Surprisingly, yes. I have no idea why people put their email addresses in those things, but they do. I put a tiny email capture on one of my websites once as an experiment. I didn't even offer anything, It just said "Keep in touch", and thousands of people signed into an double opt-in mailing list in the 3 weeks I had it up. Fucking weirdos.

• 30 mb of JS for 1 kb of text.
• Can't zoom or scroll freely without JS interfering.
• Double-click on a word and it calls another script for 'assistance' instead of selecting the word.
• Right-click is disabled or bring their own 'menu' that does nothing.

I always wondered does anybody (with sane enough understanding of tech) accept notifications? It's the one thing I hate the most, it triggers anxiety and takes my attention away from what I have to do.

Interesting approach, gonna think about it. So far I didn't take disinformation as a result of news companies going broke.

Why would people forget that the BBC is more trustworthy then someones uncle, just because his opinion is for free? The distrust in "old authorities" like big newspaper or governments is, in my opinion, a long-term result of the broken promisses of the hegemony they are, or seem to be, part of.

The concept "people have to have to pay for quality information" doesn't sit right with me. Relevant info should be available for everyone! And trustworthy news orgs should be funded pubicly.

Most websites started out free because the Web is very close to being "post-scarcity".

Running a simple but successful website used by tens of thousands of people can be done in your spare time for cheaper than a Spotify subscription. A hobbyist website about fishing with 10.000 monthly users can probably be hosted reliably enough for $10/mo, plus a few hours of work. Even if you value your time highly (say, $50/h), that's still a "$200/mo" website (almost all of which is time you're billing to yourself). The breakeven point is then at $0.02/monthly user (and the more users you have, the lower the cost per user, down to fractions of fractions of a cent for a really big text-based website).

In that context it's next to impossible to fairly pay for the service of running a text-based website. Payment processing costs are going to be, by far, the biggest share of the pie, which is ridiculous. So, advertisments and datamining it is (or was; datamining without explicit consent is at least illegal in the EU). Alternatively, donations (this is Twitch's core business model, with which they're even profitable in some markets, despite offering the most expensive service: realtime transcoded video).

Of course a news website also has salaries to pay. That significantly shifts the balance in favor of "pay for the service", unfortunately that runs counter to user expectations. Plus the historical context of traditional news orgs subsidizing their new websites with traditional revenue streams, then finding themselves cornered when the web turned out to be more than just a fad or a hobby.

Another problem with additional revenue is feature bloat. Look at reddit, the website originally was actually really cheap to operate and was actually profitable on Reddit Gold alone (donations being a very common business model on the internet which IMO makes the most sense in most situations given the low costs).
But they had to add an image host (sure, imgur was probably not happy to be footing the bill) as well as a video player (why?), chat service (where's the business value?!), a brand-new but completely unoptimized front-end UI, a mobile app (despite third-party devs already offering superior options FOR FREE), etc.
Reddit's enshittification was caused by an overabundance of revenue from external investors asking for continuous growth, not from any inherent shortcoming in the original business plan. Same goes for pretty much every other enshittified website.

I think it was the subversion of chains of trust by the kind of social media were people are linked to friends and family.

For example, say that you're connected to a cousin of yours in Facebook, somebody you know well as an excelent and honest person. Now, say they share this post about how lots of robberies in their neighbourhood have been traced back to youths in this other neighbourhood which is mainly of people from a different etnic group.

Do you believe it? It comes from somebody who is an excellent and honest person, so you know they wouldn't lie about something like this.

At this point, anybody who actually thinks properly about the quality of information has figured out that just because somebody is honest doesn't mean they tell the truth: they might be telling you something they genuinelly believe is true when it's not because they themselves were decidved into thinking of it as true, whilst its not - in other word and simplifying it a bit, you can't trust information from an honest person if they're gullible, or even if they're just prone to "spread the word" without having tought about it first (and the way things like Facebook are designed is exactly to induce people to share in response to an emotional reaction and without thinking)

How many people do you know that really figure it out before sharing, or even worwe, did so back in the day before fake-news became a widelly talked about phenomenon?

Add to this subversion of chains of trust that the fakest stuff is usually the most shocking and thus most likelly to be shared and you have this great way to spread misinformation in such a way that it keeps getting whitewashed as ot spreads thanks to preexisting trust in friends and family.

Shit gets worse over time, so every body remembers how when they first got access to the internet it was better. They're not wrong, they just weren't there for the usenet times.

You're probably right I had been a bit behind regarding the discourse about the internet. I was in my early teenage years and just started knowing about it.

And for your second claim: If you define communism the way I usually do (the social principle of coorperating to fulfill everyones needs), it seems likely the internet would be designed towards peoples needs, rather than companies profits. Of course it would still consume ressources to provide cat videos, but the required ressources might be less, since cooperating/sharing ressources is more efficient than competing.

While I agree with the sentiment, I'd imagine you can easily make the argument that written language is also for recording and documenting, not purely for human to human connection.

Truth is the internet always sucked.

God forbid I get an actual solution to a Windows error I'm googling instead of every partition manager program telling me to buy it for some reason.

Fuck flash, good games and fun memories, but also good riddance for accessibility.

There are a few extensions that try to automatically handle different cookie popups with your pre-selected preferences. Consent-O-Matic is one.

It is a setting in a browser. In the early 2000s the browsers even came with their own built-in popups asking if you want to accept cookies from this domain. Of course this was annoying so everyone had it set to "accept all", which then became the default and eventually disappeared.

20 years later, some moron lawyer reinvented the same but worse.

This? https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/cookie-auto-decline/

Link please?

You can easily host a static website on a dirt cheap VPS. The Hetzner ARM boxes are less than $5/mo with an IPv4 address and are going to be more than sufficient for the average static website… My website is on a cheap VPS with worse specs than the Hetzner ones and it does not take 30-45 seconds to load.

I've being using Netlify, it's really professionally feature rich, and the free tier is more than enough for my needs.