Enshittification

It was not until about a day ago I started to realize that the internet is full of shit.

There are so many platforms that just don’t let you delete your account. Whenever I have accounts just left open that I never plan on using again, it just feels weird in my head. The only way to get this feeling out is either to email support or to put the account on a throwaway email and remove all traces of my information. I really don’t like that I have to do that.

Then, there are so many platforms that expect the user to have a beefy computer and as such have an extremely slow interface. Take Gmail for example. The Web UI is so fucking slow. It feels so unresponsive to my scrolls and is so annoying that I switched to the Mac’s native mail client. A lot of games nowadays are also badly optimized. Performance just doesn’t seem like that big of a priority anymore. I really hope this statement doesn’t age badly when I release my shooter game.

Another thing plaguing the internet are dark patterns. There are tons of websites that have an interface designed to trick you. An example of this is Udemy. Nearly every time of the year they have these 90% sales where you can get a course you would normally get for $150 for just $15! This is complete bullshit. They want to make you feel like you’re getting a bargain but these sales happen all the time and the course is almost never sold for that high of a price. Other than this, some platforms also have toggles like “Don’t allow the sale of my personal information” where the options are flipped. When it is toggled, your information is sold. When it isn’t toggled, your information isn’t sold.

It also seems that so many sites need your phone number, address, full name, birth date, and other personal information. Many of these sites need it for no reason other than to profile you and sell it.

AI slop is also filling the internet and it is really unfortunate. I’ve seen some of my older relatives watching AI-generated videos and it really saddened me. Some of this AI content is just plain weird, such as this ad for BuilderAI. Amazon has also been filling with tons of AI-generated books such as this one. Some of these books are survival books, which could be really dangerous as some of the tips in them could be false.

Speaking of slop in general, there is a lot of kid’s content on the internet that is just terrible. These videos contain gore and other stuff kids should not be seeing. Some of this content is also AI generated.

There is also short-form content that is ruining people’s attention span. Some of the tricks that people use include adding subtitles in the middle of the video for each and every word, making the video perfectly looped so that you don’t notice how much times you’ve watched it, and dragging the subject of the video as long as possible.

In addition to ALL of this, there is ragebait. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a post on Twitter without ragebait in the comments. Ragebait is also pretty much encouraged by Twitter. People with Premium can make money by getting engagement on their posts. I must admit that making people mad can be funny, but it’s one of those “I shouldn’t be laughing at this” type of things.

I’m not really sure how all this internet shit can be fixed, because there is just so much of it.