I think we need a special internet where making money is outlawed. If your website turns a profit in any way it’s removed.
Everything needs to cost more so the taxes go up and we can pretend 40 Trillion of debt doesn’t exist.
Kind of? The money came in and ruined it like they ruin everything. Gotta wring out every ounce of value out of everything, even if you kill it in the process
It’s crazy to me how much money these companies can make off of human attention. Trying to inhabit places that doesn’t have monetary value.
I came on here to say this, and found the first comment to have expressed what I wanted to. Fuck yes.
Western culture is a cesspit. Not just the internet.
Not much better elsewhere
No, not “always has been!” Some of us remember the '90s, before the corporations found it and ruined everything.
Take the rose tinted glasses off. Dial up companies were charging long distance when you were on BBS/sited outside your local zipcode by the minute. Some companies were walled gardens and you couldn’t access the entire internet (compuserve)
Trolls, catfish, and cyber crime existed even before the '90’s.
That sounds very US specific ngl.
I don’t remember anyone charging long distance for internet packets.
In fact, I don’t even know how you’d meter that? Did they just charge you for open TCP sockets outside their own CO? Wtf who did that fucking bullshit? I’ve had a dozen different ISPs since about 1996 and no one ever charged long distance for packets
Okay, Zen_Shinobi got the details wrong but the landscape right. It wasn’t that difficult to rack up a long distance bill with your computer. It usually wasn’t your ISP collecting that bill though.
In the early 90’s it wasn’t uncommon to have an ISP that wasn’t your phone company. AOL, Compuserve, all the little Randonets. The first ISP my father used was NANDOnet, which was operated by the Charlotte News and Observer. We were in a different area code than Charlotte, so using his state of the art 14.4kbaud modem to access NANDOnet accrued a long distance charge like any other phone call to Charlotte. You don’t remember the likes of Earthlink and AOL advertising “more local numbers?”
Well into the 90’s, you’d have use for a modem even if you didn’t have an ISP at all. BBSes were often a computer with a modem attached. You’d dial directly into that BBS. No TCP/IP at all going on; you essentially had two computers connected together with an arbitrarily long serial cable. These BBS systems were owned by random nerds scattered across North America, so using BBS systems almost certainly meant long-distance phone calls. Doing things like multiplayer gaming in something like Doom over a modem could, theoretically, be done over a long distance line if you were that kind of decadent.
Anyone remember porn dialers? There were probably other industry sectors that used this business model, but it was commonly associated with the early internet porn industry. It’s the 1990’s, nobody’s got a Venmo account, hell you can’t rely on every American having a Visa card. How do you bill your customers? What you do is you host a website purely for advertisement purposes, you don’t ship your actual product over HTTP at all. You offer a download of a scummy piece of software that uses the customer’s modem to directly dial your 900 number. They can download…almost certainly pictures probably not video, while connected, and then their phone company bills the customer for the toll. Not unlike a phone sex service, same business model, slightly different product.
Re-read what they said. They’re talking about modem dialup to a long distance number, so the phone call the modem made was long distance and hence charged at the higher rate.
It’s ok to not get it, this is pre internet and a very long time ago
Now?
I remember using netgroups and UUCP in the early 90’s to piece together files from
alt.binaries.pictures.eroticaBack then there were fewer financially/data-predatory websites, mostly because we didn’t have payment methods on the Internet yet (we were just getting websites as opposed to news and gopher), and it wasn’t yet practical for companies to scrape your data.
So instead we were inundated with viruses. Like every few weeks, somehow, a virus would eat your frickin’ files. It was more simply malicious, not even greedy. Not going to try and argue which is worse.
I also used gopher, usenet, uucp, archie and all that in the early '90s. And if you were just a little bit careful, catching a virus or trojan was very rare.
Now, everything is monetized. You’re under constant surveillance on a scale it was unimaginable at that time, and being careful amounts to nothing (unless you’re super paranoid) because your security depends completely on how others secure your data, assuming that they’re trying to secure and not sell it.
In this respect, now it’s much, much worse than it was, even if in some other ways it’s somewhat better.
Peak internet was around 2005-2010, IMHO.
Getting drive-by zero click malware from an Adobe Flash / ActiveX embed banner ad, or JavaScript / CSS vulnerability, had nothing to do with how careful you were. You just randomly got viruses from your computer existing with an Ethernet cable connected. Antivirus were also pretty useless.
If you never got one, you were either extremely lucky, or just didn’t notice and it was sneaky spyware
I enjoyed reading that. I agree with a lot of it.
I don’t disagree but I don’t like this article.
Internet is just human.
You see the negativity and the loudest people and keep forgetting about the silent majority.Open source projects, people organizing events/ charities, communities geeking out over the same stuff, Wikipedia - basically all the human knowledge is at your fingerprints.
Scammers, abusers, margin groups, hate groups - they are all there. It is just so much easier to see the negative parts.
cesspits are not addictive
Are drugs not cesspits?
No, drugs are drugs and cesspools are cesspools. Apples and triangles are different concepts too.
Apples and triangles are different concepts too
Explain this then:
Thank you for bringing such an absurd brand of sanity to this chat. (I’m serious.) XD
