Dollar Tree.
It used to have been an unreal experience witnessing the existence of these stores when they came out. Everything for a $1. No joke. The quality of some things have had corners cut and the quantity might’ve been laughable, but there was a good solid purpose for these stores.
And then I started seeing the signs after a few good solid years of shopping there. The first sign was how they stopped selling eggs. This was before the Bird Flu. They stopped selling eggs because they simply couldn’t afford to buy stock and then the price hike to $1.25 happened.
And now they’ve hiked the prices again to $1.50 for some products in a handful of stores. Additionally, they’ve incorporated items going from $2 ~ $15 so they have long lost the role and title of being the most affordable places to shop.
Gone were the days.
Google. It used to just work, and really well
The United States government.
Private messaging. We used to all use an open protocol to message each other (email) and now everyone is fractured into proprietary closed centralized messengers.
Do you know anybody who doesn’t use email?
That goes for avout any service. Taxis should be using a public protocol but instead we have evil über and that’s it.
For most of the 2010s I was optimistic about how cool cell phones were going to be. Instead they’re almost all basically the same phone/camera/web browser and I can’t find anything that even has the same features as my 2016 model let alone new ones. There’s foldables I guess but from what I’ve seen that’s not particularly useful.
I remember these beautiful times when “updates” were not forced and therefore planned obsolescence didn’t happen.
Both Apple and Samsung have been fined for this and yet they carry on.
Is this enshittification or the convergence of objects into the same design due to regulation/demand/function/etc. (I’m sure there’s a name for this but I can’t recall it)?
Cell phones are certainly enshittified with planned obsolescence or incompatible text messaging protocols or ‘walled gardens’, but what else should a cell phone be besides a cellular networked pocket computer with a camera?
What features (besides a dedicated headphone jack) is missing from a modern cell phone that your old one had?
Here’s a list of things my phone has:
Headphone Jack
IR Blaster
SD Card Slot
Removable Battery (there is literally a button that pops the back cover off)
HI-FI DAC
FM Tuner
A secondary screen you can use to access app shortcuts and see the time without having to turn the main screen onThere’s plenty of stuff dropped, a lot of it is dubious tbh.
My older phones had: IR blaster for controlling TVs FM radio tuner Replaceable battery’s Headphone jack (as you noted) Expandable microsd storage Physical Keyboards (no real loss imo)
Probably some others I’ve forgotten. Honestly, I slightly miss the IR blaster on occasion. I haven’t listened to FM radio in ages, but could see it being useful. Replaceable battery’s would be nice from a longevity perspective, but I prefer battery packs to device specific batteries for longer life in general and battery life is more than a day for me anyway unless I’m going nuts. The lack of SD storage is the one that bothers me the most.
Keep in mind phones have gained at least a few things in that time. Simple reliable waterproof is a huge one.
Foldables easily fit in all your pockets. Whether it’s worth paying twice the price is not immediately obvious to me.
Getting the previous generation foldable or a refurbished one can make sense.
I worked in support for a phone manufacturer that has made some foldable. From what I’ve seen they seem to be noticably more fragile than the chocolate bar form factor. Seems the screen technology needs more time to mature
I’m using one that was gifted to me (Samsung Z Flip 3). It’s not a format that I would have deliberately picked, but after a little over a year, I can’t say I find it especially fragile. However, the provided screen protector has to be changed fairly often (I did it twice already and I’m overdue for a third), which is a bit of a bother. Apparently some people just remove it. I’m not sure if I’d be comfortable doing that though.
As for the form factor, it is slightly more convenient than a full sized phone, although it certainly doesn’t justify the markup.It’s simply novelty design and oh look, they’ve got you going to spend more money having to replace screen protectors.
I cannot imagine what it’d be like the day those models start lagging and chugging because of planned obsolescence.
The screen protectors are 10€ for a set of three (plus three sets of wrappers for the phone) so it’s not a big deal. They’re annoying to install though.
My phone fits in all my pockets.
OkCupid used to be the best for finding matching people: they crowdsourced thousands of relevant multiple choice questions from which you built your search filter: which answers you accept, how important each is to you, and a voluntary explanation. The questions and match results were factored into friendship, dating, and sex.
Then Match Group bought it. First they let it be, but then they:
- removed the factoring - no more looking for friends or sex, only complete packages
- removed search - no more finding the best matches anywhere on the planet, now you just swipe like Tinder
- removed keyword search - no more finding rare interests not included in the questions, like “furry”
- removed the search filter - now everything has to be the same to match: both of you must have or not have tattoos for example, never mind what you like - one of my likes went from 95% to 50% match
- deleted the voluntary explanations without warning, so no one could back theirs up
- deleted ~95% of the match questions without warning
- deleted all accumulated likes, which were my best matching people around the world with the maximum couple/friend/sex partner potential except location for now. I had the links saved, but they broke all of them.
- they delete matches (mutual likes) if they haven’t been messaging in a while, as if that meant they’re not a match - no, we’re just distant for now
- they police inconvenient statements in the users’ introductions as the political situation evolves - the day after the mass murderer CEO got shot, the section in my profile containing “fuck the healthcare system - make a better one” was deleted without sending me a copy to edit
Avoid the whole Match Group.
Now that I think of it, the destruction of OkCupid looks like a politically motivated attack against the minorities and intellectual power users who used to flock there.
Oh snap, I met my wife on OKC before these changes. I believe Match had already bought them out but it was before the changes like you mentioned.
I remember it being the superior online matchmaking service at the time.
RIP
Since I started using Lemmy, I’ve wondered if a federated dating platform could ever work. Obviously you would have to solve the problem of low user numbers though…
Unless it is a dating platform for tech savvy gay/bi men specifically, it would also have to solve the problem of even lower numbers of women who are users. Even non-fed dating platforms struggle to reach a 10:1, men:women ratio of active, non-bot users.
As a woman (just have to phrase it that way), good luck to any who try. Personally, I can’t think of anything that would entice me to sign up for a federated dating platform.
Make the men moderate each other’s first messages. You need 3 out of five thumbs up before that first message even goes through. You have to rate five messages before you can try to send one. Make them see how many fucking weirdos there are and hopefully make them behave a little better to begin with by being self conscious about what five other dudes are gonna see. You want five other dudes to see your dick pic on the off chance 3/5 will upvote it? Good fucking luck. Don’t listen to me I just worked for a week in a hospital without running water my brain is a smoothie.
I really miss the quizzes though. You could also make it so that you can limit your visibility to a threshold of question matching. I reconnected with the guy thought was cool in group therapy a year later when we were both doing much better because we were a 98% match. I didn’t pursue it at the time because meeting a partner in group therapy is a terrible idea particularly because you’re that fresh into recovery but it kind of vaguely felt like a missed connection. Turns out it was because we’re the same fucking person. A year later we were both doing much better and I get this message on OKC like “weird question - did we meet at (the fucking psych hospital we did outpatient at)” and he’s probably the only person in the history of ever that that line would ever work for. Thanks OKC!
Also: and I say this as a crazy bitch who just got into gnosticism / esoteric Christianity, you need to include star signs. Idgaf if you think it’s fake or not (I myself am mostly in it for the cool rocks) but its already been said in this comment chain that attracting female users is gonna be rough. You need to be willing to meet people where they’re at (this also includes UI btw my female friends think a lot of fedi looks sketchy and don’t wanna be putting their photos in it). I’ve been able to make so many more female friends now that I know what my ascendant is and I’m not sure I even put the right birth time in so there’s a good chance it’s not even my real one. Its like saying you’re a packers fan or your favorite Linux distro. It’s a short set of words that quickly identify ingroups and outgroups and provides a noncommitally vague description of your personality. Just get off your high horse and roll with it we’re trying to get you laid here.
You have way more faith in humanity than I do. I think after 1-2 and the novelty wears off, a lot of people would just thumbs up without reading.
And even if people stay diligent in rating first comments, it will take 0.2 seconds for bad actors to realize they can just save their bullshit for message #2.
What do you think about vetting to make a profile, or having a chat that exists for the folks that have matched or spoken with a guy in the past?
Peer vetting? So one has to take on an unpaid part time job to get on the dating platform?
And men vetted by peer men? The ones who are a sampling that will absolutely include some of the toxic online variety we are all trying to avoid?
I simply think initial vetting will never be enough. People aren’t dumb, they are able to behave until they have someone alone before showing their true colors. My real skepticism is that any Fediverse platform would have strong controls to identify and actually block bad people. Mainstream dating platforms have processes to deal with stalkers and sexual assaulters, they permanently block people from the platform and contact local law enforcement at times. A federated dating platform would have none of those things, unless they’re attached to a major corporation like Threads is to Facebook, which would defeat the purpose.
I don’t hate this.
There’s an open source one called Alovoa. I haven’t tried it yet myself, but it’s there.
I know it’s on FDroid, though I haven’t checked any other app store for it yet
Man that sounds really good
Flying. Ever seen those pictures where people would dress their sunday best and climb into a dual turbo prop prestine silver tube up stairs on the tarmak? Beautiful stewardesses dressed in blue with matching hats.
Compare to now. Last I “flew” they gave my seat away and I had to fly the next day with a 3 hour layover. Perhaps I’m romanticizing, but I’d love to try the old way.
Just pay for it. The glamour is from the price being out of reach for most people.
Hitting a button and the TV turns on.
Idk what your setup is, but one of my favorite things about my TVs (and most newer TVs) is that they have HDMI-CEC enabled, so if I hit the power button on my Chromecast or PlayStation, the TV turns itself on/off too and I didn’t even have to program the remote, or worry about pointing the remote toward the TVs IR receiver like back in the day.
can you not do that? or are you talking about it playing something immediately and not picking something?
I guess it’s the difference between the TV turning on and immediately doing TV things vs. having to boot up the TV, then after a wait getting dumped into some terrible smart TV interface.
I can but the elderly struggle. They’ve got these satellite reciever boxes from dish that give them too many options.
The internet. We’ve had a solid few years, but it has become a giant heap of shit for the most part.
Back then, not everything was an AI generated, SEO, ad riddled, interaction fishing, time wasting, data collecting nightmare with auto-playing videos and a dark pattern employing cookie banner.
Not enshittified. We still pay a monthly fee for access to the internet and it still operates in the same way as it did back in the 90s.
There was auto-playing music, auto-playing gifs, auto-playing banners all over the place, and it was always for time-wasting. It’s literally not changed. Maybe its inhabitants have changed, but it’s largely exactly the same as it was.
The days of randomly happening on goatse from clicking some link in a chat room are basically gone, and places are far more moderated than they ever have been. Open source software exists for anything and everything you could possibly do, and with an adblocker, you see none of that shit - which you should have been running 30 years ago, as well as today.
Additionally, everyone keeps piling onto this “AI Generated” bandwagon even though a bunch of it isn’t. Any time they see a mistake, they think it’s AI and not some basement-grown dweeb with a inferiority complex.
The term “Enshitification” encapsulates when a high quality service exists, and is reduced in quality for the purposes of profit. If anything, the internet grants higher quality access to things today than it ever has; for cheaper prices, and faster speeds…
I’m paying $60 a month for symmetrical gigabit fiber access to the internet. Gigabit upload speeds! For 60 a month! How in tf world is that worse than what we had before?
it still operates in the same way as it did back in the 90s
IT guy here, this is just not true.
Back in the 90s, HTTPS was released in 1994, I remember in the early 2000s that Internet Explorer would warn you that a page was using HTTPS, these days it just the opposite.
The internet has been encrypted, where is mostly ran in plaintext before.
Then we have the content on the internet.
We used to read webpages, mostly static HTML, these days the vast majority of websites is running a content engine, say Wordpress or other backend system that you push content onto. This is a gigantic shift, especially for private websites, sure many people used geocities, but many, many built their own webpage as HTML using a WYSIWYG editor, and just uploaded the file to a server.
Plenty also wrote their own HTML code and built the webpage like that.
These are just two examples of how the internet has massively changed since the 90d
Also the traffic is monopolized in platform silos
I think both of you are right.
I agree with the three of you.
Most of my time on the internet I e generally been able to avoid disruptive tracking and ads. No more. Even for subscriptions: Boston Globe online games require that ad blocking be disabled.
Most importantly, I just got a new iPad. I paid a crap load of money for something like ten times as fast as the old one, desperately needed …… to look at web pages. Video and games were fine with the kid one, but web pages were not. Now I can browse again
AI is definitely a problem. I can’t remember the last time I tried to Google something technical and didn’t have to wade through 2 pages of links to more or less the same slop that didn’t actually answer anything. The internet peaked in like 2013.
How fast it is doesn’t matter. We can “do” more on the internet today, but the experience is absolutely more annoying and shitty than it was in the 90s.
Peace
Google Search. Or search in general. Now it’s all shit and you have to convince it that you actually want to search what you want and not what it thinks you want. Which is sometimes hard and other times impossible. I miss Google Search, it seriously was the best.
I’m sorry I came to this late, but this one’s really the best answer.
We talk a lot about how kids are struggling to recognize fake news, find reputable sources, etc… but I also think about how hard it is to find decent sources these days! I honestly can’t comprehend how kids are learning to do research projects and so on without the ability to easily search for stuff on the internet.
And while there’s lots of stuff on this threat that was cool while it lasted, I think search engines are one of those things where we never even considered the possibility it would change. Businesses fail, prices go up, experiences get skimped on, but search engines were goddamn magic. They just were. Why would anyone ever want to make them worse? The idea never even crossed out minds.
Man, Google search back in the day was great. No search categories like images, shopping, videos, etc. Just give it a query and you get what you wanted. God had no idea what was on the second page of results because the first page had what you wanted in the first half. Your ability to find what you wanted depended on your ability to use the search terms and modifiers.
The week I changed from HotBot to Google was a revelation. The jump from barely scraping the surface of the web to being able to find anything was like finally getting the full promise of the internet. Can’t be undersold how great Google was from 2001-03 until around 2013-16.
Wow, I recalled AltaVista, Lucia and Excite but have not thought of HotBot in forever.
It was so good that “googling it” is still in common parlance, even though the phrase has baggage and isn’t used in the same case-closed tones as it once was.
Oh man, and when all the Boolean operators were revealed to work on search, doing some “Google-Fu” was laughably easy, but blew people away. Back before there was so much noise, anything online was possible to find.
I know they took away my negative operator, which is the main one I used. The anger is still fresh years later.
Yeah, that was the last straw TBH.
I occasionally have to do some OSINT-ish research online, and it keeps getting harder and harder to get what I nerd from Big G. So much noise and trash. 2019 was the year they jumped the shark.
I haven’t used Google in a few years (in fact all Google servers are blocked on my network) but I still can’t stop saying “I’ll Google it.”
Yeah it’s just starting to look like where no matter what search engine you use almost, they just spit out garbage results. And they try way too hard in being the swiss-army knife of everything.
I have switched from google to a SearXNG instance and i am more than satisfied. For german stuff i use another instance which gives me more local results. I am thinking about hosting my own instance in the future.
It goes deeper IMO. Search no longer respects the user as an autonomous individual with self determination. It has stollen your digital citizenship.
Kagi Krew represent
Haven’t had the time to try it yet, but really doubt it’s better than Google at its peak performance.
Is Kagi the AI powered thing? Or am I mistaking it with something else?
No, not AI powered. Just a great search engine. The closest you’ll get to OG google.
Definitely did not take this for granted. Between 2004 and 2010ish it was remarkable how effective Google was. It’s still alright, just not as good as before.
Netflix back in the day. A near-limitless catalog of ad-free movies and TV for $8/month. If you tried selling that today, people would think it was a scam
I remember first hearing about Hulu sometime around 2007-8 and thinking it was a scam. Free (good) TV for one 30 second ad.
I first watched Sons of Anarchy for free on Hulu!
For me it’s not so much that the price increased. It’s that what you get for the money vanished.
I’d pay $40 a month to have a modern version of the Netflix that existed back in 2013.
Now if you want to have that you’ve got to have netflix, hulu, HBO Max, Showtime, peacock, and 15 other services and spend $35,400 a month for all of them and it’s just not worth the money, time, and hassle.
And even if you did get all of it, the experience would be awful trying to figure out which service has what you want to watch
I knew Netflix existed as a dvd service but back in like 2009 the first streaming ads I saw were on flash game sites so I thought they were scams.
You know those like sign up for blank free trial and you’ll get 5000 fun bucks in shellshock or whatever
It didn’t help that Netflix was also one of the big users of pop-up ads back when that was a thing. I’ve never forgiven them for that either.
I think as phones have sort of plateaued we take for granted the joy in more mechanical devices like a calculator, ipod, radio, calendar, etc.
My last phone and tablet weren’t used for anything greater than the one before it. I have no need for more powerful devices.
Yeah. App devs want their products to work on as many phones as possible, so 6yo $100 budget phones can run 99% of apps just fine. The main thing that slows down is the homescreen UI as the manufacturer pushes updates designed to make you want a new phone.
On Android, one can fix that pretty easily with a different launcher.
Tourism, in general, but all the world’s romantic, marvellous and ‘unique’ spots: Venice, Rome, Athens, Paris, London, NYC, San Fran…
Crowds, rules, fees, more fees, lineups, crowd control, advanced ticket sales(with specific time slots) for natural wonders.
There’s a Grotto at a National Park on the Bruce Peninsula in Ontario, Canada that requires you to book at least a day in advance - to park and hike.
Brutal.
Tourism is cancer… Also same people bitching about climate change seem to love tourism.
Richer people fly on private jets all the time, don’t shift the blame to the average tourist.
I shit on rich people daily here… this is about “middle” class loser who wants to see paris though, less carbon waste than the rich but still too much.
Plus AirBnB economy that essentially ruined most urban cores esp if they are historic.
So what are you suggesting? We never leave our immediate city? I’m a loser if I want to experience another culture?
No see, if you stay in one place forever you’re a loser too, because you are ignorant and boring.
I’m a loser if I want to experience another culture?
Going to Paris or London or NYC is NOTt experiencing another culture. That’s just cospicious consumption.
Go visit friends and family
So what is experiencing another culture then?
Make some friends there and go stay with them.
Paying local merchants for China made trash while eating over priced food specifically made for tourist is deff not culture but that’s what all these “worldly” Us suburbanites consider sufficient lol
Socialism is when no mobility and have no nice things
I guess lower half of America is living that socialist dream 🤡
Pretty sure they were being sarcastic, but your point makes sense (in conservative world where socialism is Bad) without the clown.
This whole thread is a sarcasm lane
Chipotle has fallen HARD.
Disney World and their fast passes.
SubWay. That $5 foot long was a good deal, even if it was not that great.
DC Shoes - They used to be SICK shoes and now they are basically WalMart shoes.
I went to Disneyland for the first time as an adult a couple of years ago. The first day we did not purchase the Geniepass, and observed that unlike the old (free) Fastpass, they would not simply give each line equal priority but instead would let scores of (paid) Geniepass holders through before one regular ticket holder would be let on, regardless of line length. So basically they’ve raised the price of entry further except as more of a hidden fee so some people simply get a much less fun experience than others
The whole Disney World situation hits for me in particular. I was privileged growing up with my family being able to go there (altho I think my parents just had massive credit card debt lol). I know even when I was a kid it was ungodly expensive. But comparing when I was a kid to now in 2025 it is absolutely wild on the things they are nickel and diming people on.
The whole fast pass converting to a paid model after it previously being a perk with a ticket was one of the most slap in the face things I had seen.
Panera fell hard too
Panera never was good to begin with.
Disagree, but regardless it’s so much worse now
Oh man, i was wondering if i just had shitty luck with chipotle recently, but its been BAD the last couple times…
Cadbury chocolates, Fuck Kraft Carmelo doesn’t taste good at all, and their eggs have gone from the size of a chicken egg to the size of a Robin’s egg while somehow tasting worse
In that time period the costs of cocoa have skyrocketed due to blight, climate change, and legal efforts to reduce slavery in the harvesting of cocoa. Most mass market chocolate brands were harmed by this.
