• 4 Posts
  • 71 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 23rd, 2023

help-circle
  • I have a Google Alert set up, so I get notified in case my name pops up on the web. A month after I joined a new company, I got an alert - turned out that their internal directory page was exposed to the public web. I was pretty livid - all this time I was proud of maintaining good anonymity, looking up my name never returned anything meaningful on Google. So I complained to my boss about this, and he said it was actually a bug/misconfiguration - which they were already aware of, but didn’t bother fixing it because no one complained. I was super pissed and made it very clear that it was a violation of my privacy and I wanted it taken down ASAP. Thankfully my boss was understanding and got it fixed. Then I had to report the page to Google. It took a while, but it was finally gone from the search results.





  • The enshittification actually began several years ago, back when FB bought WhatsApp. That was the moment you gave up on privacy, the moment that was a clear sign that it was all going to go downhill from there. If y’all didn’t quit WhatsApp at that time, then you bought it upon yourselves. The truth is, you’ve been using a shitty service for a long time and whoring your data to Meta and making Zuckerberg richer, so this latest feature bloat or w/e isn’t the least bit interesting.









  • Because Firefox is like a democracy, they prioritize work based on number of votes on issues/feature requests. The AudioEncoder API has literally just one vote, and the overall WebCodecs API that it’s a part of only has five votes. This shows that there’s very little demand for it, meaning very few sites actually use this (that or the vast majority of Firefox users don’t use/need this feature). Why bother focusing your efforts on implementing something that most users don’t care about? The higher priority things that most Firefox users care about is stuff like performance, and Mozilla have been making some good progress too on that front.








  • I’ve never come across a single paywalled news site that was worth subscribing to. Pretty much 100% of the paywalled content I’ve ever come across were all some random links I found via Google or Reddit (and now Lemmy). It wasn’t like I was particularly trying to visit that site and read all of their articles or something. Also, just so we’re clear, I’m not saying that I don’t to pay/donate/subscribe to stuff - I subscribe to Spotify because I use it daily and it’s worth it, I subscribe to Sync because I use it daily and it’s worth it etc.

    But most of these paywalled news sites (or some random scientific paper published on some random science journal) isn’t something that I’m really interested in pursuing a subscription for, just because I stumbled upon some random link out of curiosity - so if they think that I’ll subscribe just because of one random article… that’s just shitty business.

    Ideally, they should just let me view that random article for free and set a cookie (could be server-side) and say “hey, your IP address has viewed three articles on this site already, so we think you like our stuff so, you should really consider subscribing if you want to read more content!”. I mean, that makes sense. I’d then go, “yep, this site has quality content and the type of content I’d like to read, so it’s worth subscribing to”.

    But no, instead they’re like “heeey random visitor, you just stumbled upon this random link and hey guess what, you need an entire subscription just to read one ducking article! Of course, asking you to pay for a whole month’s worth of subscription makes total sense, and isn’t going to put you off, right?”


  • d3Xt3r@lemmy.worldtoTechnology@lemmy.worldThe World’s Last Internet Cafes
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    26
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    Here in Wellington, New Zealand, we have a very successful and bustling cyber café called Respawn, which is one of those rare cyber cafés that actually also offers food - and some pretty decent food at that (they’re even on Uber Eats!). In addition to PCs, they have all the major consoles, racing rigs and even VR gear too, so there’s plenty of reasons to go there since not everyone has the room (or budget) for a racing rig or VR at home. They also host regular events like mechanical keyboard meetups, eSports tournaments and so on. And although all my friends have a decent PC/console, we’re now spread all over the country, so whenever we have a get-together, we meet up at cafés like Respawn and have a LAN party like the good ol’ days. My friends and I are grateful cafés like this still exist.

    Respawn’s success shows us that cyber cafés still have a place and can make it work, they just need to diversify and offer reasons for folks to come back.