Those handlebars are giving me an acid flashback..
I think the internet was ruined long before AI.. long gone are the sites containing useful information with folks sharing their interests.. it's mainly folks marketing themselves a brand or their social media presence.. even fkin google doesn't work anymore.. it only directs you to things which are for sale.. i think we need to ditch this www. piece of shit and set up a parallel platform where we can go back to sharing our interests..
Retrobike and the like are internet gold dust nowadays..
This.
I think it would be a massive step in the right direction if there were two WWW's. One is for news, general stuff, shopping etc that everyone can go mad on with clickbait, shilling crap/themselves, p0rn and can be cookies and profiling central. As you say that is what the web has become.
The other WWW is for information and discussion only and can either be viewed free with some relevant advertising that covers hosting and admin costs, or advert free by membership. No cookies, no tracking, etc because all that sh!te is irrelevant on this form of WWW and takes place on the other where people are doing things that other larties can earn money out of.
A large part of a job i had in the late 90's was searching the internet for technological things. I would use Google and type in whatever it was and the first couple of pages returned would all be about 99% relevant.
Now those same pages would be ai at the top, which might or might not be accurate, followed by all sorts of slightly related cr@p on sale at either ebay, or Amazon, and maybe once i get to page 4 i will get to what i want. It is overly weighted towards providing results assuming that i am a purchaser only and not someone who just wants info and it has got really bad in the last few years.
I used to love the internet. I thought it was amazing and understood what the original designers imagined it to be. I had missed the glory days, but it was still good in the late 90's. Now i use it less and less as the years go on and rarely venture outside of a couple of forums and some news and weather websites. MrsFO does the purchasing and research on things we might need for the house because she has way more patience than i have for all the cr@p you have to sift through to find out what the inside of the microwave is actually coated with etc. I do more of the measuring, building, and installation so it works out. Her side of things is still harder and more taxing though. And the fecking time it takes these days do the searching and the bloody comparisons between products
