Ask Lemmy

I deleted my other comment because I realized this is about tech in general and I thought it was websites.

But yeah, hard agree and one of the biggest culprits of shit nobody wanted on their computer was absolutely windows 8. Of course tween/teen me thought it was kinda cool, but hindsight is 20/20 after all.

Can't really remember that many other examples, but it was at least slightly better than now. I mean, just look at the old interface for Audacity with the faux 3D circular buttons at the top from around 2013-ish compared to the crummy flat and dull ones we have now! We used to be a civilized society!

It peaked right before cloud and streaming became a thing. Since then, we as consumers lost control of it, and the big tech is since then doing what it wants with it.

I remember when you didn't have to worry about getting ratioed into oblivion just because you wanted to engage in a little good natured trolling.

It peaked when only decent people knew about the internet

I'm some people. Yes, it was about 2012, 2013, in my lesser populated area where we were 10 to 15 years behind in tech. But sometimes I think earlier depending on the tech. I have made this comment on Lemmy so much people probably know me for it so I'm not gonna detail it much more.

It was peak tech before it got gross. Yes there was corpo shit, but it hadnt infiltrated every single aspect of life. There was less surveillance because it wasnt technically possible yet. There was still physical media. There were less subscriptions and if there were, they were actually decent. Social media was still eh, people weren't absolutely addicted like now (due to corporate addiction tactics and dark patterns). You could fucking talk to someone without them looking at their phone.

Tech is also now WAY too overpowered (and expensive) for normal folk, and so programming lean is straight out the window. Programs and webpages have more bloat than ever and are never going back. You can do 99% of your daily tasks on a 2013 PC with Linux thats actually programmed efficiently, probably with 4 GB of ram. Now, win 11 needs 8GB just to run in the background. Trash.

So yes,I stand by the fact tech has gone downhill very fast, due to capitalism.

One minor thing, I do think vr tech is cool and fun. About the only new thing I find interesting besides emulation .

2013 is too late, the machinations of the Cambridge Analytica scandal had already begun at that point.

I think about 2010 was when big tech peaked at being at least viewed as a predominantly utopian force (if not necessarily actually being one). Social media was still mostly social, rather than a side effect of an advertising business. Recommendation algorithms were relatively rudimentary, where they existed at all. Smartphones apps were not dopamine factories designed to be psychologically addictive.

After that was roughly the beginning of "disruptive" tech and a big expansion of surveillance tech.

There's no way to answer this really. Depends on what you're referring to. The actual technology is pretty great right about now, or at least a few years back before the RAMpocalype. The accessibility to technology is high, the learning curve is pretty low and Ui pretty good no matter what OS you choose. Little troubleshooting is required. You don't need antivirus, just best practices for app sources and to update your OS regularly. Internet connections are fast. Pirating is easy and plentiful if you want to dodge DRM bullshit.

The internet culture as a whole is garbage now though. Privacy is worse than Big Brother could ever hope for. Trying to exploit people with technology is at an all-time high. Selling licenses that can be taken back at any time, attaching internet to devices that havw no business needing an internet connection that inevitably break. Drop shipping garbage even on bigger sites. Social media was pretty fun at first, at least forums were. Now it is cancer. Ai is melting people's brains and the atmosphere.

If you want to average out the decline of those completely disparate things, sure, late 00s early 10s is where it is at. Corporate OSs like Windows 7 and Snow Leopard were at their leak. iPhone and Android were good enough but nobody demanded accessibility to you with them. Social media wasn't COMPLETE cancer yet. Lower component pricing especially for DIY PC gaming.

But the thing is, it's not inevitable. We can have the better tech without shittiness. Tech is neutral. It is PEOPLE that ruin it. If we stop rewarding influencers and enforce regulations upon corporations to stop abuse of Ai, increase worker's rights, and stop surveillance, we'd be just fine. We're here because we have allowed the slow decline of western culture with its emphasis on personal freedoms and rule of the people. Now it is just "freedom for me to fuck you over with no consequences". The solution is not going back in time, it is fixing our bullshit.

Before Google turned evil and GitHub got bought by ms, after valve started funding proton

Software tech peaked in the late 80s / early 90s. We still don't have an equivalent to Ada or Eiffel with safety and shit. Rust could be an equivalent, but the quality of software engineering has been dropping every year and I am not proud to be a developer. We used to care about quality, now its vibe coded shit written in JavaScript, the worst language ever created.

I was always skeptical about cookies that didn't serve a useful purpose to ME, and it was around 2004 when I first noticed advertising cookies. So I'd say 2003.

for me it was the last macbook pro that had lots of ports and was big and powerful. so around 2010. had dvi-I

I'd say 2013 is approximately accurate. That's about when seeking recurring income started really becoming a thing, and software started going SaaS, and renting cloud servers started taking off.

The year someone discovered that if he alloyed copper and tin, he could put a durable edge on his whacking stick.

2013 seems like a decent pick. NVME drives just came into existence. Windows 7 was around and still had Windows Media Center. Fiber ISPs were around. Facebook was still centered around people you actually knew and wasn't hyper-focused on serving you engagement-bait political bullshit. Not a trace of LLMs in sight. Google search still worked. Chrome hadn't crippled adblock extensions. Porn was accessible without privacy-violating age verification. Content was less fragmented across streaming services.

Probably the roughest backslide for me would be going without Android Auto.

I'm not going to try and pinpoint a specific year, but my off-the-cuff answer is 2015.

It's just a rough estimate, so 2013 is in the ballpark.

Everything after fire was probably a mistake.

Right now! And no, I don't mean corporate software and services or generative AI bullshit...

The hardware market sucks right now for sure, and it's the AI bubble's fault. The rate of advancement of hardware is also slowing down. But at the same time $2000 still gets you a significantly better PC today than what you had 10 years ago. Hardware isn't as affordable as it was just a couple years ago, but it's still good.

On the software side, you really just have to embrace FOSS. The Linux ecosystem is going wild, and it feels like the entire thing is snowballing, growing at an accelerating rate. I now run Linux as my main OS on all of my PCs, including gaming PCs. I have a Linux home server with self-hosted services that are accessible to me whever I go thanks to tailscale. I feel pretty much immune to service and software enshittification, because I have almost no subscriptions and mostly to use free and open source software.

I really feel like I'm getting more out of my technology than I ever have before, and it's a lot less corporate.

My Radio Shack Tandy 4000, ca 1991

It had a hard drive. It had color and sound. I could make it do anything I wanted, down to the individual registers using assembly language or high level with Object-Oriented Turbo Pascal.

I would say the late 2000s, because after the 2008 crash things started to get worse yet cost more.

The peak of software was handing bundles of 3.5” floppies with shareware on it to your buddies, so probably closer to 1993 than 2013.

Quality yeh mid teens.

Peaked on what people will pay for unfortunately I do not think we have met that yet. Too many people still buying or supporting bad products.