Obviously, if you get paid to implement this you don't want the cognitive dissonance of knowingly doing something bad, so I'm sure those folks have already laid out their justification for this technology.

I wish Google could and would make Chrome closed source. It would at least give all those rebranded Chromiums (Opera, Vivaldi, Brave) a strong reason to reconsider their choice of engine, or at least maybe work together on a more divergent fork of it that stays away from Google's evil stuff.

I do, and I keep having those tiring conversations, but it's really hard to get the point across in layman's terms. I have enough friends in tech who stick with Chrome out of convenience instead of just falling back on it in case something actually doesn't work in Firefox. how do I convince tech illiterate people of doing this?

For the tech illiterate recommend Safari. For tech people, appeal to their privileged position and the importance of defending the web by choosing any other browser (or Safari).

Both users can keep Chrome installed as a fallback - that will help with convincing too.

Didn't Apple implement this same type of thing in Safari a year or so ago?

> For the tech illiterate recommend Safari.

That's only applicable to Apple users, though.

Tech illiterate people should be using MacOS anyway. Windows just gets worse every year. MacOS is actually more like classic Windows than Windows 11 is so it's actually easier to use for tech illiterate people.

And drop my Ublock origin, bypass paywall clean, etc? Hell no.

> Ublock origin

At least there is Adguard.

You can’t, realistically. I don’t think there’s any repeatable or effective way to make non-nerds (AKA most people) care about this sort of thing.

Start referring to them as "Chrome developers" -- what's this "web" thing you keep talking about?

It's faster. The same old justification that was used to switch to Chrome can now be used for Firefox.

Whenever a new device needs to be setup for my parents, I just install whatever I use (Firefox in this case). Then I show them the things they need on a day by day basis. The problem are people who did grow up with tech. They will say things like it will take too long. In cases like this you need to manipulate them based on their personality.

> 2. It lost control over its culture, and that culture was crucial to its functioning.

This might strongly depend on the corner of usenet you were in, but there were large and important groups where elitism was absolutely cancerous, and a culture I don't miss. I frequented German end English groups, and can say that it was much worse in the German ones. Absolutely condescending attitude towards newcomers if they "misbehaved" even in the slightest; you'd have the "n00bs" post and then a dozen replies by the regulars circle-jerking by dissecting the OP down to every little detail they did wrong and trying to one-up each other in sarcasm. A typical flex was the length of your killfile.

Web-Based bulletin-boards (phpBB, vBulletin, WBB, ...) quickly took over in the early 2000s, which had the advantage of having superior moderation tools (e.g. being able to remove spam after the fact), giving a more consistent experience to users. Bulletin boards still tended to have the elitist group of regulars compared to usenet, albeit less pronounced. Some/Much of this can probably also be attributed to the users of those boards being a new generation of Internet users, which just had a different approach and attitude, much like we see today with facebook vs. Instagram, YouTube vs. TikTok etc.

What managed to mostly kill Internet forums was probably reddit, which improved SNR a lot by having the up/downvote system, and while technically being even more centralized than bulletin boards, managed to grow so much by basically allowing their users to create subreddits, which would equal the sub-forums in bulletin boards, which only the board's administrator could create.

A significant part of the culture was that Usenet was tied, almost exclusively, to selective-admission universities (and largely CompSci / EE students and faculty), a few high-tech companies (infotech and defence, largely), and a few government departments. Those institutions could exert reasonable disciplinary control over Usenet participants ... enough to avoid the grosser harms.

Yes, it was highly exclusive and exclusionary, and there were definitely toxic elements to the culture, but it wasn't entirely lacking in control or discipline as occurred later.

Note that Usenet did have some effective spam controls ("Cancelmoose", the Lumber Cabal, etc.), but overall effectiveness was limited by virtue of the distributed and noncentralised nature of the protocol, as well as the lack of any true participant authentication.

Slashdot was harshing on Usenet long before Reddit was, and various online forums (as you mention) before that.

As a random data point, I registered a new domain about a month ago and didn't do more than add a simple landing page yet, and it is properly indexed by Google.

> How is a reddit link relevant?

It appears the video in that post shows the bug, so, rather relevant?

The according issue seems to be[1], which has indeed been fixed two months ago, but as OP said was opened two years ago.

[1] https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/2971

I use recipe websites. When I want to try something new, I read a handful of recipes there, usually those with high user ratings. But what I really pay attention to is the writing style. If it's just a dry "do this then that then that", it might very well be some stuff someone made up on the spot. But if people go into detail, like "yes this seems like an awful lot of butter, but trust me, this is how the real thing is done at the restaurant where you don't see it", and little details that make me believe the person is actually writing from experience and dropping hints of what to watch out for, it's usually a really solid result for me.

Even when comparing across several recipes, I can still run into issues. For example, about five years ago I wanted to make banket, a Dutch almond pastry. I found several recipes online, compared them, and started testing them out. Every single one of them had a runny filling. Worse, most of the recipes were just copies of each other, sometimes with unit conversions, but the same wrong recipe.

I ended up experimenting with the recipe over the next six months, eventually getting the texture of the filling right. But those initial recipes were so far off, I doubt any of the authors had actually made it.

There is so many variables that could ruin it that it's hard to know exactly what went wrong. As an example, I've had relatives come visit me from a very humid place when I lived in a very dry place, and trying to cook the same way they do it at home but everything turning out differently, just because of the humidity of the air and the hardness of the water used.

Now it is your responsibility to publish the real recipe alongside all those online recipes that were incorrect.

I have, though my personal blog isn’t exactly a high SEO site. I mainly use it as an easy way to give the recipe on request.

One would guess the "story mode" recipes are the made up ones? Sounds like a inaccurate rule of thumb.

Well sure, in essence that's just a "works for me" thing. Also, no idea how much this is a regional/cultural thing, I exclusively use a German site for this. It doesn't seem to suffer fake ratings like Aamzon etc., probably as there isn't too much to gain from that. Story mode might sound a little extreme though, it's mostly that I like useful hints about common pitfalls, rookie mistakes, ingredients that can have vastly varying properties, these kind of things that an experienced chef might just know, but not a rando like me. :)

If you don't have the time/patience to look for new music then I guess nothing will ever work for you. Otherwise, I'd join the bandcamp camp. :o)

not much effort in listening to quality (web) radio stations. A playlist builts itself from shazaming or checking the playlist archive.

I have plenty of time to look for new music. I just find it all in the live scene these days. Not on the internet.

> Along with a switch to use SDI instead of MDI.

You monster!

I think one of the things you learn on your way to C) is when it makes sense to roll your own. It is difficult, and maybe something that actually happens after c.

It seems to be very hard to make that call in time, and in the past I feel like every time we chose to implement something on our own, the existing solution would have been better in hindsight, and every time we said "ok, that existing solution looks fine" it turned out to be a dumpster fire a year down the line. But obviously the times where you made the right call just don't stick out that much because stuff "just worked", and also, in case you think you made the wrong decision, the alternative could've been ever worse. But still, I guess everybody knows that feeling? :-)

Plus 400 layers of abstraction because the lowest bidder doesn't know any actual software engineering and every time they face a problem they add yet another library to the project that someone on SO mentions because the accompanying sample code in the answer has the least amount of lines.

This absolutely boggles my mind. I had to do some javascript recently, and every time I had what I thought was a very basic question the most upvoted answer was "just npm install this library, and use this one-liner". I honestly never experienced this before with any other language, it's horrifying.