• UNWILLING_PARTICIPANT
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    1 year ago

    Yeah I’m feeling less like a participant, and more like a consumer on the “greater internet” (five big), compared to the early days when corporate presence was minimal, and not remotely slick or subtle. It was like dorky and obvious, and didn’t seem remotely like a threat.

    • HipHoboHarold@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Feeling like a consumer is a great way to put it. It especially feels more and more like it when trying to do even the most mundane tasks. Like if you own a product but need to ask a question on Google about it, first you have to scroll past the links to pages trying to sell you the product you typed in, then you might get some reddit links, 2-3 from a smaller forum, and then more links trying to sell you the product. It will say there’s thousands of results, but it’s just the same 6 links to purchase the product over and over again. So now even basic web searches are mainly for buying stuff.

      • Fungah@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Search is broken. It’s been getting worse year over year and Google / Bing and all the various offshoots that are JUST GOOGLE AND BING (this isn’t a fucking secret, people. You can slap whatever algo you want over Google / bing and it’s still fucking Google and bing. And a jolly go duck duck fucK yourself to the lot of them).

        I pay $10/month for kagi. Its worth it.

      • UNWILLING_PARTICIPANT
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        1 year ago

        And then now that Alphabet owns YouTube, the first couple results are always monetized videos… It’s brutal.