Invasive tracking and pay-for-play search engines has broken the internet. It’s time to reclaim our independence with the Small Web.
this post was submitted on 29 May 2025
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It's not the technology at fault, but the advertising industry
Oh,,,
It's not just advertising (and its commensurate tracking paradigm)...
Data mining for profit, SEO for profit, and pervasive Counterfeit Cognizance are all playing their part in ruining the Internet experience.
Perhaps all the above could be summed up by "Capitalist Greed"...??? 🤡 🖕
No. It's can't. And you're actively hurting your efforts by attaching high school edgelord bullshit to it.
Corruption has been a seriously problem everywhere, forever, and does not care one bit what words the ruling party uses to express themselves. None of what is happening right now is restricted to nations which call themselves capitalist.
You dont have to call yourself capitalist to be capitalist. The main difference between modern western capitalism and classic monarchy is the collective perception of divine right. Now that perception is completely personal.
😂 🤣 Bye.
But JavaScript was a mistake. I've made my point. I'll hear no counter arguments.
As great as it would've been to have Python on the Web instead of JS I don't think that would've gone well when the Python foundation decided to make Python 3 incompatible with Python 2. That change already broke a lot of shit (Kodi addons never quite recovered from that) and I remember many people excusing it, but if websites ran on it, that wouldn't have been inconvenient, it would've been far more devastating.
But is it? Because the amount of websites that aren't search engines but have insane levels of tracking and data collection are very high. Not all of it is for search ranking, IMO.
Still not the technology at fault. Webapps for example are a good innovation. But it's used for evil as well.
I mean, yes and no.
You know how when you look up at a nights sky, and the whole sky is covered in a series of rotating popup ads, with the stars as their backdrop?
What do you mean NO??? When you use your telescope to try to look at space, and all you see is a facebook ad, a mcdonalds ad, a starbucks ad, an ad for a local lawyer, you know.....space ads. We've all seen them. Just ads floating in space, illuminating the night sky.
Oh, my mistake. This is 2025. That's commonplace in 2125. See, the technology to impose global space ads isn't a thing yet.
The thing about technology is, there's always somebody looking to profit off of every new technology. The technology behind space ads is actually used to show important global events, like what the global dictator does everyday. Oh, right. In 2125 there's a global dictator who rules the entire planet through oppression and slavery. So, not much different than 2025, besides even the illusion of freedom is gone.
The point is, you don't have the technology to put ads in the sky, and therefore the advertising industry can't yet be blamed. But once it exists, they will.
It really is a chicken or the egg situation.
Sky ad technology can be developed out of the good of someone's heart. Maybe to show emergency alerts quickly. Disaster warnings. But then, it gets in the wrong hands.
We could say similar stuff about the internet. I don't think Tim Berner's Lee had bad intentions when founding the World Wide Web. It's a double edged sword. Same has happened with a lot. I even believe that God's sacrifice on the cross- an act of perfect love for all humanity- has been misused to control, manipulate and abuse. The guy who created dynamite wanted it to be used for safer mining practices, not a weapon. Many things we make as humans seems to be invented for good, but used for evil
Internet advertising wasn't initially that bad either. People would pay to have a button for their site to appear on another page. Or a video to play on a streaming site. Then someone thinks "let's actually make more relevant ads appear. This video is about videogames, let's show a videogame ad." Then: "We can see what videos this user likes, so we can get an idea that they like videogames, so let's show them videogame ads, even on other videos". And it eventually morphed into "We can see this user visited this videogame shop 1 month ago thanks to our other maps service. Let's show them adverts for that shop's sale". It's just crazy.
I certainly hope you're oversimplifying for the sake of expressing a core concept. Because the amount of tracking, and profile building goes far FAR beyond what you've just said.
It's like 1984 (the book) is tame by comparison.
I am