE IS DONE, IT FEELS SO BAD; WHAT ONCE WAS CONTENT NOW IS AD

[–] [email protected] 34 points 2 months ago (6 children)

Pack it up boyz, goin' back to books now. The internet is a fuck and everything will be an ad. uBlock Origin in all of its zeal and strength may not be enough to protects from the endless and ceaseless onslaught that will be the internet to come.

2035 - E-readers force you to watch an unskippable ad for 30 seconds between chapters. All physical books are banned.

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[–] [email protected] 24 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Hear me out... what if everything you say and do, whether you consent to it or not, put on The Cloud and then regurgitated back to you as a quirky "AI" podcast? smuglord

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[–] [email protected] 57 points 2 months ago

S P O N S O R E D L I N K S B Y P O C K E T

[–] [email protected] 54 points 2 months ago
[–] [email protected] 52 points 2 months ago

Scratching one more company off the very very short list of software corps I think I could work at without experiencing total self-loathing

[–] [email protected] 49 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Mozilla continues to do everything but make sure the product that people care about actually fucking works. Layoffs, investments in shit no one will care about (VPN, Pocket, AI etc.), and now wanting to become an ad company? Librewolf is a nice fork and all but the web fucking sucks now.

[–] [email protected] 34 points 2 months ago (1 children)

The internet is turning into an AI-generated soup that only renders properly on Chromium and tracks every one of your vital measurements to serve you optimal ads

[–] [email protected] 23 points 2 months ago

yes consumer, your gooch width is necessary information

[–] [email protected] 23 points 2 months ago

Tired point but the only reason Firefox works is because Google gives them some number of billions per year to make Google the default search engine

[–] [email protected] 46 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Everything on the Internet has to choose between forcing users to watch shitty ads, or selling white labeled shit from alibaba 😮‍💨

[–] [email protected] 23 points 2 months ago

Shitty video ads where some "personality" pretends to be really excited about some white labeled shit from alibaba

[–] [email protected] 43 points 2 months ago
[–] [email protected] 43 points 2 months ago (10 children)

Welp, time to start figuring out how to use Gemini (or alternatively RETVRN to Gopher).

In reality, the best parts of the web are (and have always been) text-based. I mean, obviously we have lots of fun with our emotes on Hexbear, but the essential feature is being able to communicate with each other via text. My favorite little corners of the internet are inevitably someone's niche blog or fansite which is almost 100% text-based. And, pivot-to-video be damned, the most effective and useful technical tutorials are text-based, especially since they can be easily updated and maintained.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

I used text-only browsers back when web2.0 shit was just getting started for years and I am prepared to go back to them. We don’t need any of this. We never have.

And, pivot-to-video be damned, the most effective and useful technical tutorials are text-based, especially since they can be easily updated and maintained.

This is correct but it is such a frustratingly hard sell to a younger generation, in my experience. Every god damn thing is in Discord now, a glorified IRC server with less security (somehow!) and minimal if any capabilities for locally hosted backups, and no one gives a shit lol. Decades of YouTube videos can not be archived, but it doesn’t matter. Hit that little bell icon, gamers

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[–] [email protected] 41 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (2 children)

This corporate bullshit is so difficult to read. I hate it. marx-angry

[–] [email protected] 25 points 2 months ago

It's always America, too. Microsoft’s must be the most profoundly unsettling.

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[–] [email protected] 38 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Everyimw I think about Mozilla I get sad. Like they'll just make a random feature like pocket so that /maybe/ the CEO can get paid more than several million dollars instead of spending that salary on actually making the browser better

[–] [email protected] 36 points 2 months ago (4 children)

I wish more people who claim they support capitalism realized this. Capitalism even sabotages those businesses.

It starts off with something that only hurts people (no big deal, right?) like suppressing pay and hiring as little people as possible (if anyone at all) so no jobs are being made of course this is all in the name of MuH eFfIcIeNcY.

Then the business itself suffers. How many smaller businesses like local cafes could have opened second or third locations in their local area if rent wasn’t so damn high? All the jobs that could have been created are gone. Quality products? Sorry but that would be bad for shareholders? All the people porky hired? He’s laying off all of ‘em, he’s richer than ever he just doesn’t need that many workers! Time to replace everyone with AI or my friends and family!

TL;DR: Rent seeking is a disease that kills what little fun there could be found in capitalism.

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[–] [email protected] 36 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Damn this website just got me onto Firefox like a year ago sadness

[–] [email protected] 41 points 2 months ago (1 children)

It's still better than Chrome.

[–] [email protected] 35 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Also, yes Mozilla, I'm sure the reason people aren't switching to Firefox is because it lacks good advertising support.

100%, Google is leaning into Mozilla to make this happen.

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[–] [email protected] 34 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I guess it's time to move to another browser very soon.

[–] [email protected] 34 points 2 months ago

Fuck the ad-based Internet right back to the putrid hole it came from. The second uBO stops working is the second I stop using that browser.

I wasn't always this way. I used to not block ads to help support creators. I used to have ads on my website 15 years ago. And for this transgression, I sincerely apologize.

Now I make money at my day job and everything I post, which is a substantial amount, is free and untracked (except for 5 days of web server request logs).

Sure I can't write full time with this model, but we're billions of people. If we each just made 10 minutes of good content a week, that's more than we can possibly consume.

And I'd rather have more good content than I could possibly read than the mountains of AI-generated SEO tripe that advertising brings.

[–] [email protected] 32 points 2 months ago (16 children)

So like, which fork is good?

[–] [email protected] 28 points 2 months ago

Ask 3 geeks for 8 answers

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[–] [email protected] 27 points 2 months ago

we may have to start making excuses for the lack of terror

[–] [email protected] 26 points 2 months ago

Nonono they’re pinky promising that they’re gonna be “””ethical””” so it’s completely ok now or something

[–] [email protected] 24 points 2 months ago (3 children)

I understand that a high quality web browser in this modern age is really expensive to develop. Mozilla, which is like an ant compared to the gorillas called Apple and Google, needs to find the funds it takes to develop that browser and pay the people who work on it.

That said, it's really the bigger picture here that's totally fucked. The web browser is supposed to be a tool for the user, not for the advertiser. I don't give a shit about someone else's advertising, or their ability to reach me and to target my attention span. But in many ways the advertising model props up the entirety of the modern web as we know it. It's kind of a condemnation of the entire ecosystem, but I don't know if anyone has thought of a sustainable alternative model.

Further, I view it as a kind of condemnation of the modern WWW that web browsers must be so complex. It feels like half of the development of web browsers is just based on supporting advertising in some way or another, and making sure the 700 ad scripts that run when you load a page don't bring the browser to a screeching halt (a form of supporting advertising). Another 25% is dedicated to making sure crap web frameworks like React run well.

There is real innovation in the web browsing space. Wasm, WebGL, and so on. The fact that you can play a fully interactive 3d game in your web browser without having to download and run it locally is impressive. But is it all really worthwhile?

The worst thing is I don't have an answer to any of this. I realize most of this stuff is extremely dumb and pointless, but it feels like the Internet has been totally overwhelmed with AI spam, shitty websites that necessitate javascript to even view them for basic information, and endless ad and user tracking. This announcement is especially rich because Firefox is still both better than Chrome & basically second class compared to it. Many web devs (or their employers) treat Chrome like the standard and Firefox as an afterthought. I just imagine now Mozilla taking that beautiful little fire fox and caging it and poking it with cattle prods to see if it can find new ways to make its ember glow.

I'd love for an alternative to the WWW to spring up, and you'd think something like the Gemini protocol could be it. But if you've ever used it, you'd realize it kind of sucks to use. A website like hexbear wouldn't even be possible on Gemini. It had its heart in the right place but doesn't meet the moment, and IMO never will.

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[–] [email protected] 24 points 2 months ago

Neat of them to remove the onereason I use Firefox.

Will try out librewolf or, sadly, go back to chromium forks.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I guess we've got to hope that the LadyBird project succeeds and we get a usable browser sometime before 2030 https://ladybird.org/

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[–] [email protected] 22 points 2 months ago (1 children)
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[–] [email protected] 22 points 2 months ago

fuck mozilla.

ill be using a fork until an alternative comes around.

did i mention fuck mozilla?

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