Remember when the web didn’t suck?

  • Glifted@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    6 months ago

    I’m so frustrated with the internet right now. My wife started making Castile soap and I’m trying to find out if its some fu-fu-berry-bullshit or like an actual decent soap. Google is feeding me momfluencers (which range from ‘fine but there is no accountability’ to blatant grifters) and sites that are simply trying to sell this stuff. I’m going to try again with kagi tonight, but it’s still very frustrating that I never know what to trust anymore. The bullshit is coming faster than I’m able to handle it

    • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
      0·
      6 months ago

      In Canada, we have a state broadcaster, which is nice. The current election frontrunner, according to the polls, is a guy who’s made it his entire life’s quest to get rid of it. Sigh.

    • perishthethought@lemm.eeOPEnglish
      0·
      6 months ago

      If you mean via ads like this, I would agree. They could do more to filter out the garbage.

      But if you mean in their content, I’m not seeing that, beyond the usual (long history) leaning to one side or another.

      But these are two very different things and shouldn’t be equated.

  • niktemadur@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    6 months ago

    Remember when the web didn’t suck?

    No, I don’t. Not since 2000, when I logged on from home for the first time. The majority of it has always sucked. Then the web can suddenly do new things… and finds new ways to suck.
    It has, however, always had excellent little areas and corners.

    • Dozzi92@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      6 months ago

      Right? Do you remember going to websites and your computer would yell out that you were watching porn? Ads would burst forth like you just won fucking Solitaire. Shit took forever to download, and if you lost connection in the middle, start over!

      I guess if you started using the Internet after like 2008, when things really started to take off, you saw a golden hour. But it was a dangerous place in the early 2000s, although I learned a lot about how to unfuck computers in my quest for boobs as a teenager.

      • jdf038@mander.xyzEnglish
        0·
        6 months ago

        Knowing about “Temporary Internet Files” while my family was unaware made me feel like some sort of God of knowledge.

        Oh and yeah I think I found porn there hooray!

      • tacosplease@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        6 months ago

        I miss early YouTube that had full episodes of just about any TV show illegally uploaded without any sort of copyright enforcement.

        I also miss reddit, but what it used to be is gone forever.

  • sgibson5150@slrpnk.netEnglish
    0·
    6 months ago

    I can remember around 1999-2000 if you clicked the wrong thing in IE you’d get 50 popup windows with ads for porn. At least that’s behind us.

    • Konstant@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      6 months ago

      I remember installing Windows XP and when connecting it to the internet and open the browser, a bunch of random popups started showing. I hadn’t click any website, just open the browser on a clean install. It was unbelievable. A friend who was there made reminded me of this for quite some time jokingly.

    • pete_the_cat@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      6 months ago

      Then you also had the sites that would trap you there, every time you clicked the back button it would just reload the page.

      • iAvicenna@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        6 months ago

        I mean there are still websites that open themselves 10 times so you can’t click back out of them. I am curious as to what their end game is. Do they imagine we go “well damn can’t go back out of this page, might as well start living here now”

      • Knock_Knock_Lemmy_In@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        6 months ago

        <script> function openNewWindow() {

          window.open("https://this.site.com", "_blank");

  newWindow.moveTo(0, 0);
  
  newWindow.resizeTo(screen.width, screen.height);

}

window.onbeforeunload = function() {
  openNewWindow();
};

        </script>

  • Andromxda 🇺🇦🇵🇸🇹🇼@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    0·
    6 months ago

    Use an adblocker in your browser and an ad-blocking DNS server like Mullvad DNS (it’s super easy on Android, just search for Private DNS in the settings and set it to base.dns.mullvad.net), AdGuard DNS (same thing, super easy, just set it to dns.adguard-dns.com) or NextDNS on your phone (and ideally on all your other devices). There’s also an app called AdAway, but it takes up the VPN slot so you can’t use it together with a VPN.

  • Ghostalmedia@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    6 months ago

    Here’s what’s behind that stupid ad

    https://www.10news.com/news/fact-or-fiction/fact-or-fiction-online-ad-advises-people-to-wrap-doorknobs-in-foil-when-home-alone

    It clearly implies there is some kind of safety benefit to it. But there is not.

    Clicking on the ad leads to a lengthy slide show which eventually gets to the doorknob story.

    All it says is aluminum foil can be used as an alternative to tape to cover doorknobs and hardware while painting.

    It has nothing to do with safety and the inclusion of the phrase “when you’re home alone” was only used as clickbait to make the ad seem more important.

  • viking@infosec.pubEnglish
    0·
    6 months ago

    Remember when the web didn’t suck?

    Was there ever a time? In the late 80s and early 90s when it was mostly text only, there really wasn’t a whole lot of content, and bandwidth sucked massively.

    Once connection speeds improved, we got banner ads, popups, and noisy flash animations, all of which were vectors to install viruses.

    Then came google, facebook and amazon, and monopolized the web.

    Every era sucked in its own right. But I’m rather using it now where plenty of other educated people develop countermeasures that work out of the box, rather than having to fiddle around with browser configurations to block ads and malware myself.

    TL;DR: Use adblock.

    • gregorum@lemm.eeEnglish
      0·
      6 months ago

      In the late 80s and early 90s

      Hold up there… HTLM wasn’t even invented until 1991 by Timothy Berners-Lee who then made the first web server, web browser, and web page. It was another two or three years before browsing the web became more common. Before then, the internet was very basic, consisted of a few simple services, and was typically only accessible via universities and large corporations.

      Regular people often only had access to regional online services until national services like CompuServe, Prodigy, and AOL came along.

      • viking@infosec.pubEnglish
        0·
        6 months ago

        Yep, ARPAnet and some messaging boards pre-90’s. Slow as hell and limited content, that’s what I mean.

        • gregorum@lemm.eeEnglish
          0·
          6 months ago

          The internet existed pre-web. Email, Usenet, IRC, Archie, etc. the real difference between ARPANET and the Internet was the introduction of TCP/IP packet handling and CIX which unified ISPs, but those both came pre-1991.

    • EdibleFriend@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      6 months ago

      At least now I can watch porn without it turning out to be that middle eastern dude getting his head cut off

    • Neato@ttrpg.networkEnglish
      0·
      6 months ago

      There’s less info now than a few years ago and it’s harder to find. Web 2.0 has put most of the data and traffic into just a few hands. And as we can see with Twitter that can lead to a significant part of the Internet going to shit overnight.

      Hell, most of us are here because of what reddit did overnight. It’s certainly better than the age of web rings but we’ve entered a downturn.

      • viking@infosec.pubEnglish
        0·
        6 months ago

        Agree, especially with the getting harder to find part. I’ve followed some other user’s recommendation and have been using kagi.com for the last 2 weeks as my search engine of choice, and it’s really way ahead of google these days. I’m still in the free tier but about to hit the ceiling this week, and I’m rather certain I’ll end up paying for it before I go back to google.

        The results are about on par with Goolge ~2022. No ads, no trackers, and most of the SEO garbage that’s targeting google (and maybe bing?) is by and large disregarded. Worth a try for sure.

  • FuglyDuck@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    6 months ago

    So I think the idea of the tinfoil is that somebody grabbing the knob will make noise.

    Therefore altering you.

    You’d be better off with an alarm system and a deadbolt lock, though.

    • TurboWafflz@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      6 months ago

      Alternatively the intruder will just be so confused they’ll decide to break into another house instead of figuring out what the foil does

    • Th4tGuyII@kbin.social
      0·
      6 months ago

      That’s what I figured - pretty much any alarm system would be better, but could technically help you in a pinch