I’ve definitely turned into the paranoid nutcase within my friend group in recent years, I hate that everything is “smart” nowadays requiring an app/internet connection & account, just to do basic things that didn’t require any of that before.
What’s some things currently making you ramble like an old man?
Needless complexity in software is something that gets on my nerves, especially on the web. We went from simple HTML to such a bloated mess that only like 2 web browsers can manage to keep up with it. I mean, does a web browser really need to do everything? Why use an office suite written in JavaScript in a web browser when there are native programs you could use?
The loss of the actual internet + The loss of actual search engines.
Let me explain. The internet used to be an open playground where anyone could post a website dedicated to their interests, and did so. There were websites about octopuses and electomagnets and all sorts of obscure niche interests. Free website space with plentiful, and everybody used it. You could see 50 pages of information about someone’s dog Fifi, just because they wanted to put it out there. Or hand loading ammunition if that was their bag. Or why the Communist manifesto was a better document than the declaration of Independence. Anything went on your own web page.
And it became massive; so big that we needed search engines to find the exact thing we were looking for. When we wanted to find information about octopuses, we needed to search through all those obscure websites and find what we needed to find about octopuses.
So the search engine wars began.
We also had things like stumble upon, where you could be surprised by some interesting site, and there were rings, where interesting sites of the same genre linked together so you could follow a threat of interest through a bunch of obscure sites.
None of this was forced on you.
Now we have possibly 20 to 30 large websites that account for 95% of all the traffic on the internet? We have search engines that show us what they think we meant by our question, but not the exact answer to our question.
It’s gone. We wondered how they were possibly going to tame the internet how they were going to close Pandora’s box.
It’s all gone.
I just moved into a new student dorm today and every single thing is done by a different app run by a different company and the “help desk” only say “use the app” whenever you have an issue. Only problem is I can barely even download the thing because the wifi is broken and I can’t report that I can’t connect to it because I can’t download the app to report it.
Noise pollution and how comfortable people feel contributing to it. I’m mostly talking about people playing videos and listening to music in public (bars, restaurants, etc), but also the new “stereos” on motorcycles that are essentially just PA systems. Sometimes it feels like nowhere’s quiet anymore.
Another one that gets me: buying things but not actually owning them. You buy a game but you don’t actually own the game, you own a license to play a game on a service that might shut down sometime in the future or change their mind about the license they sold you. You buy an e-book but the storefront you bought it from might change or remove it, and then forcibly update or remove any copies you have on e-readers. Most people don’t even buy movies or TV shows, they just subscribe to some streaming service, and if they do “buy” an electronic copy it’s the same issue as e-books.
At least physical copies of movies and tv shows and books are still a thing, but even then we’re heading towards a future where physical media may require phoning in before it’ll play.
The proliferation of tiktok and other extremely short-form content, and parents being comfortable with their kids using it.
Ridiculously bright headlights on cars, in particular those the driver cannot control when they dim. I can’t fucking see when driving at night against incoming traffic. Yet the majority of people seem to love them somehow.
It’s more aggressive car culture bullshit where people feel compelled to keep up with the latest aggressive gesture.
That too, yes.
But it starts with the manufacturers, and with no proper research and regulations. I’ve heard of people disappointed that they can’t control the brightness of their own car lights, apparently when purchasing it they never imagined it would be something 100% automatic.
Are those legal? In loads of countries the police will simply take you off the road when the catch you with that, fine the crap out of you and won’t let you continue driving until it’s fixed
I’m in Australia and yes. Some models don’t dim when they pass you. Others do, but they already blinded you. Others are set at an angle and it kills you when they are coming downhill.
And so many are still so bright even after dimming.
Never I’ve seen the police stop anybody for their lights.
Headlights are supposed to be at a downward angle, or else they would blind everyone on a flat road. It’s annoying, but I would rather be blinded on the occasional hill than be blinded anytime I’m on a flat road.
I do agree that there are way too many assholes not aware of the angle and brightness of their lights. A lot of people mess up the angle when they DIY upgrade their headlights, too.
I don’t think we’re talking about the same thing, but I’m in Australia and I have obnoxiously bright spotlights.
In West Aus at least the law is that the spotlights must be switchable so you have park lights > head lights > high beam > spot lights.
I don’t use my spotlights anywhere there’s likely to be oncoming traffic. They’re fucking amazing on country roads when you’re trying to keep an eye out for Kangaroos. Excessive and obnoxious in any other circumstance though.
People have forgotten that you’re supposed to drive “within your headlights”, or perhaps never understood that, at night, you need to drive slow enough that your stopping distance is illuminated by your headlights.
ain’t no one gonna slow me down, I ain’t no pussy
So, the solution is to get extremely bright lights, so they can drive as fast as possible, in the worst possible lighting conditions.
it’s ok when I drive really fast, I’m an above average driver
I feel like every new comfort feature on a car is solved legally by still having the person at the wheel responsible and since now the computer does it (well enough maybe 60% of the time) you see way more of an increase in stuff like too bright lights, missing lights cause the rain detector isn’t working and things of that nature because people just assume the car will take care of it
Baseball is unwatchable to me anymore because of ads the announcers read during innings.
Everyone hates advertising, but it’s an unavoidable part of life and it’s never bothered me when there’s a 3 minute commercial break. I’ll mute it until the show comes back on and look at my phone or get up or something. Or I’ll fast forward if I have a buffer.
But baseball TV and radio announcers reading frequent quick ads between pitches or between at bats can’t be skipped/muted and it’s like fingernails on a blackboard for me. After 30+ years watching baseball, I’m essentially done with it now.
Everyone complains about ads but I seem to be the only one who thinks real TV with its easily skippable commercials is the least bad option. Streaming services aren’t going to let us control the video stream the way DVRs do.
Microplastics showing up in our organ tissue and managing to pass the blood brain barrier. We’re going to cure Alzhemers just in time for Plazhemer’s to take us down.
Roman Empire > too much lead US Empire > too much plastic
It’s okay: our shareholders got their expected dividend growth this quarter.
But how will you make money curing Alzheimer’s? Old people have Medicaid and the government won’t shell out for the goods so they’d have to sell it cheap
The centralisation of all web browsing in the hands of a handful of aggregated front ends that basically monopolise on content provided by other people. Goodbye websites and independent communities.
Hello auto generated websites that exist to push ads and optimise SEO.
waves lemmy flag
squints in to the depths of the internet at the fractional population of Lemmy
Yeah… Yeah. I always feel kinda hopeless about this stuff because I’m not the sort of person that has the social clout to migrate my communities onto platforms.
Yes, absolutely. As of right now I have zero friends either online or offline. It’s been that way for a while now.
Do you live in the US? If so, what region? Wanna go to a movie sometime and then get pancakes & talk about said movie?
I wouldn’t say that I have zero friends, but I certainly don’t have the social circle I wish I had. That worries me for my own future. I’m gonna die someday, and I don’t want to slip into the abyss feeling totally alone.
And the fact that I don’t seem to be an outlier makes me worried for the future health and resiliency of entire communities.
I live in South Florida.
Well, we’re a few thousand miles apart, so the pancakes bit might not be feasible lol. On any fun discord servers?
Haven’t used Discord in a while actually.
I like pancakes but I’m in Oregon.
I always thought it was just me
Nope. I live in the pacific northwest of the US and there’s something here called the “Freeze” and some people refer to it as the “ice out” but it’s a term for how people in this region don’t really like making new friends. A lot of people here are very against talking to strangers.
Same here. I lost most of my friends after COVID.
It’s because as we’ve connected more and more people together the less the connections are meaningful or need to be meaningful. If I disagree with you I’ll just go find another person to talk with instead of trying to find a middle ground. This is why extremism is in the rise. It’s much easier to just join a cult like community where everyone agrees.
You can see the obvious GOP Republican Trumpers but there is also a lot of left wing extremism on lemmy, creating an echo chamber which is like the start of a cult.
So the Internet inadvertently is causing loneliness and extremism due to our connections not being meaningful.
The left wing extremism is part of why I don’t have a lot of in real life friends anymore where I live. I’ve had to either distance myself from people or just stop talking to them at all because they don’t think I’m good enough or something.
Like earlier this year I joined a meet up group in my area and I guess I made the mistake of asking about pride events because somehow that conversation turned into someone saying “you’re a fucking idiot if you don’t question your gender” and other fantastic concepts like “if you’re cis you’re dumb”
That sounds tough. I certainly have had times that I questioned my gender but I am comfortable being a CIS white male. I can’t change how I feel. Equally though, I recognize that people don’t feel comfortable with what they were born with. I also understand that the line between male and female, biologically, is more of a spectrum. We all started as female. Men have emotional periods every month. There is clearly not a binary state between male and female. It’s not cut and dry as that. So I fully support LGBTQIA+. In turn, I hope they fully support me being who I am.
That said, I have run into the exact same types of people. People who call me an asshole just because of who I am. I try to point out the hypocrisy and they do not care. That said, fuck’em. I still support LGBTQIA+ because of 2 reasons. 1) Very simply one person does not dictate the whole community. 2) I’m not a hypocrite. I want them to support my right to live how I feel is normal for me and I am going to do the damnest that they get the same.
Realistically though, those people are just angry and upset because CIS white males are the people who attack them the most. Our human instincts are that if some type of person keeps trying to kill you or threaten you, you generalize that all those types of people are bad. That I totally understand. It’s really not their fault even that they’ve generalized me as a threat to them. It’s their survival instincts and the shittiness of the world we live in. The best I can do is be a point for them to look at and say “Yeah, I guess not all of those types of people are trashy assholes.”
So I don’t think that’s really the same left-wing extremism that I was originally talking about. There are left-wing communities like Linux, Open Source Software, Unionization, and Communism. Whereas if you aren’t 100% you might as well be -100%. If you have a slight disagreement on how the system should be ideally then you are the absolute enemy. Zero middle ground.
Yeah, I mean, I went to pride anyway and I’m bisexual so of course I support LGBTQ+ because I’m part of the group.
But I don’t get treated like I’m part of the group. I just had a trans girl the other day who felt the need to explain to me, what a bisexual is. Like she’s fucking explaining my identity to me and talking down to me and you’re right, they don’t see the hypocrisy because you know if someone explained her identity to her, she’d filp out and other people would be outraged. But being bisexual is seen as “whatever” so its okay to condescend to that group.
So I don’t think that’s really the same left-wing extremism that I was originally talking about. There are left-wing communities like Linux, Open Source Software, Unionization, and Communism. Whereas if you aren’t 100% you might as well be -100%. If you have a slight disagreement on how the system should be ideally then you are the absolute enemy. Zero middle ground
I don’t understand how that is left wing? Like what does Linux have to do with left wing politics?
Open Source and Linux are very communism-focused. It’s very heavy on working together and sharing everything even if that means ruining your ability to make a product in the capitalistic society we actually live in currently. The GPL license essentially forces you to contribute back to the original source. If you disagree with doing that you are seen as Microsoft-incarnate.
Yeah, when I think of left wing politics, I think of like abortion rights, social issues… that sort of thing.
Oh, fair enough.
I’m with OP on this one, I can’t stand that everything needs an app to do simple tasks either. And subscriptions are getting way out of hand, the whole technological scope seems way more intrusive then it needs to be.
Capitalism is growing, it has successfully seeped through every aspect of our life, creating consensus and effectively becoming more and more the norm in the social fabric. Right now there are many opinions against capitalism that are beginning to become almost taboo.
- It has taken our privacy: it is almost mandatory nowdays to use things like social media and operating systems that track you. You can’t opt out without being a social outcast. As much as I wish I could live with pure Linux on every single device I use (including my phone) and without touching any proprietary software (except games and professional software with no privacy - invading tracking, but that doesn’t work well financially with a FOSS business model) belive me I would. But I would have to give up so much, it becomes almost impossible.
- It’s beginning normal to defend profit and condone terrible things for profit. Everybody knows about how the supply chain relies on several human rights violations to continue, but it’s considered normal.
- It has instilled the idea that everything you do must be useful. I’m seeing the idea that your hobbies must be “productive” in some kind of tangible way in your life spread around more and more, and it is making us appreciate life less, as “doing it for the sake of doing it” is beginning to be shunned as an useless waste of time.
- Relationships are becoming molded by capitalism. Think about the dating apps culture, swiping left and right on people who basically sell themselves as products on a market. It is becoming normal to see different people in parallel and then just committing to the one you like best - as if you were trying a bunch of laptops in an electronics store. Relationships themselves are less committed and more transactional, as we are normalizing stuff that makes me raise both eyebrows at once. People are starting to become scared of commitment and scared of committing to one person. More and more people are not only opting out of monogamy, but shunning those who choose to practice it as some kind of close - minded conservatives. There is more and more pushing and popularity in something like fluid and open relationships - which allows you to be in a relationship but still be on the market, never fully commit to a person, always keep looking for something better to jump onto, and have a normalized free trial with your partner’s consent. While it does work for some people and I don’t put that in doubt, I feel like at large this is being used to commodify relationships, sell ourselves as products on a market, lose our ability to commit to another human and get used to returning people like an Amazon package. It’s literally treating relationships as products. People want to live in the comfort that, if they decide to try a MacBook Pro M2 and later a more powerful M3-based iteration comes out, they can smoothly transition to the newer model - but for relationships - which is, in turn, damaging the very idea of a serious long-term relationship.
- Likewise, we are becoming all too trigger-happy in throwing people away from our lives like yesterday’s trash. Is your relationship or friendship hitting a rough spot? Nuanced opinions are getting more and more rare. “They’re a narcisist and you need to cut them out”, “they’re gaslighting or manipulating you”, “They don’t deserve you, you should leave immediately”. It’s super good that we are finally starting to take mental health seriously, thank goodness this is one of the things where I think the present is much better than the past at, but people we are overdoing it and using it out of context. In a world where people are commodified, they are too considered as disposable as products, and as such, easy to throw away and replace. The tendency to do real and actual work to work on a relationship or friendship with a person you love is starting to go out of fashion.
- We are making people work several jobs at once and completely drain themselves to even be able to afford their rent and basic survival. Everyone is becoming lonelier. Real friendships and relationships are being replaced with parasocial ones - only accessible through proprietary software with Draconian privacy policies that you would be very hesitant to accept if you took the time to actually read them, of course. There is a push to get part of our social need met by watching “stories” and social media updates by friends, mistaking a few reactions and comments here and there for actual interaction, and parasocial romantic relationships are actively being sold on platforms like Onlyfans, where not only creators sell their content (which I think it’s fair - content is content and everybody should be free to distribute it and sell it as they want and take profit for it), but also chat (or, more often and more unethically, hire someone else to chat with) lonely people who pay them to have someone to talk to and a semblance of a connection, one they cannot get in today’s hyper capitalist lives with low energy and low free time
- The rise of the right. Have you noticed that, right around when capitalism has gotten this intense, it has become almost acceptable once again to be openly fascist, without euphemisms? Have you noticed the sudden rise in far-right leaders in elections worldwide? It’s not just you, this is happening, the far right is making a huge comeback.
I absolutely look like a boomer typing this, and I am fully aware of this. I hate absolutely everything about contemporary culture, except for the much higher attention to mental health, broader acceptance of the LGBTQ+ community, more attention on the problems of feminism and a few other things that I think are a net positive to out society. I think capitalism is fully to blame for most of the things that are going to shit right now.
I am with you on a lot of this, but I will never and I mean ever understand the impulse that so many people have to say that online dating has made life worse. Dating is much better now because of online dating. Instead of constantly needing to be vigilant for an opportunity to find a mate and then pursuing them only to often be shut down or find out about a huge deal breaker on the second date, we can filter out a lot of those cases simply by reading a profile. Yes I’m aware people lie and hide things. But if they’re on a dating site they probably are looking for a relationship of some kind and if they wrote 3 or more sentences you probably can get a feel for what they generally value in life.
I also think it’s quite a stretch to try and say online dating = capitalism because “marketed as products” and “throw people away like trash”. It sounds like you were broken up with by one too many online dates?
Are you somehow intelligent enough to write all of this so thoughtfully, yet somehow unaware that relationships have ALWAYS been highly “transactional”? One of many aspects I could focus on to illustrate this is just the concept of marriage period. In many cultures, since thousands of years ago, you literally paid a family for a bride. It still continues today if I’m not mistaken, you just call it “paying a dowry” instead of buying a wife because it sounds better.
If we are talking about r/datingadvice I think there it’s a legit complaint to say that people seem to be more in the “throw that person away” camp but I don’t think there’s actually a shred of evidence that anything is new about this. We just now have a conduit for public opinions about dating to end up in our faces while we doomscroll.
I also blame capitalism for a lot, but I think it gets tricky to link capitalism to everything bad. I’d say it’s more like all these things are symptoms of a condition and all somewhat related. Greed is what a lot of this is, and yes capitalism is all wrapped up in that but I don’t think if you somehow took it away that every problem goes away.
First things first, throwing people away and online dating are in two different camps entirely. For the throwing people away it’s something that I have seen a lot: the Reddit dating advice is also more and more common and spread on social media, and it’s becoming to be eaten up by people. Ask random friends in your social circle in general, and you’ll find that - at least the younger ones - are susceptible to this trend.
As for online dating: we can meet in the middle and say that I think it would be a net pro on something that is structured differently than Tinder, which represents the embodiment of what I think is bad about it. There is, of course, value in being able to have access to a wider pool than “your friend group and social circle”. This is how I would structure my own dating app:
- Free and open source with no invasive data telemetry, full GDPR compliance, you can request all your data to be wiped clean with a button.
- No freemium model to encourage buying a pro option for it to actually work. Using a simple, unbiased algorithm that does a sort by distance, then a sort by sexual/romantic orientation compatibility (without requiring you to state it on your profile, for privacy reasons)
- Use a model that discourages “serial dating”. Every match you have with the app has a countdown, and the chat automatically terminates after some amount of messages and days. Every match has a “Set as Exclusive” button. Both parties press it when they’re not quite in a relationship, but are seeing each other exclusively. When both people press it, both people know they have agreed on this, and from then on the app goes in total lockdown until you deselect it and go back to non-exclusive dating.
- As for the last thing, I will freely borrow an idea that already exists from the Hinge app (which I consider to be the absolutely least worst option around; I have read a book written by one of the people who worked on it and I have agreed with every word): The app is made to be deleted. When two people enter an official relationship, both select a “Make official” button in their match’s settings view. When that’s done, the app congratulates you, deletes both accounts and then invites you to delete it.
Yes, I am aware this would not work for open relationships or stuff like couples looking for a third unicorn for kinky stuff, but that’s by design, as existing apps already work well for that. Tinder, for example, is more widely used for casual sex that it is about building romantic relationships, and it is perfectly adequate for that.
Yes, you are pointing to combines marriages - but I am not suggesting we go back to the 50’s, I am talking about the past few years. Capitalism has already been an upgrade over feudalism, I agree. My point is that, lately, we have been overdoing it and everything that started off as a positive innovation, like social media and dating apps, is starting to lose its soul and become more Draconian or anti - capitalism.
Greed is what a lot of this is, and yes capitalism is all wrapped up in that but I don’t think if you somehow took it away that every problem goes away.
I have a question for you: why is it that billionaires and big capitalists have been amassing more profits and pushing this more intensive version of capitalism? I know this argumentation all too well, I have once had a long discussion with a friend who argued capitalism or not wouldn’t change anything because greed exists. My counter point is that, while greed exists and has always existed, it’s never been quite that bad in recent times and, for second, greed and capitalism feed and reinforce each other. It’s an endless loop that keeps reinforcing itself.
Also, do consider the fact that while I was highly upvoted here on Lemmy, the same wouldn’t be true at a random table with some friend group out there in the world. These opinions of mine that are popular here are fringe in the real world, so if you get the impression my comment is disconnected from reality and what people think when you touch grass, yes, that is precisely the point why I wrote it. This is my own little grumpy old man yelling at a clown view of a lot of modern things that I talk about in spaces like these online, but mostly shut up about when I’m out there having a drink.
Absolutely agree. I am afraid of where capitalism will bring us one day If I am being honest.
By the way, to be precise and pedantic, they are the results of neoliberalism and not purely capitalism. From the outside, it seams not very different but it’s. Capitalism is only a part of neoliberalism.
But isn’t neoliberalism a natural progression of capitalism? This is like a rolling snowball that becomes an extremely destructive avalanche.
Edit: spelling.
Damn there’s so much to agree with. The way you’ve found a common thread in all this, it puts into words many criticisms I’ve started to foster. growing up in capitalism with such a far reach (into our private lives) and high speed is absolutely leaving it’s mark on the culture.
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I think it’s especially the money and LGBTQ+ and non sexual norms that are driving people to the right. I notice when I talk to a lot of younger guys theyre tired of hearing about it.
Because it’s pushed on so much of their TV shows and things they like that they side with political candidates that are conservative at a young age and they further grow into it. These are conservative candidates with lots of money usually.
I hate to say it but it was universally cool to defend LGBT people when the media and TV shows didn’t push it. Because you were defending an oppressed person. Now it more so feels like it’s popular which means it’s no longer an obscure thing, the anti culture is the new trend.
I want to disclaim that I don’t agree with any of this other than to say this is my observation of the behavior. I play rainbow six ranked on Xbox and use the looking for group party finder with a buddy of mine. We group up and encounter a lot of guys in the army and Marines, a lot of teenagers and this is cumulatively the culture I’ve heard. Same thing on like world of warcraft classic and using discord to raid but those guys run older typically.
when the media and TV shows didn’t push it
This infuriates me more than I can express. How is the existence of lgbt people in media “pushing it”? I that case, I’m sick of the “straights” who have been “pushing it” since I was born.
A few months ago someone I considered a friend came to me and was like, I know you’re trans, but what’s your opinion on all the trans stuff in the media, I don’t want my kid exposed to it. Like, wow, the only reason you know I’m trans is because I told you and now my existence has become political, something her kids need to be shielded from. Fuck all these people to hell and back.
You wanna know how that kind of shit makes you feel? This is what I wrote in a comment yesterday:
You know what’s fucked? Being told every day, wherever you look that you shouldn’t exist, that you’re disgusting and gross, that you deserve to die, that you’re unwanted and don’t belong. Online, in the news, on TV, from family, people you considered friends, people you tell when you’d like to date. People like this are part of the reason that the end of a rope gets more enticing by the day. You can only take so much constant abuse and hatred. So I guess they’re winning, they should be proud of themselves because they’re achieving their goals, with some luck I won’t exist anymore.
Playing the victim is the right wingers favorite pastime. Crying that someone’s right to exist is a burden for you to hear about. Fuck on off back to 4chan or whatever
Temu, Shein, Alibaba and even Amazon are full of unsafe products not manufactured under sufficient quality standards.
Recently we bought some plates for a party that had gold metallic polka dots on them. I was able to use a plastic fork to scrape off these polka dots. People were eating cake off these plates. The metallic paint was going into people’s mouths.
Also, many of these products are only designed to last for a short time before they break, so we are literally filling landfills with this plastic junk we get sent over to us from China by the shipping container load.
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Some of the Chinese stuff is good, particularly if you get a name brand (Aqara, Sengled, Sonoff, etc). I’ve got a bunch of Sengled smart plugs and they all have proper ETL listing. A lot of US-based brands are manufactured In China too. It’s just hard to separate the good from the bad sometimes though :/
Yes. I search a good figdet toy, but all i find online is either shitty or mega expensiv. There is like no way of finding these things in local stores.
Why would you buy anything from these places and not expect garbage? What bothers me is people continuing to buy plastic crap then blaming the corporations for environmental issues. Just stop buying shit.
at this point, i’m not sure where to buy most things and not get garbage. every online platform is trying to emulate amazon and become a “marketplace” filled with unvetted cheap shit; stores often have little stock and no one with expertise.
i need a lamp for my office. where do i buy something i can ensure is safe and well made? i have no idea.
i realize this is a small concern relative to the larger failures of capitalism, but free market competition isn’t even successful at providing basic goods and services.
Absolutely. Louis Rossmann recently made a video repairing a disposable sex toy, and when he took it apart, he realised that the battery wasn’t empty, but it stopped working because the product had zero water resistance design, which means that it is unsafe to use in addition to being a literal subscription service to get these disposable toys when it could have easily been a regular product.
So you poisoned ppl. Good on ys
Well I found out about it later, but yes I guess I did. Got away with it too!
Sadly my partner finds this junk irresistible.
Subscriptions. Why is everything a sub now?
I understand the need for some subscriptions and their benefits when there is ongoing content added to a platform.
However i’m not paying a subscription for software I could just buy and own forever, i’m not paying a £6.99 subscription to get some shitty cloud features in an app that is costing several cents a month to host. I get hundreds of gigabytes a month for less than that with Backblaze.
I’m not paying a subscription to read every second news website. I’m not paying a sub to access remote features of my car. I’m not paying a subscription to remove ads in an app, just let me pay once.
