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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.
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.
I'm sorry I came to this late, but this one's really the best answer.
We talk a lot about how kids are struggling to recognize fake news, find reputable sources, etc... but I also think about how hard it is to find decent sources these days! I honestly can't comprehend how kids are learning to do research projects and so on without the ability to easily search for stuff on the internet.
And while there's lots of stuff on this threat that was cool while it lasted, I think search engines are one of those things where we never even considered the possibility it would change. Businesses fail, prices go up, experiences get skimped on, but search engines were goddamn magic. They just were. Why would anyone ever want to make them worse? The idea never even crossed out minds.
Man, Google search back in the day was great. No search categories like images, shopping, videos, etc. Just give it a query and you get what you wanted. God had no idea what was on the second page of results because the first page had what you wanted in the first half. Your ability to find what you wanted depended on your ability to use the search terms and modifiers.
The week I changed from HotBot to Google was a revelation. The jump from barely scraping the surface of the web to being able to find anything was like finally getting the full promise of the internet. Can't be undersold how great Google was from 2001-03 until around 2013-16.
It goes deeper IMO. Search no longer respects the user as an autonomous individual with self determination. It has stollen your digital citizenship.
Definitely did not take this for granted. Between 2004 and 2010ish it was remarkable how effective Google was. It’s still alright, just not as good as before.
Netflix back in the day. A near-limitless catalog of ad-free movies and TV for $8/month. If you tried selling that today, people would think it was a scam
I remember first hearing about Hulu sometime around 2007-8 and thinking it was a scam. Free (good) TV for one 30 second ad.
I knew Netflix existed as a dvd service but back in like 2009 the first streaming ads I saw were on flash game sites so I thought they were scams.
You know those like sign up for blank free trial and you’ll get 5000 fun bucks in shellshock or whatever
For me it's not so much that the price increased. It's that what you get for the money vanished.
I'd pay $40 a month to have a modern version of the Netflix that existed back in 2013.
Now if you want to have that you've got to have netflix, hulu, HBO Max, Showtime, peacock, and 15 other services and spend $35,400 a month for all of them and it's just not worth the money, time, and hassle.
Tourism, in general, but all the world's romantic, marvellous and 'unique' spots: Venice, Rome, Athens, Paris, London, NYC, San Fran....
Crowds, rules, fees, more fees, lineups, crowd control, advanced ticket sales(with specific time slots) for natural wonders.
There's a Grotto at a National Park on the Bruce Peninsula in Ontario, Canada that requires you to book at least a day in advance - to park and hike.
Brutal.
Tourism is cancer.... Also same people bitching about climate change seem to love tourism.
Richer people fly on private jets all the time, don't shift the blame to the average tourist.
Chipotle has fallen HARD.
Disney World and their fast passes.
SubWay. That $5 foot long was a good deal, even if it was not that great.
DC Shoes - They used to be SICK shoes and now they are basically WalMart shoes.
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 Valley~~ Palisades) 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.
What's even worse is that even with these prices, Palisades is absolutely swamped with people on most days that are worth skiing (especially holidays).
So, unfortunately, the market can clearly bear these prices...
I definitely miss skiing in Tahoe when I was younger. Much different vibe now with all the crowds :(
What percentage of the market is daily pass vs seasonal pass, I wonder? I think it's close to half at the big resorts. I feel like mountains (and mountain ownership groups) are pushing hard into the subscription model which means a lot of those people are paying less than the surge cost for the day, but a lot of people are also paying for a year pass but are sitting on their butt at home b/c they don't actually have time to get out.
On peak days, both people with onesie-twosie passes and the people with annual passes are out there, I bet.
Yeah this is a tough one. I think I read something like 70% is pass holders. Stowe, a mountain in Vermont, used to charge $2,000+ for their season pass. Now Epic is ~$700-800 and gives you a bunch more. The lines suck, they treat their workers like shit, they charge for parking, but skiing has generally become more affordable with the mega passes in some regards. I prefer passes like the Indy pass myself anyway.
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.
To be fair to the XP days, the OS was a bit of a malware cesspool. Now, MS provide pre-installed corpo malware.
98SE was peak.
In what way? I continue to use Windows 11 just fine.
Must be bliss, mate
Could you expound?
The OS is riddled with ads. How can anyone be okay with ads running at the OS level is beyond me.
The tracking is also getting much much worse, they spy on every fucking thing they can.
A lot of fast food places have undergone this due to private equity acquisitions.
Whataburger and Dunkin Donuts used to be much better around me.
Oh yeah I used to love eating at Subway, way back in the 90s. Then one day the steak-and-cheese got substantially worse. Then the meatballs got much worse as well. Once they started prioritizing app orders over in-person orders, I realized I didn't fit into their cost-benefit calculations and haven't been back since.
Re: Dollar Tree. Even in the pre $1.25 days or $1.50 or whatever they are now, it was well known that they made ends meet by deliberately padding certain items and in the process, preying on the poor people who shopped there who would be unable or unwilling to go to two different stores to complete their shopping trip.
This was primarily on packaged food products which are easy to comparison shop for if you have the means. Canned goods from them were the worst. They'd charge $1 for lots of things you could get at the grocery store at the time for 59 cents or 79 cents or whatever. And if that wasn't the play, if you checked the quantities on stuff you'd find that the $1 version they sold was inevitably a smaller can, bottle, or jar versus the $1.79 version from the grocery store. So even if one container appeared less expensive, it was actually a worse deal per ounce.
I think they also propped up their business an awful lot with disposable party supplies: Balloons, plates, cups, paper hats, napkins, and all that kind of stuff. I imagine that definitely was not a winner for them during Covid.
Education.
Democracy
Frontend in software development. If you know, you know.
