For months, Google has maintained that the web is “thriving,” AI isn’t tanking traffic, and its search engine is sending people to a wider variety of websites than ever. But in a court filing from last week, Google admitted that “the open web is already in rapid decline” (with regard to advertising, kinda-sorta)
Genuinely want to know, what web standards have been ruined by the Goog?
I am so fucking exhausted of EVERYTHING in this society being treated like a statistic.
But what pisses me off even more, is when a gigantic corporation makes a bold claim, pretending they aren’t a major contributor to what’s happening in the said claim
Google commenting on the decline of open standards feels like a tobacco company commenting on cancer rates.
Even browsing existing small to medium sized sites has become such a chore, with all these verifications and rate limiters as part of the anti AI scraper effort.
So many cloudflare verification checkboxes. So many Google sign ins. So many cross site cookies and tracking for even basic functionality.
Care about privacy and restrict browsing data even a little? Captcha hell.
Then you get to load and execute 10MB of JavaScript while another 5MB of ad content loads and displays in the background. With the obligatory two dozen API calls to various trackers, counters, taggers, and “optimizers” in the background of course.
Glad someone else noticed this. I don’t care that the “small” web isn’t as extensive or as polished as the corporate web, but all the anti-scraper stuff and cookie pop-ups are the actual death. It’s horrible.
Off to gopher and Gemini I guess.
Especially since discoverability has pretty much gone down the toilet, between SEO and spam sites.
You’re not going to as easily find a new and interesting website, when the first few results are just computer generated regurgitated text, stuffed with ads by the gill.
Time to bring back the webring and every site having a “links” section.
That shit did work pretty decent. Yet hard to find the initial go to when you’re looking for something specific.
Some mainstream websites and services are practically unusable when using a VPN, too. I’m glad I stopped using imgur years ago but I wish the rest of the world would catch up…
And then after all that have to read a page full of ego and and thinly veiled sales waffle just to find the tiny bit of info you are looking for.
You have to give up too much time and privacy to get little back. It’s not the internet we knew. It’s a hyper monitized sales board.
I miss being excited about what online would unfurl for me each day.
Yeah. We saw the peak of the web and since then its ugly decline. Surfing today is actually more frustrating than satisfying. For me. Half the shit doesn’t work, bugs me with paywally or any other wall just to - MAYBE - finally reveal not really an answer but my problem…rephrased, dragged to five hundred words, or worse, a 20 minute video of a shit bird that shows me how he types text into notepad.
I miss the times where we had to search the search-engines. And the web would be so damn fast today if not every shit would also load 583u2 libraries of blingbling and tracktrack
And guess how awesome that is with blocked google. I fucking hate lazy bastard sysops who prefer recaptcha. Half the web is basically locking me out. And cloudflare is another bad thing that monopolized infrastructure.
We really need to change the mindset about what the internet experience should be. I think everyone got too used to the idea of centralized services like Google search, Github, Discord, Twitter, reddit, and etc. and that didn’t turn out well. We need to go back to federated protocol based system instead. Let’s go back to the decentralized federated architecture of email, web, irc where no one corporate entity is the sole owner of said service. I think Lemmy and Mastodon are good start but we have to start replace things like Google search, Github, and Discord with decentralized counterparts. We have to learn from our past mistakes and start reconstructing a better internet infrastructure one piece at a time. It will take lot of effort and patience but it’s really the only way out of the mess we put ourselves into by being addicted to simplicity of centralized corporate controlled systems.
Prior to GitHub, everyone just hosted their own Git repositories. The nature of Git is pretty decentralised. And Linux kernel development still uses old-fashioned mailing lists for development co-ordination, rather than something like GitHub. I have heard before someone say the difference between Git and GitHub is similar to the difference between porn and Pornhub.
Prior to Discord, there was IRC.
IRC is still there. The user numbers just aren’t that great anymore 😒 I fucking hate discord and what it did and how it took over. And also, of course, murican.
I hate that everyone fucking uses discord for everything, discord when I’m using it is strictly to game and for online game related activities.
People are just clueless and lazy, and take the easiest way “that everyone else does too”. And here we are. Recently had to join one…and was asked for a phone number before being allowed to enter. Lol. Yeah sure. Guess I won’t join then 😐
Lots of “muricans” hate discord too
Sure sure, you’re not all idiots. Wasn’t meant this way. Just that, on top of being shit, being murican is another no-go for an app.
This makes me think that a big part of the solution is some sort of very low barrier to entry guide or product for self-hosting. Like something even a non-technical person can do. Imagine if it became the norm to have a little always-on device that serves up your personal website, instead of social media accounts…
We need a startup to just make and try to sorta standardize a mini pc product pre-installed with a proxmox-like setup with an easy web interface and self-hosted solutions pre installed. 5-10 apps for main internet service needs like email, social media, content hosting/publishing and personal media libraries.
Give it a cute name like “Web-Pal”, keep it open and Customizable for powerusers, watch the internet become a better place while you’re the household name for devices that are as essential as a router.
If you could sell this for $500 or less you have yourself a customer
Exactly my thinking. You could even have some sort of containerized environment so that people can easily just download and run containerized apps for various things. A podman image for your music server, for your photo hosting… almost like apps but less proprietary and less closed source
Yup. I really wish we had an open source alternative to proxmox that used containers under the hood. Would make customizing and mounting external volumes much easier too.
Great idea. From a nerd 😁
But who do you think would be the target demographic? Critical users, that don’t want to use major crap but are also not suited for doing it all by themselves, either due to skill, time, money or a combination thereof?
I wouldn’t think that group is significantly large. And definitely not large enough to seriously put a dent in the major crap apps.
Better than nothing, but probably not worth investing in such a project. Sadly so, I might add.
Platforms keep getting shittier and more exploitative, while government thirst for control with things like Chat Control, OSA and whatever the US is doing.
The more we see of that the easier it becomes to market a “your internet services in a box” to a layman.
But first they have to care. The amount of people who don’t care for e.g. privacy - even if explained in detail - is flabbergasting. Even today I heard two times “why? I have nothing to hide” or “but WhatsApp is superior!”
Considering that many don’t even know anymore what a website actually is, or domains (especially TLDs that are not .com or <insert local one>)…
Also take into account that people are lazy (not meant condescending). Using the major shit is easy, “everyone else does too!” and technologically challenged people can use it.
Even IF selfhosted XYZ would be as easy as downloading something (it already starts to be “too complicated” for many) and executing it, it probably wouldn’t happen.
I, personally, fear for the future of the web. I’ve seen the peak of the web and its constant accelerated decline since.
Yeah I know more than a few people fitting that description. But I do believe things can turn around. It’s less likely to make converts of people who already have that mentality, but things can resurge among new people and I think there’s a real movement there with tech literacy.
I sure hope so, yet am not as optimistic as you 😑
I love the idea, but until stuff simplifies significantly that’s simply not happening. I’m a moderately technical person and all the self hosting options are such a chore. Even simply looking up info about them can sometimes be harder than installing and starting the centralized option.
The cat is out of the bag and long gone.
People got used to the simplicity of centralized services, and corpos made great efforts to make everything 1-click.
So when the average users need to do more than 1-click, they won’t use the software.
It would help if anti-trust laws were applied and these mega-corpos got broken in a thousand pieces. Centralized monolith services would have a harder time to thrive and give space to federation/decentralization.
I don’t know how this will help during World War III when billions of people will die.
Seriously? WTF? We’re talking current reality here, we can’t do anything to start or stop war, so just keep moving and living.
Google is so goddamn at fault for this it’s not even funny.
They admitted, with obvious glee
You can tell they’re scared of it because they immediately tried to retract/clarify the statement.
Though IDK why they’d care this point since the Supreme Court already declared Google a monopoly and turned around and said they weren’t abusive enough and gave them no punishment.
That’s a weird way to spell “celebrates”.
deleted by creator
By their hands
Not to mention a lot of site traffic is now getting tanked by the UK blocking everything because of the “online safety act” that’s actually anything but (source)
Most recently my friend couldn’t access a Reddit post about a dental issue of all things because it got marked as NSFW and it asked for her face or ID (can’t remember) so she could see it (I ended up making her download TOR)
And Reddit completely.blocks you from reading when coming from a VPN exit, unless you are logged in (at least with. MullvadVPN).
Brave new world… :-(Not if you put “old.” before the “Reddit” into the address bar, the old UI doesn’t force you to login
At least on TOR
It is a 50/50 shot for me if it makes you login with old or not
Thanks, will try that!
I wonder how long old.reddit will stay available.
More like Google/Alphabet is doing what it can to close up the net, and hopes that openness on the net goes into decline.
They already squeezed the open net for all its worth.
They denied it until the instant doing so was inconvenient to them.
But in a court filing
Why is this legal? It’s always like this with large companies. " Yeah we were just lying to everyone all the time, but this filing for court is the absolute truth!"
It’s the same as Fox News which always says they’re fair and balanced news and they bring the news nobody else does, but in a court filing… They suddenly claim that no reasonable person would believe them to be a real news organization… Uuuh huh…
Any court should dismiss this filing immediately and punish them for submitting a false filing, or continuously lying outside the courts. This sort of crap should be inadmissible.
Bye bye internet. Hello splinternet.
Essentially.
The fediverse, small-web, ubb-boards, xda, and parts of the darkweb, as well as places like 4chan all belong to a sort-of bound community.
Facebook, Google, Tiktok, Instagram etc make up the mainsteam internet with Tumblr and Reddit on the sidelines.
It’s getting worse, it even trickles down to software choices and piracy. Choose Linux and trust the community, run Kodi and fight constant update breakage on Youtube and corporate streaming solutions when Jellyfin and samba shares just work?
At what point does their world of influence become seemingly worse than ours by default and everyone just ignores them? Will the giants allow themselves to be ignored? I believe they will eventually make self-sufficiency impossible. Somehow, some day, you won’t have any of these choices and everyone will be nickle and dimed to death until the entire internet is an unskippable full-screen ad.
From some mobile-only average working Joes out there, that’s all it already is.
I’m from the 90s Internet. Geocities. Tripod. Webrings. My awesome gothy co-worker staying late after work to update her vampire fan-fiction site because hardly anyone had a computer and the boss let her use the company’s windows 95 machine.
We are categorically lazier as a culture now than then. I expect things to enshittify further until we collectively take responsibility and accountability for our own culture, engagement and entertainment online. As we used to. We need more stupid web tricks, this place used to have all sorts of public art and weird monuments to human quirkiness.
Until they take away from us the ability to purchase a 10$ domain, use DNS, and make HTML forbidden knowledge, anyone can be out there contributing. I realize, however, that most will not; I’ve recently started getting wide eyed stares of amazement because I have my own domain and use it for my email address, so we seem to be sliding further…
Not sure how we fix this.
Me too. Even earlier.
But your last described problem is getting more and more obvious with the years. I always had lots of domains since there were domains for purchase. Even when it where very very expensive. Yet, despite all the progress, people so often respond to your own email with “errr...@gmail.com?” And you have to explain, no it’s just name@surname.de and they don’t understand what you’re talking about and why your email doesn’t end in gmail. And some at least know a world outside gmail, yet struggle with TLDs other than .com or .de (or other local TLDs in other countries probably)…
It hurts. And it got worse. People totally unlearned what the net even is.
