Funes-

Hmm... To my mind, the best way to commercialize software is the old way: pay for the binaries of every major version. This, of course, bars the option of using the software online, and makes pirating it easier, but I think it's the most fair.

You might think to look for it through a smartphone app; I certainly wouldn't. That's some projection right there. And no, it's not there, still. If you knew anything about the deep web, you'd know it's quite different from the Internet of old, as well as much less populated.

I think everything changed when Eternal September happened.

That was a critical turning point, to be sure. But what came about with the conjunction of social media and the smartphone around 2010 was a much more impactful one, as it made the Internet undergo extremely essential changes, not just a qualitative (and quantitative) modification of its userbase. The Internet became the media outlet for hypercommercialism and late-stage capitalism, basically, and all the societal changes we've seen since are byproducts of that paradigm shift.

It's mostly devoid of content and participation, unfortunately. We need more people to join in.

We desperately need to develop more for I2P. Make it a real place to thrive instead of just a curious piece of technology or a mere repository of pirated media. Let's say right now it's mostly an abandoned and almost empty museum.

I'll say it yet again. The Internet has become the very thing we used it to escape from.

One step closer to the great exile from the clearnet. I'd say "accelerate".

Absolutely. If they end up making access to the deep and dark web impossible through commercial Internet infrastructure, the next logical step is cracking down on alternative Internet infrastructure. Overlay networks like I2P, Tor or Hyphanet can be a temporary safe haven, but ultimately a government can make it extremely hard for uncontrolled platforms to stay up. I guess we'll have to fight for it if push comes to shove, and it's looking very bleak.

We'll move permanently to the dark web, then. Ideally, we should maintain resilient wireless community networks that can withstand government abuse, as well.

If people attend university for certification instead of education I think the battle is already lost

It's been a lost battle for decades, then.

Advertising and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.

"Commercial speech" being protected by free speech laws anywhere is abhorrent. The advertising industry, in and of itself, seems abhorrent to me. It's one of the worst things humans have come up with, ever.

"well what specific laws would I write to combat addictive design?"

Hear me out: banning advertising on the Internet. It's the only way. It's the primordial domino tile. You knock that one over, every other tile follows suit. It's the mother of chain reactions. There would be no social media, no Internet as we know it. Imagine having TikTok, YouTube or X trying to survive on subscriptions alone in their current iterations. Impossible. They'd need to change their top priority from "maximizing engagement by fostering addictive behavior" to "offering a product with enough quality for someone to pay a fee in order to be able to use it".

From another article:

"Social media app TikTok has been accused of purposefully designing its app to be “addictive” by the European Commission, citing its infinite scroll, autoplay, push notification, and recommendation features."

All of these have immediate and easy replacements or workarounds. Nothing will substantially change (for the better; maybe it does for the worse, even).

Moreover, "purposefully designing something to be addictive" (and cheap to make) is the fundamental basis of late stage capitalism.

...and the global oligopoly grows ever smaller.

You missed my second statement, I think.

I didn't. Nothing in my post could possibly make any reasonable person think I missed it. It bears no connection whatsoever to it, nor does it contradict anything I wrote.

social networking has the same effect on a laptop

You carry your laptop literally everywhere you go and use it in every imaginable situation you can find yourself in for more than six straight hours every day? You really pull out your laptop while waiting in line at the grocery store? You text on it while driving? You use your laptop strolling down the street at any given moment, or at restaurants with friends, really?

Get real.

At the same time, YouTube videos are getting longer, and people are watching more YouTube videos on TVs than on mobile devices

I wager most people are putting those on while having a meal and using their phones or tablets at the same time. Moreover, 99% of the most watched content on YouTube is utter garbage that would make the average reality show on TV twenty years ago look like The Godfather in comparison. Gossippy, clickbait videos made to induce an immediate dopamine dump and be used as background noise aren't "in-depth" anything. I don't think people are sitting in front of a TV watching an hour-long, non-sponsored, ad-free interview with Margerite Duras and doing nothing else concurrently, for instance.

On top of all that, this trend of making longer videos comes mostly from an attempt to increase ad revenue. Let's not be fooled here.

The "shit" to "good" ratio in literally every field was much less skewed to the "shit" side before smartphones and social media came along. It's always this same fallacy: "hey, that was always a thing!". Sure, drugs have "always" been a thing, but did you have fentanyl producing real-life zombie parades in the streets just ten years ago? If we make these reductionist claims, we can say just about every phenomenon was already a thing a hundred thousand years ago. We have to think about the degree to which something is occurring as well, and how it is taking place, not just try to dismiss it through knee-jerk intended retorts.

Everyone's.

Every monopoly is predicated upon abusive, anti-competitive and unlawful practices, as well as exemptions and unearned subsidies from governments. Always. Many people aligning with megacorporations wouldn't support "capitalism" if the playing field was even.

Guys, it's been over for a while now. And I mean decades... This is just one of the next steps in the path that's been laid out in front of us since the general population reached critical mass on the Internet and the ruling class (politicians, the media, corporations...) went all in on exploiting them for money and power. If we don't radically change the underpinnings of how the entire system works, we're in for much worse than this.

Since Trump is as borderline fascist as von der Leyen...

If you think any democrat president wouldn't do the exact same, I don't know what to tell you...

None, I'd bet. Can't you see this is just about tightening their grasp on our liberties, swaying our opinions, and selling our data? Organised religion could be going for that (minus the data, at least not in the current sense) in the past with a certain degree of success, but I don't see how they are even a tad bit as powerful as they once were. It doesn't seem sensible to associate these seemingly coordinated measures around the world to organised religion instead of corporations and the political elite. That's just a tone deaf take.

We're going to see more and more crackdown on internet access, in the name of making it "safe", or "safe for kids", particularly. All they want is pushing for censorship and control, though, on top of collecting and selling even more data. We'd be wise to make an effort to migrate to censorship resistant overlay networks like Hyphanet (formerly Freenet) or i2p before it's too late.

If I need to buy a phone made by Google to get away from Google, I'm just not doing it. /e/ doesn't support my current smartphone, either, and postmarketOS is not functional. At this rate, I think we're better off going back to dumbphones.

If there ever was a case to switch to crypto payments...

I think we aren't far from GrapheneOS being rendered unusable. We desperately need to make Linux phones viable daily drivers. Desperately. It's the only way we'll have access to critical funcionality while being independent from mega corporations like Google and whatever they decide to do with AOSP and their Pixel phones. Right now everything regarding our privacy is in their filthy hands.

The title is click-bait.

Click-bait!? On HN's frontpage? Oh, say it ain't so!

Yeah, the possibility of any of them being a honeypot I'd say is real.

Absolutely not, not to the same extent. That's a really illogical statement on your part, considering that the technical barrier to entry to even begin to think about developing a program in 1980 was much, much higher than what it's been for more than a decade now.