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. 🙂
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 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.