Microblog Memes

"Back in my day" if a platform or service would look at all your messages and sell the data it would be called active spyware and we treated that like the antichrist.

If you see that many ads you still have malware, we just call them apps now.

I've a friend who uses chrome on Windows and absolutely refuses to switch to Firefox for ublock. His kid is three and already knows what ads are.

I don't get it.

I don't think you lot know how old gen Z are, older gen Z are turning 30 next year

What ads? uBlock, Sponsorblock and an automatic cookie decliner and the Internet experience is only hindered by log ins.

Also change your DNS and if you can use a VPN and a faked user profile like user agent switcher.

Sites these days collect all the data they can, that includes your screen size, system data like sound drivers and operating system or your language and IP Adresss which sites you visit at what times (that is where the DNS comes into play).

But yeah, the Internet has changed a lot and for the worse. So far there are ways to mitigate them.

Listen, I'll admit I've never experienced a virus download automatically and rarely experienced a virus from a sketchy file.

But nearly all of gen Z remembers the free internet. Even up to 2016 it was still possible to view every major website without an account.

Every time I disable my ad block, or I see Internet Archive fail to save a webpage, or I'm forced to download the app for the privilege of scrolling down a thread; I get mad at what was taken.

We didn't realize how brief the era of mostly reliable and always verifiable universal information access would be. Now we can't trust any video because Sam Alton threw gasoline on the AI fire to make a failed Tiktok clone.

Now the virus is the operating system.

Facts.

I mean, I haven't seen that shit on my system in years because I run redundant adblockers but... when viewing someone elses computer.... it's crazy.

Advertising is the most prolific form of environmental pollution wrought by commerce.

It needs to become as socially acceptable as smoking, and every instance of it must be exhaustively scrutinised and required to be justified.

Still the case. Except now the malware is from the OS/hardware vendor.

Life was easy back in the day. People asked me to fix their computer. "I installed Firefox 3.5 and ABP. Life should be good for you now."

Come back years later annnnnnd they have been goaded to use Chrome and have trillions of bullshit apps. Was like "sorry, you have to actually pay me real money to fix this, people in this industry are actually very well compensated"

Conversely, ads are now one of the primary vectors how malware is distributed, so you still have at least 3 viruses on your computer. 👍

Watching TV, ads ran every 15 minutes and lasted 3 minutes when I was a kid but then jumped up to 4-5 minutes. So, 4 minutes of ads and 11 minutes of show, then another 4 minutes of ads. Unskippable, awful ads for deodorant and slap chop

Oh discussion is only about computers. I remember the first popup ads and pop under ads and they put a fake x so when you click it instead of closing it takes you to install malware

Me being on the family computer running XP and finding porn for the first time around high school age. Learned a lot of things immediately after.

Got caught and lectured.

1. So I learned to wipe history and cookies.
2. I honestly don't remember anymore how adblockers work back then or it exists. Probably does. But fuck all the fake Download buttons and X to close buttons.
3. I learned how and where from to torrent safely eventually.
4. became the tech support cleaning all the stupid toolbars. FML

Well these days the OS is the virus

how young do people think gen z are? older gen z people will turn 30 next year which is in roughly 3 months

i'm on the older end of gen z and can absolutely remember this.

windows xp was used for a very long time and this is a windows xp and before era thing

get this man a true

It's hard for me to say this but I actually miss older (NT based) Windows versions. They kind of worked, had a mostly consistent UI / UX and could even be customized a little bit.

Yesterday I had the Editor (the thing that used to me notepad) show me an account login notification, next to some weird copilot buttons that were not there the last time I used it. Best of all, the notification couldn't be confirmed due to a bug and stayed open the whole time and covered about 1/8 of the screen...

On my super locked down work laptop windows does weird screen size stuff with windows shrinking or getting larger, especially when they're moved between screens that have different scaling, sometimes task bar icons disappear or begin to flicker.

WTF?!

That's the thing: that's still true, it's just that Windows, Chrome and Facebook/IG are all malware, and people (of all generations) seem to fail to process that undeniable fact.

sure kid. for me it would be a long interstate road trip in a car that runs leaded gas, has no A/C and only an AM radio.