uBlock Origin is the gold standard, but you need something that supports the full version. Plain Chrome (and most forks) are not good enough.

Firefox, Helium, and/or Orion would be my top picks.

On top of three letter agencies, basically every cybersecurity expert that publishes a “basic tweaks” article recommends uBlock Origin.

Nah, I left that place immediately; can’t remember what it’s called. TBH I don’t lurk in any Discord unless I basically have no choice.

But if you want to dig it up, it’s linked to related Discords of the local diffusion/imagegen community (as the whole business is just generating sexy pictures en masse).

Horrible, but not unprecedented at all:

https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/military-history-and-science/vietnam-war-and-censorship

Ah, a fellow New Comments browser?

Still doesn’t properly display HDR images for me, but I suppose this is a pain point for most photo software.

Yep.

Cool niche content gets sparser and sparser as attention of more popular opinions snowball, and the “hero” posters holding single communities afloat burn out.

Mark my words, Lemmy (and Piefed) will meet Voat’s fate (amongst other Reddit clones) unless something changes. It’s happened over and over again, and creative filtering like Piefed is doing or “open” Federation as is Lemmy’s focus isn’t going to fix it. Neither will posters. They need more fundamental structural attention/UI changes, in the code.

The results are awful though. Over the past few years, I can hardly even think of a single search where SEO quickly brought me to “the page I was looking for”; searches end in either a wall of spam, or me getting frustrated and more directly finding what I already know I want. Smaller sites I used to love have withered and died, buried from the lack of earnest traffic. Malicious URLs rise above the businesses they are copying.

In other words, what does it matter if SEO is “improved” if the results are junk? It’s clearly not working better, unless one’s a scammer, or a corporation that benefits from the consolidation.

Bender’s Big Score, the first one. I was thinking of the scammer aliens, who have that same attitude SEO folks tend to carry.

I ran into a Discord where the whole purpose was running AI woman Instagrams and OnlyFans. And it was huge; they ran competitions, frameworks guides and everything, and apparently made a lot of cash doing it.

And it got me thinking… Does it even matter?

If you’re paying to stare at some internet person behind glass, whom you’d never deeply interact with, it mind as well be fake, since the relationship is so vapid anyway.

No, you’ve got a point… Actually you’re right. To an extent.

I should have qualified my post.

But I’d argue the “bad” part of SEO is just too tempting. It’s clearly winning out, across the entire internet, unless you can look at me with a straight face and say “Google search is fine.” Or that discoverability of genuine services is fine. It’s definitely not; it’s a miracle any legitimate business is surviving from web search anymore, amongts the sea of attention scams and corporate behemoths.

In other words, the I feel like the “honeymoon” where we could trust SEO to happen ethically is now behind us.

When the Digg beta launched, we immediately noticed posts from SEO spammers noting that Digg still carried meaningful Google link authority. Within hours, we got a taste of what we’d only heard rumors about. The internet is now populated, in meaningful part, by sophisticated AI agents and automated accounts. We knew bots were part of the landscape, but we didn’t appreciate the scale, sophistication, or speed at which they’d find us. We banned tens of thousands of accounts. We deployed internal tooling and industry-standard external vendors. None of it was enough.

I love how the SEO industry pretends they’re anything but a caustic cancer leeching off literally everything.

“Oh, but discoverability of small business!” Yeah… I’d punch you if I saw you, SEO jerks. The Futurama movie was right.

I mean, any YouTube creator is neck-deep in streaming. It’s probably more unhealthy than long-form TV.

EDIT: Though to this influencer’s credit, she seems more low key and avoids other social media. It appears she only does YT, Patreon, Ko-Fi, Peertube(!) and her own site, and uploads on a modest scheduile. That’s quite reasonable.

I don’t buy that. No way they “open up” iOS to be more OSX-like, as that would spoil their cash cow (the App Store).

I hate to sound so cynical, but I just don’t see any incentive for Apple to do that.

Eh, but will they? There’s a whole lot of OSX legacy Apple would have to throw away.

I mean, I guess they could; they’ve done it before with architecture transitions. But this is different in that stuff on existing devices would stop working, whereas Intel or PPC Macs keep chugging along as-is.

Well, technically, System76 and a few other white box laptop makers did. But they don’t actually make laptops.

And to be fair to big OEMs, “it uses Linux!” was a much harder thing to market before. I can see (outside of the Framework, which caters to enthusiasts) they only dabbled with it but didn’t invest.

Also, an HP or Dell Linux distro would be an unholy abomination. I can only imagine what they’d ship.

As I always say:

…Most people need an iPad with a better keyboard, and a touchpad.

That’s all they use their computers for. They don’t want to mess with filesystems or specs or any concepts like that, they just want to add text to their kid’s picture or send an email or read a PDF or scroll YouTube, or do things like banking or streaming that are honestly better supported as iOS apps anyway.

And that’s basically what the Neo is.

Laptop makers are up shit creek if they insist on staying with Windows, as Microsoft stupendously bungled that experience.

It’s basically iOS at that point.

“If this is all surprising to you then you’re not talking with the women in your life.”

To be fair, maybe Lemmy is less social than “average”? I’m certainly contributing to that statistic.

…Still, as a guy, it’s kind of my experience everywhere. The longer I live, even as isolated as I am, the more I’m bewildered by other men being incapable of following the “don’t be a jerk” rule, incapable of shutting up and listening to women, or doing/saying straight up terrible, sexist things, all while knowing that’s the tip of the iceberg.

I can’t even imagine the experience of being a woman using Uber. It’s mind boggling that so many male commenters wag their fingers like they somehow do.

I buy that. It fits with literally all of Meta’s previous behavior and lobbying efforts.