I think the thing I miss most about the old internet was the fact that many people just produced things without worrying about getting paid all the time. Websites were basic but fun, people uploaded funny videos just for laughs, and sites like Reddit were hardly heard of.

It's a store where there's a pickpocket in every aisle, all the products are cheap fakes and the registers are programmed to cheat.

But line goes up. It goes up!

The internet was also a place you went to, and you could actually turn it off or walk away from. Now it’s everywhere and stitched into our entire lives.

I still write and release open source software projects despite full well knowing they will likely have 0 users and that AI could replicate it in 1% the time I took. Doesn't matter. I do it cause programming is what I love to do. I think it's really sad that a lot of people have forgotten that's the purpose of doing this kind of stuff. It's not like we were ever gonna see a cent for it anyways. One of my projects was downloaded about 8000 times. That's nice. Too bad it's a project I discontinued because I no longer use it. No refunds!

A programmer that does it for the love of the game! Here's to hoping more people (yes human ppl, not agents) follow your example! These are the things that keep me vested in tech in the first place

I have a few projects like that and I used to create itch.io pages for them (at least for those related to gamedev). I've discontinued all of them years ago but recently I started getting notifications about people paying a dollar or two for them for no reason.

I read this in Tim Robinson's voice for some reason.

Objectively, a library under capitalism would rather be a bookstore. Theres no point to holding information because information isn't profitable; replace that with entertainment. Steal some data so you can better target markets. Price out competition once you get large enough. Require paid membership to be given the privilege of renting the books once you have a monopoly.

I wish the internet WAS a store. It’s a lavatory these days, full of shit and scribbled texts on the door aiming to rot your brain and to destroy democracy.

Not just the internet. Ever fucking thing is for profit

The US, the most capitalistic country on the planet, has thousands of free libraries.

I love people like you. I can t believe I was talking to my partner about this very case of FOSS programmers who do it just to scratch an itch but still benefiting others and the world more than any sycho-corpo can ever hope to

Capitalism is a machine that turns all freely accessible public goods into paid products and services.

But hey, look at the GDP rising. Don't you feel richer?

If you invented them today they'd call you a commie terrorist

The social contract was that everyone was a custodian of that library. That's how we got Wikipedia.

Social media and monetization broke that social contract. Another building was constructed beside the library. People were checking out books from the library and selling them at the market.

Now with LLMs, those books are being burnt. There's a trillion dollar giga-sized building next to the derelict library and the fast becoming defunct market that is industrial scale mass producing pulpy books.

I mean, probably, but that doesn't change the fact that we have them and many were built by one of the most famous capitalists in history.

We're just lucky they got "grandfathered" in to our current late-stage capitalism. For now anyway.

Something that I get angry about occasionally is how so many people have had their hobbies stolen from them. Like people who'd tinker about in their spare time making music, now feeling like they have to monetise it, and feeling the stress of not being able to supplement their failing income because they're just one artist in a sea of artists, someone without a major label giving them a push.

I don't blame the people at all, we're all just trying to get on in this increasingly shitty world.

I do a little radio show once a week. It's reasonably popular, but not so much that I could ever think about giving up the day job, and my day job's pay isn't too bad in the grand scheme of things. But even I'm at a point where I've set up a Patreon where if anyone wants to kick in £3 a month, they can. Ultimately it just helps with the running costs of my VPS and domain renewal, and will hopefully give me enough to be able to pick up a new midi controller.

It's fine, and people are happy to help out because they get to be a part of something they enjoy, but I hate that there's been an increasingly vocal bit of my brane over the past year or so that's been telling me that if everyone who listens paid £3 a month, I'd be 'earning' an extra £450 (give or take). According to my stats, the episode from a couple of weeks back is up to 250 listens on the podcast feed. That's £750...

It's my hobby. It's a thing I enjoy doing. But if I'm not careful it'll veer far too closely towards something I have to do, and that'll kill it.

Hey there, now... it's destroying more than just democracy.

Fair enough

I think about this peach vinaigrette story a lot in that context:
https://www.reddit.com/r/bestof/comments/142qfal/uusername_unavailable_offers_us_a_cautionary_tale/

Please forgive the Reddit link.

Yeah and this is why my friends all have gibbity subscriptions: "its so much easier to find info instead of scrolling through reddit or a ton of google pages that are ads! I set my gibbity up to tell me the weather!"

Jfc people are stupid and I hate everyone and I must scream.

/rant.

What kind of projects are you working on? I really need to start some of my own or contribute to other projects but I'm not even sure where to begin.

Wait, what? Now it's easier than ever to find information on the internet, what difficulties do people have?

Is this person the one who writes "pls help me" in YouTube comments and doesn't ever explain their problem or come back?

Here's what N. M. Klein wrote about the internet all the way back in 1998, likening it to a labyrinth.
I don't say this often, but this text has completely changed the course of my life.
Some choice quotes:

1998 is still a dangerously nascent stage in the Internet, while a trillion dollar nest of dragons sets up shop.
Inside, you have seemingly infinite choice, but practically no way out. In fact, you prefer being trapped a bit. That gives the story some bite. Why enter Happy Imprisonment? Because you slowly catch your breath. You expect to outwit the program.
Pockets of confusion in the system let the player imagine that there are ways to subvert it. It's a Faustian sim-bargain. The player submits to the labyrinth, then pretends to cheat.
Simulating revolt is more fun, and a better investment. [...] But consider what sim-revolt implies as a broader model for public life? We pretend that the labyrinth of the Web makes us free of the global corporate program that builds and owns it. We feel above the swamp of idiotic web sites. We know how to surf. The demon apparatus can't get us. We can dig out of anything. We're never trapped.
Recently, there is talk of voting on the Web. Is a cross between ergonomic fascism and the shopping mall the best frame of mind for making political decisions? Let us not mystify information delivery too much. Despite the services, it is not fundamentally democratic, only the freedom to chat. The server and the search engine are a feudal plantation. They decide for us, when to plant, when to hunt.
The labyrinth is a mood of passivity. It's like saying you're never really trapped in bad traffic. Just because we can subvert the Web by saying nasty things or engaging in cyber-sex in the margins, or downloading information cheaply, does not mean that we are subverting any core reality.

Wikipedia still exists, in fact it's expanding every day...

It was just another form of enclosures where the wealthy locked off huge areas of the commons floor their own private gain and forced the rest of us to get a subscription

Its never been easier to get free software, and if anyone is telling you the internet used to be easier to parse then they were not there in the beginning.

Hey now, it doesn’t just destroy, it also builds fascist movements!

God. Yes.

Are you using Linux / Wayland? Lately I've been having a lot of fun using gtk4-layer-shell in creative ways. Imo a great way to come up with projects that you'll enjoy and be motivated to finish is to explore something totally novel and see where it takes you. An even better way is to recognize that feeling of 'I feel like my computer should be able to do X' and then make it possible. My last project of that variety was a system to stream videos from torrents as soon as possible after the download begins. Can start watching a 10gb video file all the way through in full quality with no buffering after like 30 seconds of downloading if you fiddle with the torrent and analyze the video file as it's being written. Unfortunately I won't be releasing this one as I learned that it would be quite bad for swarm health, but it's cool for personal use.

Its a store and you're the product

I Walk the corner to the rubble,
That used to be a library, line up to the mind cemetery now,

Under a digital model libraries generally have to keep paying for digital licenses to books. So capitalism is making inroads against tax dollars and actively nullifying the majority of benefits of digital books.

Republicans on city councils in Texas are trying to force libraries to charge people for access, just like a gym.

Gopher sites were great for finding information, if the information was actually there. The tree structure made drilling down to what you needed very straightforward. Mind you, the internet was also small enough that I had downloaded and pribted a book that listed every site and a short description of what it contained.

I strongly beg to differ

3 years ago, when I searched for something I found it. Even the esoteric little details buried in an old forum weren't that hard to find

Now? It's fine if you want the most common information, but it's impossible to find the little details

And those little details are critical for developers. A single sentence can give you an answer that could easily take hours or days to figure out

Programmers aren't only switching to AI because it's easier... The old way of doing things has been crippled

Marx had a lot to say about this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx's_theory_of_alienation

Edit:

In his analysis, Marx identified four key aspects of alienated labour.
First, the worker is alienated from the product of their labour, which is appropriated by the capitalist and confronts the worker as a hostile power.

Second, they are alienated from the activity of production itself, which is experienced not as a fulfilling expression of creativity but as coerced, meaningless toil.

Third, this leads to alienation from their own human nature, or species-being (Gattungswesen), as free, conscious activity is reduced to a mere means of survival.

Finally, the worker is alienated from other people, as social relationships become reified and mediated by market exchange, fostering competition and indifference rather than community.

Looks like #2 and #3 apply directly to the situation in your comment.

Dude knew what he was talking about.

I just checked, my man pages are still there.

Ugh. I get it, but I dislike poetry that avoids grammar to make something seem deeper than it is.

I walk to the corner

To the rubble

That used to be a library.

Line up

To the mind cemetary now.

It is not easier to find information; real information exists still, but it has been drowned out by garbage. Consider Borges's "The Library of Babel", or watch the Fractal Philosophy video concerning "surviving a dead Internet".

There is also the issue of knowledge being paywalled. Consider the Guerilla Open Access Manifesto and its context.

And the fascists have been going after it wholesale.

"We had computer rooms, and the Internet should have stayed in those."

"With Spotify, playlists are created for me!"

Bud, you're letting someone else define your preferences, and giving up ownership.

That is cool, and KDE Plasma is my home these days. This is all very relevant to my interests and I suspect it is to more and more others lately too.

Thanks for contributing even if it doesn't get a ton of attention. You never know when your novel approach to something will end up being THE idea someone needed to solve their own problem.

It's a store. Profit and greed are a huge factor in what the internet has become. We used to have people paying for hosting so they could provide information to the public for free. Now every fucking moron wants to make money by making 'content', it predates AI, by a lot.

ok but hear me out; I made some wild musical discoveries by having playlists generated based on a song, add it to the main playlist and do the same with some unkown song in said playlist until I have a big playlist of very weird niches combined.