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.
Growth reaches a saturation point and now they have to cannibalise every single thing in order to continue growth (in company values). This comes at the expense of product quality for the person using it but that’s fine if you have no competition because everything is a monopoly.
The capitalist system is the problem. The system will ALWAYS reach this endpoint for as long as it is a system that demands infinite growth.
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”
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Better time than ever to be a FOSS enjoyer, that’s for sure
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
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
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.
Yes, which works for the few, but they know that the majority are completely oblivious and will just consume whatever they are given.
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.
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
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
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.
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?
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.
Inb4 you can only browse the internet with Chromium.
Please drink verification can
ERROR! Piracy detected!
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).
