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

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?

Watch five or six great ape (gorilla, orangutan) videos in a row and you will be deluged with gorilla content forever.

I ordered an HP Lovecraft paperback from Amazon in like 1998 (when they only sold books) and to this day they still recommend new Lovecraft titles I might enjoy

I've been getting stuck in loops of smart bird content lately. It's pretty good stuff tbh.

Watch five or six great ape (gorilla, orangutan) videos in a row and you will be deluged with gorilla content forever.

― Tahuti Watches L&O:SVU Reruns Without His Ape (unperson), Friday, March 22, 2024 2:48 PM (three hours ago)

oh god the gorilla channel is real

my reels are basically all x games all the time now. i'm not mad about it. unless i'm home alone on a friday night contemplating the fact that i can't pay my bills without a side gig that doesn't seem to be coming and i can't travel anywhere or afford more than groceries and gas. then somehow it all feels a bit joyless.

gay underwear, climbing, fancy cosmetics

which, fair enough

Watch five or six great ape (gorilla, orangutan) videos in a row and you will be deluged with gorilla content forever.

And clothing… though I will resent getting ads for clothes that don’t come in plus sizes… especially since so much of purchasing and search history is “plus size”…. Today I got an ad telling me I should book a hotel for when I go see Pulp … I live 8 miles away. They should know this

but at least it prompted you to organise the pre-Pulp fap (in the future)

Space bar makes the video pause. Except when it instead selects the buttons on the video, a thing I have never once wanted to do.

* The web gradually filling up with images in strange, nonstandard formats, indigestible by a lot of very widely-used software: .webp, .heic, .avif...

that’s what people used to say about .png files, a format that was partially adopted as an alternative to the patent-encumbered .gif
(gif’s default compression scheme fell out of patent in 2003)
also at least one of those you mentioned was developed by a working group of note and is an ISO standard. my guess is you’re referring to Adobe’s heel-dragging on any format that’s not a new camera raw format

.webp can go straight to hell, back where it came from.

there's an entire realm of people shouting about google's creation of webp, their refusal to contribute to or implement jpegxl, all kinds of nonsense. the kind of circular nerd fight that goes on forever

i did eventually get a plugin working for importing webp into gimp. with avif i still have to run a converter from the command line before editing.

(avif is the still images version of some video format iirc, has been around for ages, just not used for this. webp apparently technically very good. both still annoying when i'm trying to filch book covers or album covers for ereader / media player)

i fucking hate webp but i guess it's a thing now and we all just have to learn to deal with it. technologically it probably _is_ a forward step... i'm just getting old and hate change. why can't we bring back DOS 5.0? i knew how to use DOS 5.0, and even more importantly, _no one else did_. knowing how to edit a config.sys file made me feel smart.

I am fucking delighted to find out that the working group mh mentioned is the Moving Pictures Expert Group, as I'd never realised what that acronym was till now.

The impossibility of dropping these things into PowerPoint or, yes, Adobe software is my main gripe. Every webp I inadvertently download, I have to open in Paint to resave as a jpeg.