this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2023
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Privacy

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And since you won't be able to modify web pages, it will also mean the end of customization, either for looks (ie. DarkReader, Stylus), conveniance (ie. Tampermonkey) or accessibility.

The community feedback is... interesting to say the least.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (15 children)

One comment mentions possible incompability with article 22 of the GDPR, and I sure hope the EU will stand their ground on this.

I can only imagine noyb letting all hell break loose. We need more people like him, dissecting corporations legal bs to find every last little thing we can possibly hold against them.

Obligatory use Firefox

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (16 children)

What the fuck is happening to the internet recently?

Twitter and Reddit CEOs completely losing their minds, and now Google of all companies wants to lock down the whole internet?

This isn't even close to being okay. It's 100% bullshit.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (4 children)

The enshittification of the internet shall continue.

We will fight and we will lose, as depressing as it sounds. The vast majority of people just don’t and won’t care.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Recently? This is a long time coming. Users have been accepting all kinds of shit from big players without complaint. Even if they protest it's usually just performative and they keep using the services, sites and software that violates all kinds notions of user and privacy rights. Most people unfortunately are (understandably) not equipped to really even understand the kind of shady shit these companies pull on the daily. The internet is going to shit and its users will gobble it up and ask for more. It has been frustrating watching this happen, but there's really very little that can be done.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Interest rates going up means investors are demanding more profit so all the tricks web companies have held off on till now are coming out.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

A lot of them never had to make a profit before.

Rich idiots threw money at anything because while a million dollars is more than the vast amount of us will ever have, to them it's like buying a lotto scratcher.

The underlying issue is wealth imbalance.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I know, right? It’s so weird. In every single instance of some bullshit happening it’s easy to brush it off as incompetence or an attempt at profit maximization, but overall it feels a lot like some kind of targeted disassembly of whatever made the internet great and facilitated open discussions.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (4 children)

I don't think it's coordinated, I think it all starts from the same root cause: Silicon Valley Bank failed. These companies all need to do something they've really not done much of in the past: turn a profit. But these companies are not run by the business geniuses we were once convinced were running the show. Most of them live so far removed from a normal persons life that they don't understand what motivates us, what we want in a platform, and as soon as we provide feedback after they've already made a decision, they decide it's because we don't understand the squeeze they're under to make money.

  • Twitter: Elon Musk thinks he could make more money from subscriptions than advertisements. The whole thing's a disaster because that's really dumb. This case may be a little different though because there's some evidence Musk just wanted more people to see his tweets and to pay people to be his friend
  • Reddit: Spez fails to see that he has multiple revenue sources available to him so long as he keeps his users around. Somewhere, there was the right balance of charging for the API at a reasonable price, performing better market research on his user base to provide a better ad platform, and keeping the Reddit coin system in place as the base liked it because the user base paid more for that than most similar online payment schemes.
  • Google: this is the scary one. This is the one that seems like they know exactly what they're doing. They're ramping up their enshittification following the fall of SVB, but the way they're doing it is both malicious and a minor enough inconvenience that the majority of their users will stay. And they're doing it in small quiet ways. A little bit of tweaking how YouTube bans users here. A little bit of RFCs about DRM on the web there. Some PRs to chromium and android no one will notice. All to squeeze more ads into peoples online experiences. Their search product has been utter shit for about 6 years now, but people still prefer it over Bing or DuckDuckGo (which is a wrapper for Bing). They've learned the following lesson: if you're big enough, the citizens of the web will let you do it
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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Inb4 you can only browse the internet with Chromium.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Please drink verification can

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Well, the engineers say it themselves: nothing would prevent websites developers to prevent access from browsers that do not support this "Web DRM".

My biggest fear though is that it becomes a standard which all browsers will have to support to stay relevant. And with Google building the engine used by the vast majority of browsers, they can force this upon other browser engines (ie. Safari and Firefox).

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

It's such a potent example why everyone who cares need to stop using Chromium based browsers before it's too late. Stunts like this would be much harder to pull if there wasn't a de facto browser monopoly.

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