Hating the Internet
fuck the corporate internetJust a
It just feels like every website, application, and platform is trying to shove out the worst changes possible in the past couple years, along with trying to suck out as much data from users as possible. I've joked before that "Google knows more about me than I do" but at this point I wouldn't be surprised if they literally did, it's insane.
I'm not even a huge "muh cybersecurity, muh digital privacy" kinda person, I just think it's absolutely wild that not a single thing on the modern internet today seems to not have some ulterior goal or shady practice going on behind it. It's hilarious to me that the U.S. would go all out with trying to ban TikTok but they'd NEVER try to touch Google or Apple despite having the same problems prying into users' data constantly. It's a "national security" problem when a Chinese company steals user data, but when the biggest U.S-based tech companies in the world do the same shit it's no problem at all.
I would probably use a different search engine than Google if I'd ever seen one that looks worthwhile. I've seen and checked out a couple before, but none of them made me think "Wow, I should've been using this instead the whole time!" It reminds me of the types of Linux-using chuds on YouTube who tell you to use Firefox or a fork of it, turn on browser fingerprinting protection, get all these anti-tracking extensions, change your default search engine to DuckDuckGo or Qwant or some shit when half that shit doesn't matter for the average end-user. All you really need is a decent browser and a decent adblock at least, like Firefox and Ublock Origin.
Speaking of browsers, all of them suck now too; Chrome has been Chrome for years, Opera is known spyware (moreso than others), Brave advertises being "for your privacy" but has a built-in crypto wallet and bakes ads into the new tab page, of which both features are opt-out (as in, you have to turn them off yourself) AND it's built on Chromium anyway. Vivaldi is another Chromium browser I've heard of and tried, didn't interest me. Every other big alternative browser I've heard of has just been another fork of Firefox, like Waterfox or Pale Moon, which were also disappointing.
Basically, use Firefox and get Ublock, otherwise don't browse the internet in the first place.
Going back to Discord's username update: the username system they're changing to has ALWAYS been bad and no one seems to realize that. Alphanumeric characters and underscores only, and maybe dashes or periods (one or the other, never both), often with a restriction on length (15 characters on Twitter for example, 32 on Discord). Discord's is even worse by making it forced lowercase, whereas at least Twitter allows uppercase characters (even if usernames are case-insensitive anyway, so uppercase is just a cosmetic difference).
Discord's original discriminator method was clever and solved the problem of "this username has been taken" that forcing totally unique names creates. The fact that they try to say "only 10,000 people can have the same name" is a problem is so unfathomably stupid. Even if discriminators just CAN'T be used, "@username123" is the future, at least allow uppercase and more special characters. I don't understand why the people running these sites and apps insist on only having 1 or 2 special characters (like underscores and periods) and not stuff like slashes, brackets, parentheses, or symbols like @, #, and $.
Anyway, fuck Discord. Maybe someday IRC will come back outside of niche subcommunities and piracy.
Recommended reading: Sadgrl's Case Against Today's Internet and Internet Manifesto.