The Dark Age of 202X and beyond - RealWorld forums

Hello, RealWorld community! I'd like to announce the current era we live in. We once lived in a world where we owned anything we liked, and it's all ours. We loved to use YouTube to watch and play with our favorite creators. It was all cool and fun. I was born in 2003, and this was the time when I enjoyed my life.

Unfortunately, as time went on, the quality of services and ordeal has gone down substantially. Years went on and when we reached the pandemic, where we were in lockdown, we had to rely on what we had until the pandemic ended. Once it ended in 2022ish, the world has become dark up to now, and we had shrinkflation and decrease in quality of services. I’ll explain them as I go:

1. All our food products and toiletries are shrinking in size and quality, while staying at the same price as the original product or preceding quality. This is shrinkflation and companies are doing this to all the things we get in supermarkets, car shops, and fucking restaurants! Especially where we get paid less in jobs, it’s hard to live with the prices of our necessities.
2. Speaking of which, prices of streaming services like Disney Plus and Netflix are increasing every month and gas prices are skyrocketing (haven’t used Upside, tell me what you think!). Why they do this, I guess it has to do with the hyperinflation going around the world. Again, with the low pay rate for most jobs, it can be very difficult to live in a simple apartment.
3. We own nothing! And I’m a pirate for this reason. I pirate anything I can get my hands on, and in a safe manner. USE A VPN and bind it to your torrenting programs and download websites, especially with region-locked content! YouTube has been cracking down on adblockers and is forcing users to sign in to confirm you are not a bot; either Google is stopping AI scrapers or the downloaders, since the help page says it will stop people from downloading content for offline use. I really don’t want to do any hate speech, but in my head, I say fuck YouTube. DRM is implemented and we pirates have to use tons of tools to download the content and decrypt the DRM to make it into a readable format.
4. Windows 11 is my hatred enemy. It is heavy into AI, has ads, full-screen reminders that won't go away, very beefy specs, can't install on most machines to this day and has unstable updates to non-Insider users that could potentially brick your computer until you reinstall Windows. And unfortunately, Windows 10 is on its way to the end of life in October 2025. Consider using 0patch if you plan to stick with Windows 10 (and Windows in general). I'm generally not a Linux user since my Steam library is on Windows and Wine doesn't work half of the time. But I do praise Linux for being privacy friendly.
5. Companies want to paywall everything (even a mouse)! Check out any post on r/AssholeDesign on Reddit and you’ll see why. Also check out Lois Rossmann’s videos on YouTube!
6. GOOGLE (and other companies) WANTS YOUR DATA! I personally don’t mind them using my data to personalize my content, but when they use it to train AI, that’s a problem. I don’t know how to stop them from training AI from me, so let me know how I can do that!

I hope you know what I mean and that I hate the state of the world we are living in. Have a great day!
This was written by hand and AI is not used since I hate it so much!

In fact everything after 2020's sucks

Well, the situation is complex. I don't think that there is a hyperinflation (>50% YoY) in most of the countries. On the other hand, there is a lot of government debt in many countries and it hard to imagine how else it can be eliminated except by a long term increased inflation. That is probably the least painful way.

Owning a software... what does it actually mean? That you can run it now? Or run it at any point in the future? Being able to modify it? Without paying anything? The thing is, most of software is not isolated. What run on Windows 95 may not run on Windows 11 because the environment has changed. Who will do the necessary maintenance to keep the software alive? No matter how well it was originally designed, it eventually will break, for example when the hardware breaks and cannot be replaced with equivalent parts.

So, you can turn to open source, but there still has to be someone, who keeps the software alive. An abandoned code repository is not worth much. Having access to the source code is just one part, someone must invest (usually a lot of) time to understand it. That is not free, head space is not free. In short run someone can invest their own time for free, but that is not sustainable.

Google/YouTube provides a lot of services for free, but has to make money somehow. They chose the ad model and it worked, maybe too good. Now they have a very strong position and probably need to be better regulated. US prefers profit so, the regulation is rather light, EU is trying to be more strict, but not very successfully, the bills sometimes do more harm than good. So, in short, situation is complex.

Fuck ai, I hate it so much, is for cocky yet worthless btches with no skill at all

I might sound like my stupid old self (circa from late 2023 august from 2023 october) but I wish we could go back to the good ol' days, when ai wasn't even a thing, when people at internet were more civilized, when companies cared about their users, when mobile games didn't had obnoxious ads and ultimately, whe the skeuomorphism was popular

Also blame china, they're the villains behind 2020 pandemic era

I also might sound like these toxic linux users but just switch to any easy to use linux distribution instead of upgraded to a chronically bloated os or getting a new pc; isn't worth spending money on something it won't be easy to improve. I will continue to Win10 for using vmware for ripping icons from windows betas, after october 2025 I will ultimately switch to linux, as I dualboot w10 and ubuntu, I don't think vmware will be ever available for linux so after 2025 october I'll have no other choice than sticking to vbox

Read through that. Sucks how worse these of the internet got, and it felt like it all happened so fast. From the start of the modern streaming era, to the whole -flation crap, it just seems like everything changed right in front of our eyes so quickly. That’s why I’ve switched to more private alternatives to services. I know my data’s already somewhere on the dark web or whatever, but I do want to try and get more private in the future. While I myself haven’t subscribed to any streaming services (only my parents do), I can still see the issues in such. The prices and business practices are just so crappy these days. (cough, that one recent Disney lawsuit, cough, cough)

I know this might be unrelated, but I’m gonna put down here some resources for those who are tired of all the junk on the modern web.

If you’re someone who’s not wanting their data scraped by big companies, use private alternatives!!!!! They may not fully function the same but they’ll be much better for privacy. Here’s a comprehensive list of alternatives for a lot of popular services on github: https://github.com/pluja/awesome-privacy

If you’re someone who wants to stick to Win11, your best bet is tiny11, a shrunk down, debloated version of windows 11. I’ve installed it myself, and it seems that copilot is nowhere to be found! good effing riddance… If you want a fully private experience, make sure to use private services and stuff. It’s also safe to install from my experince. You can get it from here: https://archive.org/details/tiny-11-NTDEV
For ones who perfer windows 10, try tiny10, same stuff as tiny11. (It omits the Microsoft store while tiny11 doesn’t!) https://archive.org/details/tiny-10-NTDEV
To install it, use a USB drive to write the ISO on to. It’s best to use Rufus to write it onto. https://rufus.ie
I’d also follow a tutorial online when installing so you know how to get the best results. This tutorial on Tiny11 and this tutorial on Tiny10 are the best ones I found.

For those wanting to switch to Linux, Linux Mint is good for those who are coming from windows. Not too sure about other distros because mint is the only one I’ve actually used.

@Animelove_1105 You forget about Windows 10 LTSC

Welcome to the 21st century. Nibbler is right because everything is very expensive these days. Here in Brazil, inflation is 7 pesos. That means, raised to the seventh power, as you may have seen on TV. It won't be long before Brazil reaches level 22 like Venezuela. Here they want to be similar to North Korea. I can't stand the corruption in Brazil anymore. Unfortunately, it's a worldwide disgrace. Despite everything I said, I like Brazil. It's nice, but I'd like to see other countries. Regarding YouTube, you can expect anything these days and be vigilant. In the past, everything was much better there. Regarding what you need, it might be software; if you already have an old software that isn't working properly, it might work on your current Windows; just right-click on it, access the pop-up menu Properties and choose the Compatibility function in the tab above; in this tab you can choose the previous version of Windows in which the old application worked. Click Apply and run the old software and it might work. Many people forget that modern Windows has this feature in case they need to run older software. Good luck!

fr fuck the millenials and gen x bastards grrrrr!!

did the baby got angry because we dislike how is the internet (and world) is getting fucked up?

Bro what? :skull: