Technological/practical "backward steps" we all just accept now

if i'd died, would anybody have cared? fuck no. nobody's going to give a shit about some seriously mentally ill "guy" who doesn't even have a job. if anything, people would have blamed _me_.

by the way i literally saw this happen to my ex-wife's schizophrenic brother. for decades her family tried to take care of him, help him live independently. finally they got to a point where they couldn't do it anymore. they were like, he deserves better. he deserves more than we can provide for him. so they put him into long-term care.

two weeks later he was dead of a prescription drug overdose. nobody was exactly sure how that happened. was it a mistake by one of the staff? did he get it from one of the other patients? nobody really gave too much of a shit. people saw him as a problem, a burden, and now he wasn't. one less mouth to feed is one less mouth to feed.

when you move the mouse to the browser's back button, or toward another tab, and a pop-up comes up that says something like "wait, before you go you could sign up for our mailing list!!!" or "don't click that button! we have other content!" or "don't you leave me! you stay here!"

shouldn't they add this to physical stores, too? when you even look toward the exit, a sales associate approaches to make sure that you're sure. really there should just be more physical interactions in stores, like physical objects with messages on them thrown at you while you're browsing

there was one gas station once where I went in to browse and I didn't find anything snack wise I wanted and the employee followed me out of the store demanding to know what I was looking for and I should come back inside and she will find it for me

and please fill out a short survey to let them know how they did, before you leave!! please for the love of god fill out thi---

If I knew how to write browser extensions I would write one to make all that shit fuck off

at the grocery they always ask me if I want smokes or ice or maybe buy a decorative candle

want a bottle of whiskey, some funeral balloons?

Related: sites that load/refresh in such a way that you can't simply hit "back" to return to your previous page--you have to depress the back button and choose your previous page from the drop down because the last three previous entries are the page you're currently on.

everything is flooded with monetizable crap, computers writing content for computers to index and return, at some point, to people looking to read something, anything, written by another person

yeah lately this has been irritating me too. I write a music blog where I basically just focus on a particular album 2-3x a month. it gets a decent amount of engagement - always cool to like hop on Discord servers and realize people actually know who I am. my numbers have been going up year after year and most of that is Google traffic - I write about some pretty obscure stuff sometimes and I think people searching for those albums happen upon my site. lately this hasn't been the case though as top results are now AI-generated bullshit, my site isn't even on the first page anymore when you look up really obscure stuff where I'm almost certainly one of the only people that's actually written about it. I mean I'm not touting my own writing but surely this is what people who are searching these albums are actually looking for right? kinda unsure if I even want to be doing this anymore

what's your blog? just curious to check it out

^^^ let's get those search results boosted!

yeah, i had no idea a frogbs blog was out there. link pls.

Somedays I wish I could take the technological backward step of directory search engines like '90s Yahoo. All the usual caveats about gatekeeping apply, but it'd be nice to look up a topic and see sites by verified humans. But I suppose that's not feasible now that so much of the web is no longer "handmade".

it's on my website url on ILX!! what are you telling me nobody checks those!???

https://critterjams.wordpress.com/

No offense to frogs, but websites with social media icons that only lead to facebook.com or instagram.com, not to any actual profile pages.

They're likely thrown with the template, but why throw them in there at all in the first place?

it's on my website url on ILX!! what are you telling me nobody checks those!???

https://critterjams.wordpress.com/

― frogbs

i absolutely don't check those

It's multiple layers of awful that the only way to reliably find real people talking about something is to add site:reddit.com to the search string.

No offense to frogs, but websites with social media icons that only lead to facebook.com or instagram.com, not to any actual profile pages.

They're likely thrown with the template, but why throw them in there at all in the first place?

― pplains, Thursday, February 29, 2024 2:46 PM (twelve minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

I just had to pick a new template because the old one was doing something very annoying, I didn't even realize they were there :) but no more!!!

lololol ok I am hooked

When I first read about Zappa it was on a webpage that began thusly: “Frank Zappa was a man who simply could not shut the fuck up.”

The Paramount Plus and Sirius XM apps are so bad it's like they must be joking. how do these huge companies have such lousy apps?

good conversations on super niche topics have mostly moved to discords I'd say, which can be viewed as a backwards step because a) harder to get to and b) not searchable in the same way.

I can’t remember because I have talked about it with so many people but have we discussed the Dark Forest theory of the Internet on ILX?

have subscribed to yr blog frogbs

we salute you Colonel

Dark Forest rings very familiar, but I can't figure out which thread it was on.

I just had to pick a new template because the old one was doing something very annoying, I didn't even realize they were there :) but no more!!!

― frogbs, Thursday, February 29, 2024 3:02 PM

You are now light years ahead of many hospitality and tourism organizations.

featuring erstwhile ilx0r yanc3y (who seemed like a great guy but i never heard how he responded to kickstarter unionization):

The dark forest theory of the internet (2019)
+
The Dark Forest Anthology of the Internet (a new collection of essays)

ty

Trying to get a refund from my energy company cause I’m £192 in credit & I’d rather that money were piling up in my bank account than with some cunt “provider”

This had previously been easy to do, literally just the click of a button on their site. Now there it takes you to a chatbot that asks you to type REFUND to request a refund, so I do and it says “sorry, I am unable to process this as you are not logged in” (I am) and tells me to click a link that takes me back to the landing page to start the cycle again. After a couple of times I get it to say “I am unable to process this request at this time, click here to chat with a member of our customer service team” — which just turns out to be a different fucking chatbot that can’t do anything!

The company I was with, shell energy, was recently bought by octopus so I figured it’s to do with the handover & I’d try again once I got set up with them .

Get the email to set up my octopus account yesterday, log in on their site: details all correct, £192 in credit, go to the refund section & am relieved to see it’s a simple button to click & not a stupid pretend chat window. Click the button & get “We can't automatically approve your refund request online, as your balance is less than £5”

I know these kinds of companies sucked before, in some senses this isn’t so much a backward step as on a continuum with stuff like automated phone lines — it does have that particular kind of dysfunction that is built into absolutely everything now tho so belongs itt

Yeah, customer exhaustion as a business model is definitely a thing, including "free for first 30 days then they have to cancel" - of course that's an older thing but as you say it's easier for them to make it harder for you now.

They're likely thrown with the template, but why throw them in there at all in the first place?

Is there a trendy term for excessive crap in templates and defaults and apps that come with your phone or computer that you want to get rid of? I feel like it’s related to bloat.

I feel like we are back to the late 90s when we had to deal with the extensions manager in Mac OS 9.2 (and earlier) but we can’t as easily get to the extensions manager

https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/book/the-glossary-of-human-computer-interaction/featuritis-or-creeping-featurism

Thank you for understanding!

Liking anything on Facebook ( and probably other Social media Channels) is now a case of please spam me with stuff that's only vaguely adjacent to this item.

and now I never like stuff that might actually interest me because I cant take the sudden influx of stuff the algorithm has waiting in store.

suggested content on timelines is the great 'backwards step' we all just accept now, because capitalism myth of constant growth.

Not a new or novel opinion, but had some recent examples which drove me nuts.

I liked a video a pregnant friend of mine posted on insta of her baby moving around inside her belly.

You can only guess what kind of nightmarish eraserhead suggestions insta suggested to me for the next week.

i recently discovered on Facebook on phones you can go to "feeds" and then "friends" and you see way less of the crap than the default feed

This is a good tip!

You know, back when I fought for frozen peaches on the Internet in the 90s, I fought for two things: The ability to say "fuck", and porn. Quite honestly, I am mad as hell that capitalism has made the Internet into a place where we can't do _either_ of these things, or you get DEMONETIZED. People make these video essays and they're all funded by these fucking scams like HelloFresh, but you can't talk about real shit. Contrapoints made a three hour video about fetishes and she had to say it was about fucking _twilight_ to get it to where anybody could look at it. Yet that same site will promote transphobic bigotry and hatred all over the damn place.

I mean, I guess at least if you're a video essayist you can put an uncensored version on Nebula. If you're not doing video essays, you can't even do shit behind a paywall. Gumroad has decided to ban all its NSFW content. They're blaming their payment processors. And fair enough! Anything can be _legal_ but if you have to meet Youtube's or Paypal's "decency" standards to sell your stuff or to get anybody to see your stuff, what does it matter?

All of this is so absurd. If this wasn't the Darkest Timeline, I'd be doing work that has actual value, the work I was born to do: Making force fem ASMR for my legion of finsubs. I assure you that this would be _far_ superior to whatever it the hell it is my employer is paying me to do. And you might be saying, "Kate, you're clearly being paid to complain on Internet message boards about capitalism", but no! No, not today. Today I am taking the day off, so that I can complain on Internet message boards about capitalism on my _own_ time.

lol

kate otm

This is a good tip!

someone on here posted a good essay about the SNL/Shane Gillis thing from Kath Barbadoro, who I follow on Twitter and think is a good writer...anyway, she wrote another article on her Substack about Ozempic which I read. since then I'm getting a bunch of suggested content from MSN about Ozempic, all freaky stuff too. I couldn't figure out why until I remembered I read that article. I'm starting to really hate suggested content. When everyone thought Putin was gonna use nukes there were articles up there for a month saying stuff like "Russian insider says Putin ABSOLUTELY WILL nuke the West". I look up a couple articles about blood pressure and cancer screenings and suddenly it's all stuff about getting old and all the health problems in my future. It's not like I'm clicking on any of these but just loading up a new tab you still see it just enough for it to depress you. Why does it have to be all negative stuff? Why can't it be anything related to my actual hobbies?

my Instagram feed is 90% "tips to make your LinkedIn stand out" and "what ADHD is really like" reels. If I'd known that a few isolated, mindless clicks would forever customize my feed this way I'd have been a little more discriminate, might have clicked on a few more New Yorker cartoons or Mitch Hedberg videos

Agreed, someone described Instagram to me as like flicking through a magazine, and every so often an item or picture will catch your eye and you'll linger on it...but I just get fed stuff I would totally ignore in a magazine...dogs, DIY, cooking.

I recently found out that you can adjust the "sensitive" content setting to show you less "sensitive" content, and that this basically filters out most thirst trap posts. Because I feel like my primitive brain will just drift toward those in an idle moment, and then it just winds up showing me more and more of them (at least when I pull up the "search") even though I don't follow any thirst trap accounts.

DO THIS EACH MORNING TO EVACUATE YOUR BOWELS

A couple of years ago I was looking up something on an obscure university's website for work, and to this day its ads follow me all over the internet, including in my LinkedIn messages.

how do I get less "lesbian touches a penis for the first time" ads?