Remember when the internet was fun? If you’re under the age of 30, you probably don’t. Yes, all internet websites, services and applications are getting worse year after year. That is by design. But there are things we can do about it! Today on Solutions Watch, James presents 10 simple tips for de-enshittifying your internet experience.
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SHOW NOTES
Cory Doctorow at CF 25: How Enshittification Conquered the 21st Century and How We Can Overthrow It
The ‘Enshittification’ of TikTok
Enshittification – Merriam-Webster definition
2023 Word of the Year Is “Enshittification”
TIPS
1) – RSS
Really Simple Syndication – #SolutionsWatch
2) DeArrow
DeArrow is an open source browser extension for crowdsourcing better titles and thumbnails on YouTube. The goal is to make titles accurate and reduce sensationalism. No more arrows, ridiculous faces, and no more clickbait.
3) AI Sloplist
“Block AI-generated slop content from your YouTube experience. A community-maintained blocklist with browser extensions for Firefox and Chrome.”
4) The Small Web
Wiby – Small web search engine
Starla.org – download your very own set of classic SP fonts!
5) Nearby Glasses
The Rise of the Ray-Ban Meta Creep
New Nearby Glasses App Alerts You When Smart Glasses Are Nearby
6) Internet Archive
7) Wayback Machine
The (Necessarily Incomplete, Inarguably Ridiculous) List of Things “Caused by Climate Change”
8) Television Archive
9) Famelack
10) Photopea
Oh Jamiesan
Your super powers extend around the globe. How will you use this power? We have had you under surveillance for all most of a quarter century. Apparently the report is not finished.
The most curious laying, that egg you laid just the other day. You gave everyone a ride on your vomit comet. You know the plane that trains astronauts. It must have sent hundreds of your followers to another planet . The truth of something so revealing and horrible to the uninitiated can be hard to swallow. That’s no Cassandra moment. I believe you really mean it. Earth shattering for the faint of heart. To follow that up with something important and informative is kinder, gentler on the system. However , the structure of this present time needs more massaging. Then we may grow into RSS to keep going forward in our unsettling concerns of the world around us.
I hope you can take the time to follow that last report up. Clarifying for the aged and newly recruited. It was a well written report packed with complicated concepts unfamiliar to most. The banking, the credits, the technocracy and where currency and commodities are one in the same. Distribution and lockdown . Those middle men and redundancy that will go direct. The totality of what is going into the trash heep of history. The thousand points of light . Complex things that are now happening.
Thank you, Broc and Shaun .
I’ll give you my secret for de-enshittifying my browsing experience on the Corbett Report. 🙂
Now that the Reportage ad is no longer covering up Shaun in the background I had to become resourceful to make my own cover-up tool.
What I do is use a pop-up sticky note program that I can activate with the click of a key and bingo, Shaun is no longer distracting me while I watch/listen to James!
Necessity is the mother of invention. 🙂
Fantastic! If anyone is on Android and wants to De-enshittify YouTube. Look at Revanced https://revanced.app/download
Would be great to have this added here
There was a split up in the revanced team so now we have another offering on the market, alongside revanced, morphe.
https://morphe.software/
There is also another option (Louis Rossman involved, funding?) called grayjay. To me this looks like RSS on steroids.
https://grayjay.app/
I don’t use a SMART phone, don’t carry my Kyocera Dumb flip phone in public.
Only watch youtube on my Dumb TV.
NEVER use any social media stuff.
Early 2000’s I could go on the web with my 2000 Mac Pismo G3 laptop using OSX 10.4.11 until they started loading up pages with so much crap it wouldn’t load anymore.
These days on my desk top iMac 2009 searching with FireFox is beginning to slow down like it was on my Pismo :-/ The incredible amount of nanny state demands is ridiculous. Security fear porn is rampant.
Even getting on the VA website has shitshow stipulations.
GET OFF THE PHONE (song)
https://old.bitchute.com/video/2QbsxZOkIYjA/
Holy cow! James!
RE: The (Necessarily Incomplete, Inarguably Ridiculous) List of Things “Caused by Climate Change”
https://corbettreport.com/list-of-things-caused-by-climate-change/
I really do appreciate you going through every one of those broken links and logging them into the Wayback Machine.
Tenacious skin you have.
I’m laughing to myself, ‘cuz about halfway through the massive list I would want to give-up…but that would mean that my previously invested time was for not. A trap of my own making.
Httrack is an app that can grab a website and store it locally – you have an “index” html page and when you open it you follow the link into the page…..while you can’t grab the entire web some old websites are rather nice to have and it can grab all the files stored there if you tell it to.
I kinda like the idea of Neocities but comparatively few people make websites in the Age of YouTube. There are a ton of YouTube essays and in copyright audiobooks that can be downloaded from the site though they keep breaking download apps.
It’s a good time to buy some hard drives and store the things you think are worth preserving….buy a pair of external 20 gig drives and mirror them because two copies = one copy 😉
You can run your own movie plex with free KODI software on an old computer (or a cheep Raspberry Pi SBC) and play them on your big TV via cable….I was gettting DVDs at a dollar or less each a while back and ripping them to hard drive as an “iso” file via Brasero- you can play those with KODI or rip them into MP4s with HANDBRAKE- plenty of YT vids on how. Also a ton of olde movies and radio plays on the Internet Archive.
VLC player can convert media types (I was just ripping MP4 videos of audio books by batch into flac and mp3s) as well as (I am told since I never got it to work right) download and save YouTube and other video streams.
Librevox has a lot of old books being read (some even read dramatically by groups) and project Gutenberg is still around and deserves some love for all those free old books.
I would say that the internet (whatever you do to mitigate) will be getting progressively worse as we get poorer and dumber as a population. It’s probably a good idea to plunder all the good stuff you can carry off now from the burning library of Alexandria…..start with stuff you like then get stuff that others will find useful after your gone.
I heard of Project Gutenberg last summer as I’m an avid reader. And I looked up Librevix It’s actually spelled Librivox. It’s a project where books no longer under copyright are actually read by volunteers.
Thanks for the info.
I want to mention a few other archive facilities.
Various Universities, libraries and some news stations (e.g. WFAA) will archive a collection of videos, photos, documents, even High School yearbooks.
MUST SEE PLAYGROUND
https://web.archive.org/web/20240410060211/https://dallaslibrary2.org/dallashistory/photogallery/images/parks/pa87-1-19-59-210-10.jpg
”…Does this Dallas playground pose an unreasonable risk to the health of our children? Does the exposure to the hazardous higher levels ascertain a chance of harm?
An early 1900’s photo hosted by the Dallas Library shows “Children playing on iron pole playground equipment at Trinity Play Park.” Kids are seen playing on horizontal iron poles suspended about 20 feet in the air.
It is well accepted that a hazard exists at that high level. It is obvious that “Trinity Play Park” posed an unreasonable risk of injury to children….”
CSPAN.org has some very interesting historic videos.
Here are two examples of CSPAN videos via the following article:
A Black Dallas School Teacher Opened the Door to Fluoride’s History
https://dallasexpress.com/opinion/opinion-a-black-dallas-school-teacher-opened-the-door-to-fluorides-history/
In July 1992, Eileen Welsome, a journalist for an afternoon Albuquerque, New Mexico newspaper called a Dallas schoolteacher by the name of Elmerine Allen Whitfield. Her father, Elmer Allen, had been experimented on and injected with radioactive material (plutonium) during the top secret, classified Manhattan Project.
Beginning in 1993, President Bill Clinton started declassifying some of these secret Manhattan Project documents. On October 3, 1995, the same day as the verdict in the O.J. Simpson case, President Bill Clinton made a public address to the nation promising to release all the secret Manhattan Project documents. Clinton stated, “Informed consent means your Doctor tells you the risk of the treatment you are about to undergo.”
Speaking of internet has anyone noticed that the service has been acting weirdly? I’ve had a few people complain about it slowing down or stopping randomly. I see cards readers in stores being erratic in how long they take to connect to the Credit card co. I heard the Iranians have been hitting data centers out there but on the whole I can’t see a world wide internet actually paying for itself , nor people paying what it probably costs to maintain it in real (rather then start up) money.
I read an article years ago and even back then they were talking about server rooms with a fortune in old copper cables that the isp couldn’t “mine” because they just laid fiber cables over the top of the old ones in their building. That was maybe fifteen years ago and they said the internet was getting too complex to last back then.
In the past week I have lost internet three times, but otherwise I’ve not perceived a loss in performance.
The county where I live is installing internet service to every home, regardless how remote, at a huge cost that will be added to our property tax bill for many years. (I just assumed this is being pushed for our future digital lives, when we are not permitted to leave our homes for work or school.)
The internet got more and more shittified ever since our militaristically minded handlers and leaders declared it a war zone, its purpose becoming a simple trade, war and propaganda machine for those in charge (with the PNAC declaration, in case anyone can remember the infamous piece of crap). Heck, it had to happen, as this happened historically to every new media which increased the reach and control of the machines. See: Radio as internet 1.0; TV as internet 2.0 and now the internet as media shittification 3.0. As is obvious from the start, the neural interface 4.0 will not fare any better.
I just read through the article on pluralistic.net (Pluralistic: The web is bearable with RSS (07 Mar 2026)). While it is an interesting read, I must say it is not really good advice, as there is a much simpler solution to the problem discussed. Its a simplistic approach, I dare say, but in my experience, the simple things always work best in the end. Do it like that: The very moment a website starts to throw shit at you, quickly hit the close button. Also, do not intentionally visit enshittified websites. At all. If it happens by accident, just quit before they can even download all the shit to your puter. What you actually do by visiting these parts of the web, is supporting them, simply by paying attention. That is not rocket science but the real anarchist way of doing things. If you do not like it, do not buy. Just as a reminder: attention is the life blood of any media.
great segment,,, will be bookmarking famelack.com & photopea.com for a look later.
NoScript has been an add-on I’ve used with Firefox for years,,, always surprised when I use someone else’s computer, which doesn’t have a script blocker, just how much nonsense, adds & suggestions pop up on the screen, that I, thankfully, never usually see.
Thought something like this must exist when Corbett mentioned broken links, so did a quick search and this was one of many suggestions… Didn’t investigate this one but sharing it just as an example:
“The Top 10 Broken Link Checker Tools to Check Your Entire Website (2026 LIST)”
https://www.softwaretestinghelp.com/broken-link-checker/
Obviously identifying broken links is one job, but replacing them with Archived links is a much bigger job,,, but maybe Corbetteers could pitch in & do the heavy lifting…?
For that subscriber who uses the internet at the library, maybe look in online RSS readers. There’s a web app for everything these days. Just as one example, first one that was spit back by the search engine.
https://rssviewer.app/
One good way to reduce youtube use is FreeTube. This is a standalone youtube frontend with a bunch of features built on electron. Carry over subscriptions you actually care about and enjoy a much cleaner YOUtube experience.
https://freetubeapp.io/
Recently I have started playing around with a locally running search aggregator aptly called degood. It’s quite interesting, there isn’t much you have to install to get it running. I didn’t use the docker option as I don’t need the bloat.
https://github.com/fccview/degoog
If there’s interest, I’ll put together a guide on how to get it running, on top of what they already have on their github. It’s just a beta still, so I guess that’s why they didn’t provide a rock solid newbie guide with all the steps needed to get it running-
I’ll quickly note my recent discovery that FreeTube integrates DeArrow and SponsorBlock, among other functionality. Here’s a c/p feature list from their github. Essentially, my lack of knowledge made this application look less high quality than it is.
Thanks James, you introduced me to The Waybackmachine years ago and it’s been helpful.
One thing I have wondered about waybackmachine in relation to current events pushing the Digital ID control grid forward is whether it could work to circumvent those ID walls that some people have been telling me they are encountering on Substack now.
For instance when I shared a link to my Substack post here in the threads, a Corbeteer that goes by “vadoum” recently commented :
“any hyperlink that exists in all substacks that I’m reading goes first to an I.D.wall, demanding a photo, and stacks of details. I refuse to comply with the demand, so am now blocked from the colorful content on yours and about 10 other “writers” I’ve been following for years.”
I created a waybackmachine archived version of my post in the hopes it would give him a work around but have not heard back yet
(here is the link for reference: https://corbettreport.com/nwnw622/#comment-185620 )
If anyone reading this is facing similar “ID Walls” when interacting with Substack content, would you try out the link and let me know if it works?
Thanks.
Another idea for the subscriber who wants to use RSS at their library is to use a portable RSS application. Portable applications don’t have to be installed. You run them from a flash drive. (This is assuming that the library lets you run applications off a flash drive.) I can’t vouch for any of these, but it may get someone started in the right direction.
https://pendriveapps.com/software/portable-rss-readers/
Another option would be to run a live linux distro from a USB drive with persistance setup. This could be a nice beginner friendly hacking project for someone.
@RandomNYCitizen
I do not understand that but I appreciate the comment.
As i noted in a recent post, i`ll re share here as its pertinent.
I did my own small part to contribute towards De-enshittifying Substack in a post. I am basically using the honor system and taking people’s declaring themselves as non-A.I. dependent authors at face value (since most people do not trust those “A.I.” writing detectors anyways). Same as that youtube AI slop community identification based program you highlighted above.
https://gavinmounsey.substack.com/p/non-ai-writers-list
It is at least 15 years ago I last managest RSS on my websites, carl-fh.com for example. You put me on it again.
Thanks for the info.
About 5 years ago I was trying to explore ways to store website bookmarks under several different tags. And I finally found a site and app to do just that among other things. I still have the app on my phone but they since discontinued it but you can still use the web-based version. The site is Diigo.com.
They do have a paid version if you want to store unlimited pdf’s, notes etc. But it’s a great site for organizing websites.
The Pocket app is a great app for storing websites too under different tags and you can even have the articles read to you!
And another app your members might like is f-droid, an open source app store. You can download the APK file for the app at f-droid.org. Actually I just downloaded a great generic RSS feed app on there called Read You. I’m still setting it up. So if anyone knows of any more great alternative media RSS feed sites let me know.
Thanks
A really key method to de-enshittify the internet is to de-enshittify your operating system. Windows and Mac are platforms (of a sort). They comply with Doctorow’s description of enshittification, and have been playing a much, much longer game. Google, Facebook and post-2000 platforms are just more impatient, so they are closing their traps more quickly to make cash quicker.
Replace Windows and/or Mac with a Linux distribution.
For newbies, start with Linux Mint (it’s like Windows XP, except that Mint treats the user like an adult).
Top tips to plan your migration:
i) expect a learning curve, specifically the need to unlearn all of the bad habits you’ve developed as necessity to use Windows;
ii) stop using Excel. Microsoft will never publish Excel for Linux, because Microsoft knows that Excel is the main “need” to use – and buy – Windows. Learn to use LibreOffice Calc instead, and start doing so on Windows before you migrate to Linux.
iii) in Linux, remember to use the in-built “Software Manager” to download software for the first year of use. Don’t do the Windows thing of downloading random stuff from the internet in your first year of using Linux. This is a big expectations gap for Windows users. It’s less of a learning curve for Mac users, because the same method of the “Software Manager” is already in Mac.
iv) in Linux, do not use an anti-virus software like you are still using Windows. Linux is not Windows. In Windows, the sole purpose of administrative rights is to obstruct the user installing printer drivers; the lack of admin rights does *not* prevent malware from installing itself. In Linux, the security model is correct, meaning that “live” anti-virus software needs to undermine the security model to work, making the anti-virus the attack vector.
v) in Linux, like on Windows, create your system admin user account and create a separate non-admin user account. Keep your data in the non-admin account and ensure the system admin user cannot access the non-admin data. You can do this in Linux. You can’t do this in Windows. This protects your Linux from your data, and vice versa.
vi) in Windows, in Mac or in Linux, apply the practices of https://www.privacytools.io/ .
vii) in Windows, in Mac or in Linux, segregate your data life into persona: a) your “work” persona (your employment, your business); b) your “private” persona (your household bills, your household accounts, your digital identities and e-signatures, etc); c) your “social media” persona (your logins to social media). Keep these persona, and the data within them, segregated. For more guidance, refer to The Hated One, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lLessJ4R6w8 .
At this point, you have a computer that *you* substantially control – not a platform – and therefore the data stored on it. Even if the distro changes, you have alternative distros to select if you need to.
A nice way to get into Linux IMO is to buy a little Raspberry Pi single bird computer and play with the distos available- the fact that you can now buy one with the keyboard built in and just need to plug it into a tv or monitor and add a mouse is amazingly simple way to get a feel of Linux (and TBH a Pi can do most everything most people actually do on the internet for waaaaay cheaper then buying or building a new PC.
For alternatives to OneDrive and GoogleDrive on your own Linux platform, https://www.privacytools.io/file-sharing-sync sets out a few alternatives. Here’s a few more:
https://proton.me/drive – part of Proton’s suite. A reduced free version is available. It does what Google Drive does, almost in the same way, but isn’t Google, so you are hosting your data on somebody else’s platform which might be less prone to enshittification.
https://nextcloud.com/files/ – this is a wholesale replacement of Google Drive, which *you* manage and control. Client apps exist for desktops (Linux, Windows, Mac) and smartphones (via the platform’s software repository). This means you become a server administrator. You can do this for low cost by renting your own domain (from, say, https://www.namecheap.com/ , generate your domain name with https://www.domainnamesoup.com/ ) and creating your own cloud server on, say, https://www.linode.com/ (now Akamai). *Important bit*: think about the purpose of this server. Which *one* persona shall it serve? Your work persona, your private persona or your socal persona? Keep them separate. Have as many servers as you need, but make sure you understand how each server might consume your time. For Nextcloud, one convenient method is to rent a ready-to-run instance on Linode/Amazon Web Services labelled as “Nextcloud All-In-One”. On the Nextcloud server, create one admin user account to administer the server only and a different, non-admin user account for your data.
A secondary data backup solution for your desktop(s)? Try https://duplicati.com/individuals . This is available from the software repository of Ubuntu distributions. When configuring Duplicati, point the backup destination to a bucket that you created in, say, https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-storage or https://www.akamai.com/products/object-storage . Remember to configure the destination storage buckets to be encrypted. https://aws.amazon.com/s3/ is still a thing, but is priced for big businesses, not retail consumers.
Corbert, please you have to do one dedicate to how to use the Eay Wack Machine propely. Its complicated sometimes. I do remember you dit one long time ago, meaby 2017 or so.
For the past year, I have been attending online philosophy reading groups. The people are friendly and the topics are very interesting. The experience is so much more fulfilling than quibbling on social media.
This is the organization I am familiar with, but I would assume there are many others
https://www.meetup.com/the-toronto-philosophy-meetup
Defeat paywalls: While researching a book, I’ve discovered a fantastic resource for research papers: Sci-Hub.
Many of the scientific journals charge scandalously high access fees. Unless it’s a newer paper, though, you can probably find it at Sci-Hub. Just type in the DOI. The disadvantage is that you can’t print or search the document.
Sci-Hub isn’t, er, totally legal. They jump to a slightly-different URL now and then to avoid being shut down. It’s hard to feel bad about using it when the scientific journals are such a lucrative scam.
In the USA , we once had many men and women representatives who actively fought against shitifacation. We, no less than two generations back strongly believed it was illegal and UnAmerican to use an corporation for enshitifacation . Of over controling of markets, labor, natural resources, land ,or industries.
ANTI-TRUST LAW.
What is antitrust? It is one of the least understood areas of the law
Apparently the biggest violaters are Google, Amazon, and just about every company in silicon valley.
Antitrust – The Modern Day Trust Buster Advancing Competition – Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost https://share.google/LvKJLn0zdfmBQFYql
Returning to a time when grift, cheating and betrayal of the investor trust is now a dream evaporating in the mists of war. War time is when the biggest theft occurs .
.
Trump’s Justice Department dropped 23,000 criminal investigations in shift to immigration – Salon.com https://share.google/2FTockaiFlFtdOfXJ
It would be a monumental task for a young documentary producer to investigate how ANTI-TRUST has evolved up to today. Enshitifacation, as I said up top here.” the structure of this present time needs more massaging.” Pun intended.