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
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.
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.
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?
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.
Granted it’s a bit niche, but: skiing + snowboarding.
I learned to ski as a kid back in the 90s, and have always loved it. Used to be you could get a lift ticket at alpine meadows (where I learned to ski) up in Tahoe for like 40 bucks. Palisades Tahoe (the merged resorts formerly known as Alpine Meadows and
Squaw ValleyPalisades) now costs between 2-300 a day (surge pricing, ofc) if you buy a ticket day-of - not including rentals/demos/parking/food/etc that a snow enjoyer might also opt for.Yeah, fine, it’s a kinda bougie sport, but it’s kinda awful that all these PE firms who are gobbling up all the mountains in the country are not even pretending to keep the prices even remotely reasonable. I don’t need a “curated resort experience”. I just want to slay some gnar pow.
Microsoft Windows. Oh boy has it gotten bad.
It was always bad.
Windows 3.1 was bad. It was ugly, it was slow. The Macs of that era looked better, although their multitasking was even worse than Windows, somehow. It was pretty clear that 3.1 was just a desktop GUI over a text OS.
Windows 95 and 98 were bad. They were graphical improvements over 3.1 / NT, but they were so brittle and janky. Remember bullshit like “TEXTFI~1.TXT”?
The latest versions are all terrible too. Like, try to make a change to a system setting and you get the Windows 10/11 themed settings menu. But, if you try to make any kind of advanced setting change and you’re taken over to a GUI that shows that under the hood it’s still effectively running Windows XP components.
I thought Win 2000 was an improvement. Didn’t Win 3.1 literally run on top of DOS? Like, DOS was the actual operating system and Win 3.1 was merely the graphical user interface/desktop environment, so it consumed a bunch more hardware resources? I think I remember having to run many programs out of DOS so that they would run more smoothly than if I used Win 3.1. In that sense, Win 3.1 was really Ski Free, Space Cadet Pinball, Solitaire, Minesweeper, and a nice file manager.
I also liked the improvements of Win Vista, but my laptop couldn’t seem to keep up with the requirements needed for things to run smoothly. Win 7 seemed like a smoother Win Vista, so that was nice. However, I felt let down that there were no major noticeable improvements other than performance, which could also have been attributed to improvements in hardware. Around then, I started experimenting with Linux out of sheer curiosity and slowly switched to Linux 100%. In the past several years, I know about Win only from what I hear on Lemmy, so ofc I think it’s terrible, but I wouldn’t know from personal experience and judgment. I’m happy af with Linux anyway.
