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Published 3 weeks ago by kxh with 5 Comments

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  • Gozzin (edited 3 weeks ago)
    +4

    These are the two factors that make services terrible: captive users, and no constraints. If your users can't leave, and if you face no consequences for making them miserable (not solely their departure to a competitor, but also fines, criminal charges, worker revolts, and guerrilla warfare with interoperators), then you have the means, motive and opportunity to turn your service into a giant pile of shit.

    I never used those "services",but I've noticed You Tube doing the same thing,from lowering video quality,to ordering people to turn off ad blockers and trying to restrict their use of the platform if they don't comply. I'm one of those people who refuses to comply due to my unbridled hatred of ads.

    • AdelleChattre
      +4

      Good Lord yes, but these big outfits seem to've worked out how to obtain unobtainable resources to match their growth. Mom and pop outfits not only lack the access capital to the internet, but also the kind of revenue stream newspapers used to get from their ad syndicates. There've been online ad services with discreet, postage-stamp ads that've supported outfits like Metafilter before. Being able to handle not just the traffic but also the necessary revenue plowback from getting Slashdotted probably helps, right?

  • Maternitus (edited 2 weeks ago)
    +4

    Leaving Facebook and Instagram did good for my site, as in: when leaving Facebook, my website tripled in visitors. A few months later I left Instagram and it doubled. So, there's proof of the locking in.
    But I didn't leave it at that. First I discovered the robots.txt, which sounded good in the late nineties, but is simply ignored by those moguls in this age. Now I have a very aggressive .htaccess-file and firewall policy installed/created, to go against AI-crawlers and bots. And guess what? My site keeps on growing with visitors, and from what I've learned from the server stats, no Facebook references, no Instagram references are mentioned or even on the radar.
    Also, the only automated crawlers or bots that I allow, are the regular ones for regular search engines, not the AI ones. And they are a minimum, compared to the real people that visit the site, all the while I'm on top of every search engine when you search for my name. So, I guess people do not need Facebook or Instagram to have an audience and AI is nothing more than redundant server loads. The stats showed me that the site can handle the visitors easily now, because AI bots can't get on it.
    An example: ChatGPT can generate over 2000 hits per minute on the server, compared to a regular human that stays on the site for 5 minutes, which has about 40-something hits in those five minutes. So, it also saves a shitload of energy and the equipment everything is installed on.
    IMHO Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and all their ilks are destroying the internet as it is, not just content-wise, but also the infrastructure. And the energy use, omg, the energy they use is enormous. Count AI with it and you can get an idea how destructive they are.

  • Gozzin
    +3

    I went to FB maybe five times but have noticed have noticed how it sucks people away from really nice websites into it's vortex. What is your website?

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