Another post about how bad the web experience has become, discussing a negative experience that I don't notice at all because I use Brave. I can't believe it's not the dominant browser. It solves so many problems with no user intervention.
There was a time in the mid 90’s where we could have gone down one of two paths. “Free” ad-supported-you-are-the-product”, or digital micropayments. The latter was hard, and didn’t mature until 20 years later. Instead we got the shitfest internet we see today.
What would the internet look like today if every visitor could drop micro-donations on content creators by simply clicking a donate button in their browser or on the website to support the content creators they appreciated?
Webrings led to DoubleClick. DoubleClick led to Google Ads. That led us to Facebook and the hyper-invasive internet we have today where everyone worldwide is profiled for their ad-worth. Fuck this timeline.
Recent experience: trying to search for websites that review products that I'm not familiar with. It was pretty obvious that most of those review sites had never actually touched the products they were reviewing, they all just copied each other.
