I realize this is probably no surprise to anyone. I don’t know though, maybe the younger generation doesn’t have the same experience because they never lived in a period where things actually worked most of the time. A few cases in point.
- This website/blog/domain/hosted account/wordpress installation.
When I started Vagobond, it was perfectly fine. A simple self-hosted WordPress installation that allowed me to write in html or to use a basic wysiwyg editor. I could embed photos, create galleries, and customize the installation how I wanted using some basic html and css coding skills. If I wanted to embed videos, I was able to do that. The galleries were good, functional. The domain was $12-$19 a year and there were no browsers that didn’t let people visit because I didn’t pay someone to have a SSL certificate which I had no need of because I don’t do e-commerce here. The search engines didn’t autocorrect vagobond.com to vagabond.com. People could register, sign up for email notifications of new posts, and comment on posts. It was all pretty simple. Hosting was $40-$50 a year. People could actually go to Google and search in a category called blogs. I never particularly wanted to outsource my content to social media sites, but I set up a Facebook and Twitter page that my content was sent to automatically with links back to here for the community aspects. I could look at my simple WordPress stats in the backend. I actually had a links page where I recommended the travel sites of other travel bloggers and they did the same. It worked. People could find the site and if I wrote well and about things that were interesting and not covered elsewhere – readers came and joined the community. My biggest complaint in those days was about scammers posting fake links but WordPress developed akismet and that solved that problem 95%. I owned my own content, owned my installation and was not forced to do weird, tedious, pointless shit to keep my site alive beyond just posting good content and interacting with my community. I installed Adsense and used affiliate links for products that I found worthwhile.
Enter SEO, Google PageRank Algorithm shit, non-stop WordPress updates, SSL, siloing on quality features into paid subscriptions SAAS, social media siphoning of community, bizarre WordPress complexity updates, content farms, browser complexity, search engine autocorrect, and strategies to gamify ads and search. Completely and totally fucked up. Then you can add in all the cool side services that were acquired by the walled gardens or competed out of existence or simply stopped being free or affordable. This site went from more than a million visits in a year and earning close to $100k from ads and sponsorships to around ten thousand visits a year and earning nothing. Why? SEO bullshit, content farms, and social media hijacking community. Add to that the search engines turning to a model where sites had to pay to get any traffic and you can see what happened. What happens now? Someone types in vagobond.com into google or another browser and it autocorrects to vagabond.com. They search for “cool things to do in Hawaii” or “buy a house in Otaru, Japan” and the first five pages are all paid ads with expensive keywords. If any sites make it through that aren’t – they are highly targeted content farms that have created shit content loaded with keywords that the algorithm associates with the paid ads that use those keywords. But let’s say the user gets past all that and actually types vagabond.com into the menu bar – if my SSL has expired – they don’t go to the site, they go to a page that looks like a warning, but hey, maybe they click the little thing at the bottom that let’s them then click another thing that brings them here. They find a story they like, they leave a comment – no one else is commenting. I might reply back to them, but there isn’t a community because all of the travel communities went to walled social media gardens. So they click on my Instagram or Facebook link and they are taken to where my community should live but on the way they are hit with targeted ads, paid content, and travel posts that feature 19-year-old girls in bikinis. They probably will never make it past.
As for me, I’m forced to load so many plugins and tools into a no longer simple WordPress CMS that I lose the thread of creating content at all. I become more focused on “How the hell do. I make a good looking gallery?” and “Why do I have to learn how to use this new system they just updated to?” and “Where did my pages go when they updated the theme?”
So yeah – it’s fucked.
2. Music
I had a lot of CDs. I burned them all and put them on my iPod. I downloaded a bunch of music from friends. I had a huge MP3 library. I’m not really sure what happened to it. They no longer seem to be on my iTunes and since iTunes and Apple’s Music app aren’t the same thing but sort of are, I don’t really know what happened to my music. I had music that friends had shared with me from all over the world. It’s gone. I think. I have no idea. I can pay for a subscription to Apple Music or Spotify or listen to a shit ton of commercials. Instead, I just don’t really listen to music very much anymore. I used to listen to music all the time.
3. Movies and TV
Three networks and Blockbuster weren’t ideal, but I could pretty much watch what I wanted. I could pay to go to a movie theater too. Netflix and their DVD delivery service worked pretty well. Streaming seemed to work well. I created huge lists of what I had watched and wanted to watch. Where did those go? Now the algorithm decides what it is I need to have put in front of me. I can’t even find those lists. Now I just watch reality TV. It’s too hard to make friends because everyone is looking at their phone all the time or in their house watching reality TV so that’s what I do too.
4) Crypto and Blockchain
I mean, the idea was that middle men would be eliminated and p2p transactions would save the world. Blockchain could be used to protect IP, to keep track of award programs like airline miles, and stuff like that. The public nature of it would protect from scammers. Instead, a bunch of middle men created middle-man stuff to onramp and offramp, governments and scammers are using it to rip people off, and for some reason everyone that seemed like they were in it for the technology and societal change left and the only ones left are scammers and nazis. Far from ideal.
5) Apps and phones.
I really don’t need an app to order food or coffee. I really don’t need a phone to record where I go and what I do and report it to some company so they can target me more effectively with political campaigns or products. I barely use my phone as a phone anymore. Discord seems to work pretty well and I’m on there a lot. I use Whatsapp and Line and WeChat. I was becoming a big fan of Substack but it turns out that instead of publishing my videos to Youtube, it was only publishing the audio for most of them – I’m not sure why, but their algorithm decided to also take away my posting privileges and delete my email list. I tried to contact support but it was a bot that kept sending me in circles and informed me that the real humans were too busy to help me. I’m still a fan of Couchsurfing but most users on there haven’t been active since around 2012. I’m trying some of the other apps, not the billionaire controlled ones, but I’m afraid that they will all just go the way of Google+ – build something cool and then rug pull or move into paid software as a service subscription model.
I keep trying, but honestly – tech just sort of sucks.