The Internet is a shithole

What drained me of power over the past years is this constant fight of debullshitting the Internet experience for me and others.

You always have to use an AdBlocker, VPNs to circumvent all sort of censorship - and for that matter change the location often else you still get blocked; find proper news sources then find their RSS, add to an RSS reader, try to read locally if these websites allow you to....else go visit their bullshit websites.

Youtube is still by far the biggest, or the only in most cases, video platform. Now even with an adblocker the youtube experience sucks - they autoplay videos, insert shorts into your face, make you click things you don't want, and now insert AI generated video description for videos.. So you have to use an app for youtube that removes these piles of poop. But these apps are constantly blocked and won't work all of the time...

I don't even want to think about search which has become a pile of nonsense. Full of fake AI websites and now when pretty much all search engines introduced AI summaries...makes searching a painful experience.

Even Reddit, which can still feel like a "community" of people posting stuff from time to time, is a garbage. Full of fake posts and bots, and no way you can use RSS to follow subreddits. Login to see some content....endless scroll....all a bazaar.

I have to fight with "free" Wordpress plugins that insert ads into your dashboard, I have to block AI Summaries in searches, I have to keep Freetube up to date and often when videos do not work there, open in Youtube. I have to read my news in a semi-broken RSS reader since some cannot fetch all of the news, I have to install a custom OS on my phone then block ads there too, but now some banking apps do not work....a constant loop of poop, to protect yourself and your sanity, because everyone is there to fucking slice you open for a view, a click, a like...

Always always a fight against this destruction of the internet even tho all I fucking want is to read some reliable science news, watch some educational videos from time to time, and post some content or search for content. What the actual fuck....

I know why this is: TRADE. Same reason why the offline world is a shithole full of destruction, garbage, less nature, all about consuming and shops. This is what happens when humans have a primary goal of trading. Same online, these platforms are about trading, your attention, data, currency in return for a service. So it is a normal "enshitification" of the online too.

At least I have Friendica, Peertube, Nextcloud, Linux (TROMjaro) and the like, that allow me to still use the Internet in a sane way.

But man...such a shithole the Internet has become. I can't even imagine how "normal" people use it without adblockers, with relying on youtube, facebook, tiktok and such platforms....must be hell in the brain for these people.

I used to LOVE the Internet back in the days. It was like a park where you met interesting things and people. Now is like a metrostation full of ads and merchants, where everyone is in a rush to go somewhere else.

#enshitification #enshitiffication #internet #fedi #youtube #facebook #tiktok #reddit #alternatives #friendica #peertube