Google taught me it's OK to be evil

Man, this is depressing. While I wasn’t “raised online” since I was raised on dialup and couldn’t block the phone line all that long.

I still remember when google was the new kid on the block and the general feeling about them across early Internet forums.

Microsoft was evil because they copied everybody else’s stuff and wanted to charge for it. Apple was clueless making expensive junk. Sun was a darling for a while at least until they started pulling shit.

Enter mother-fucking-Google. Ethical. Honest. Not evil. Smart. Supporting open source. And on top of all that, FREE to use. Like Microsoft wants to charge you for hotmail if you want an inbox > 2MB? Fucking EVIL!!! Google is ethical because they are completely free!!! And I hear they are working on an email service too. Google just wants to shepherd the internet and protect it from companies like Microsoft, Apple, and AOL.

Oh Google.

A company that survives long enough eventually gets turned to the dark $ide. Greedy asshats will always ruin a good thing for their own benefit
- Any company that becomes publicly traded gets turned to the dark side. That's the factor that does it because they have a legal requirement to do everything they can to maximize profits.
  
  Trying to sustain perpetual growth will always lead to companies fucking over their customers and employees.
- The biggest problem in my opinion is, when companies stop to be companies and instead turn into glorified money trees whose only purpose is to shake all value from, value generated by the people who have to work there.
  
  Once a company sells its soul to investors, it becomes nothing more than a human in the Matrix: a thing to harvest, to be kept alive until nothing of value remains, then thrown aside and disposed.
  
  Source: I speak from experience, worked at one investor-driven enterprise and one that is listed on exchanges
- Being good is good for growth, but investors eventually want that payout.
- 'You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain"
Google was so exciting. Gmail especially.

We were so keen to ditch yahoo messenger and msn as soon as facebook messenger came out too.

Now it all sucks.
This made me really nostalgic for times when the internet still felt new and promising...
- I miss the old days, browsing internet forums and discovering for the first time that there exist people out there who like the same nerdy things that I do!
Google didn't have a plan to keep from becoming evil. They just had a cute motto.
since I was raised on dialup and couldn’t block the phone line all that long.

That bit reminded me that my mom had a desktop application that takes messages for you when we were using the dial up.

Shoutout to Deviantart, they a real one

Shame you need an account now to download the old cursor packs and stuff
Sadly even with furry porn, still a product. They forced everyone to be in some art AI dataset, it's quite the downfall

All of this led to me ditching all of those (except YouTube, this is without a real alternative due to the content exclusively hosted there) and starting to self-host my stuff and joining the Fediverse.

you can use invidious or piped on PC and newpipe on a phone. just be careful cause i heard google removed newpipe from the playstore and someone put something malicious with the same name, but im not sure how that situation is going
- I use the NewPipe fork with Sponsorblock as an optional feature. You can get NewPipe on F-Droid here and the fork with Sponsorblock here.
  
  As a rule of thumb, I always check their respective GitHub pages for links, I don't really trust the Google Store. There are too many spam duplicates of various apps, especially FOSS ones.
- You can still get NewPipe on F-Droid.
- I just disabled play store and sideload everything anyways.
- How's newpipe compared to youtube revanced?
- There's also dentex YouTube downloader. (android).
To have some sort of viable fediverse alternative to YouTube, the developers of it would have to abandon some of the free software principles that current fediverse platforms uphold. There needs to be a way to monetize to attract creators and get people to host the servers
- Free in software should stand for freedom, not money. We need better ways for financing such software projects and creators making content on them.
- If it were possible, I'd like to continually donate a given sum of money to an account that split the proceeds between the content creators and the people hosting. Granted, while I'm unemployed, the best I can do currently would be to donate hosting directly

Lemmy seems to be trying its best to teach me about furry porn.

While I'm not into furry porn, I love the community around it. I've actually had random encounters with a few furies and they are awesome peeps.
- You know, you can be into furry stuff without being into all the porn...they ARE separable. It's not any more harmful than anime fans or trekkies, really. There's tons of crossover, actually.
- Same, and they're usually some of the best engineers out there.
- That's really cool!
Listen I didn't choose the life, the life chose me.
OwO
Memes. Memes everywhere

Someone's underestimating the age of the internet.

Yeah but...ordinary people were not dialing into BBS forums back then. We weren't "raised" online like kids now are, we were able to log off anytime and not ever need it to function in society. That started changing in the early 2000s. All my kid's school assignments are now done on a laptop on a district-owned cloud system. He hasn't needed a pencil and paper in...I forgot how long.

If you're around my age, congratulations on being the last generation to ever know what the world was like before widespread use of the Internet.
- If you're around my age, congratulations on being the last generation to ever know what the world was like before widespread use of the Internet.
  
  This is why I always insist that the cutoff between millenial and Gen Z is 1995. There's a pretty obvious generational split along this topic and 1995 seems to be the birth year of the divide
- Most districts don't own a cloud system. They subscribe to one from a big vendor, and that vendor is scraping that sweet sweet data (aggregated and anonymity of course, because, kids), but still.
Eh. But what does it mean to be raised online? I think for that you need the availability of ever present internet connections in the form of mobile devices. I think the first kids raised online would have been born in 2003, and would have been 4, preschool age, in 2007 when the iPhone came out. Those kids are 16 now. If we want to set the standard for "raised online" as being "digital native" then I think we should dial back the range to when AIM was popular. Again, setting the standard for who could have been raised with that constant interconnectedness as being someone who was 4 at time of introduction would give us the first AIM connected people reaching age 30 right now.

The reality is, I think, in the middle. The first generation we could say was raised online is basically right in between those two ages, 23. The other standard we could try to set is, who is the first generation who doesn't remember the internet as exciting, just instead a daily part of life
- I am sorry to disappoint but people born in 2003 would be either 19 or 20 years old now. I know that it is hard to accept getting old.
Seriously, Eternal September was like 30 years ago.
I think it's fair to say that those in their late teens now are the first generation raised online. Sure, previous generations where raised alongside the internet, but the current generation is raised with a much larger presence of the internet.
- Nah, the zoomers are IMO the second generation to grow up with the internet. Sure it's even more present for them and gen alpha, but I'd argue us millennials are the ones who first really grew up with the net. While we weren't on the net all the time back then, we were the generation that grew up with the net as it became what it is today, for better or for worse.
Remember Fredryk Phox?

Pornhub taught me I'm picky af

Pornhub prob made you picky. Be less picky it's great.
- If it's not underwater trans midget porn, I'm not interested
- Indeed, indeed.
Pornhub taught me people like incest. Maybe it's related to game of thrones?
- It is just mindless pursuit of the forbidden for algorithm cheering reasons. And then you need to have had hot sisters to lust after growing up. With so many one children families you end up with a relatively small proportion of the population that could even care.
  
  On the other hand, adding one incest adjacent keywords to the title, if it means 3% more clicks they'll do it

rule34 sites taught me I could be porn

Not "could", you very likely are or have been porn to somebody. Like really very likely. Chances are just that they will never tell you and you will never find out.
- Oh, I know I was for sure. I wish I'd still be lol
- what the fuck are you talking about

Jesus what was the original version of this?

Cringe. The original version is cringe.
Gotchu fam!
- Youtube taught you to be yourself? The site where basically everyone fakes a striking and cheerful personality because of how difficult it is to build an audience if you don't?
- The sweet release of death cannot come soon enough
- No you didn't, that's a Google search to a cropped image
  
  This is an image, and the original
- Holy yikes, batman
- Huh, I say "gotchu fam" too. Anyway, thanks! And yeah, that's cringe.
I found a Reddit link to an original
- Good fucking god. Whatever moron created this... I hope they are as happy as they are stupid.
- Thank you. I'll save it in case I ever have to induce vomiting with that HailCorporate nonsense...

One of these things is not like the other...

DeviantArt really caught me off guard... lol

This is what neoliberalism does. It privatizes everything, including the individual. Everyone is a product. Everyone has a "brand".

Right liberalism is about individual rights, economic freedom and freedom in general. Left-wing countries will give big tech more power cause they'll have advantages over other companies and groups cause they have the money to pay for unnecessary laws that the left likes and they'll be friends with the government. In countries even more on the left the problem will be the same but added that you won't have any economic freedom and individual rights, small groups and companies will most likely not exist or die in the minute they're created and you won't be able to support them cause you basically doesn't own your own money and the money will he spent on useless taxes that you supported. Your ideas give big tech power, you're not the resistance but the perpetrator. Big techs have grown more and more as the world has become more leftist and you insist in not noticing the base of your mentality is helping big tech.
- Wow man, bet you think it's the LGBTs fault too and that the EU is some leftist place with less freedom than the US.
  
  Travel a bit, helps heaps for people like you, I mean if your freedom includes stuff like holidays...
- Right wing countries do this. What do you think South Korea is? "Economic freedom," is freedom commensurate with economic power, which means freedom for people with money, and "personal responsibility" for people without. The opposite of government regulation of business is corporate domination of government. You're conflating these opposites to falsely align organized labor with "big business." The entire right-libertarian political project is a smokescreen for the Kochs and their economic class to baffle morons into thinking the policies they want benefit the little guy.

Vine taught me you're worthless unless you're making someone else money.

Sounds like it prepared you for the world economy
- It hurts because it's true... ;_;

I need to log into my old deviantArt account again. Those were fun times.

Don't bother. Everything has a watermark on it now.

Which generation? Im 36 and i was definitely raised online.

Gen Z (most likely)

Let vine rest easy

One of these things is not like the others.

i cannot escape YouTube at all for sure and i do want to use instagram sometimes + GIB VINE

Use YouTube.com in firefox with u-block origin. Works well enough while not giving them ad revenue.
- OR you can use piped to watch youtube videos
- on computers sure on mobile well it works
- I used to do that but I realized content creators don't get paid if I do that so I subscribed to Premium.
- Just pay to remove the ads

Lemmy is great but the majority of you guys have a, r/notlikeothergirls vibe.

Like you know something about the world and by saying, "I am not mainstream I am alternative," you are making yourselves inclusive in some way. You don't know anything the rest of the world doesn't already have some idea about. Some sort of secret knowledge. I think my favorite thing I have seen on here is people thinking they are private and secure on the Fediverse. Despite the fact you are on a self hosted instance of someone's hardware and handing your privacy and security to someone random or an entity at random.

Being inclusive is not how you educate people. It's how you isolate your knowledge and make people think you are a jerk.

Lemmy attracts this FOSS/linux/firefox/self-hosted or die mentality because the biggest jump in Lemmy users came from a corporation messing with a product they liked
- Which is good.
  
  Without "die hard" FOSS people we wouldn't have Lemmy, Linux, Apache, Firefox etc etc etc. I mean, dont shit where you eat I guess I what I want to say.
You're a real man, could you check my profile?
- I reviewed your profile. Personal opinion. You have some personal growing to do.
- It feels like you are a 14 yo edgy person watching too much right wing echo chambers.
  
  It's just a big mess.

Who tf uses DA for furry porn? There are way better websites nowadays

People are so quick to forget. Back when Netflix came out it's appeal was offering movies for viewing online. People scoffed at it because TV was king and Netflix wasn't on TV yet, smart TVs weren't a thing and Roku had to be built as a middleman. "Why would I pay for that". No one believed in the products in the way that people believe in Netflix and YouTube or Google or even twitter today.

Today every tv is smart, YouTube has a YouTube TV app, all these media companies have their own apps like paramount and ESPN, and people are willing to pay.

Are you high? Netflix wasn't online, it was DVDs through the mail that you kept until you were ready for new ones. After its online became far more popular than the legacy service, people were still pissed when they announced they were going to stop the DVD mail, even when they stopped using that original service.
- I think it's sort of implied that the time period I'm referring to is when Netflix shifted it's attention to the online service.
  
  And what I'm saying is still valid. I remember my father scoffing at Netflix because he didn't think it could compete with traditional TV.
I had a mythtv box with 1000 movies, 10s of thousands of TV episodes just so much stuff and a computer in every tv in the house. You could rewind live tv and skip ads. Most family members never switched the tv input to the mythtv box. The two that used it asked after two weeks, is there anything new?

DA, the one half way decent platform. XD

Tumblr, too, once upon a time. Started out as a side project built by a guy and a programmer from his company he paid to help him. He hated social media sites like Facebook and wanted to build a social media site that he would enjoy using. Someplace where he could post his photos and follow people he liked so he could see their content, and that was it.
- And now its a massive data-grabbing corpo. What an inspiring story.

Man, vines. That's a blast from the past.

That's like, last week for us old fucks.
- I still call all the short videos vines. I refuse to learn all their pointless terminology for the same shameless dark pattern.