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lyornHave been reading this https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/12/8/2210584/-Everything-Worked-Better-Before-The-Internet and felt they had a point. And then I started digging in my memory.
I loved the internet when it came up. So many fannish people to talk to (I was on Usenet back then), so many stories to read, so many ideas and knowledge! You could order books and comics from the US for no shipping cost at within days, at a USD to DM rate matched only by the very specialised stores with a very small selection of books. I booked a flight to the UK via internet in 2001, and if it cost 80 Euros fees for a 10 Euro ticket it was still so much cheaper than buying it at the local airport with a major airline. I got an account with an online bank for my savings. I got a LJ account to keep my friends up to date when I was travelling for job reasons.
Life was sweet!
Today, amazon sends me damaged books. The delivery driver rings my doorbell so he can throw a note in my mailbox that I wasn't home. Ordering English-language books that are advertised as being sent from within Germany are sent from the US, so you pay a few cents for taxes -- and several Euros to the delivery company because they handled the taxes, and there is no way at all to just pick up the book and pay the tax at the tax office as I used to do when ordering a laptop 20 years ago. When attempting to book a flight in 2014, it took me two times three hours of page crashes and offers disappearing after I selected them, and when finally my screen said that I had booked a flight, three days later I got a mail from the site that the booking had failed. After that happened two times I went to a travel agent -- by then the ticket had gone up in price by 200 Euro (assuming the advertised price was ever real). And, well, you know, LJ, but that's actually a different story, I guess.
A few weeks ago I cancelled that savings account, because the bank always found new loops to have me jump through if I wanted as much as the info for the tax office from them, culminating in telling me I had to get a new smartphone before I could access my savings. (The savings account would interact only with one other account. As long as I did not change that, or change my e-mail address, the risk to the money was quite low. Still they treated it like an account for paying for online purchases.)
The loss of kitchen and household goods stores does not affect me badly yet, as there is a household goods market in town twice a year. I have an average size so I can still shop for clothes in town. I know bookstores that will order books from abroad for prices still better than in the 1990s.
So, no, things were not better before the internet. The internet is just having very bad case of enshittification and this has gone on for years.
I loved the internet when it came up. So many fannish people to talk to (I was on Usenet back then), so many stories to read, so many ideas and knowledge! You could order books and comics from the US for no shipping cost at within days, at a USD to DM rate matched only by the very specialised stores with a very small selection of books. I booked a flight to the UK via internet in 2001, and if it cost 80 Euros fees for a 10 Euro ticket it was still so much cheaper than buying it at the local airport with a major airline. I got an account with an online bank for my savings. I got a LJ account to keep my friends up to date when I was travelling for job reasons.
Life was sweet!
Today, amazon sends me damaged books. The delivery driver rings my doorbell so he can throw a note in my mailbox that I wasn't home. Ordering English-language books that are advertised as being sent from within Germany are sent from the US, so you pay a few cents for taxes -- and several Euros to the delivery company because they handled the taxes, and there is no way at all to just pick up the book and pay the tax at the tax office as I used to do when ordering a laptop 20 years ago. When attempting to book a flight in 2014, it took me two times three hours of page crashes and offers disappearing after I selected them, and when finally my screen said that I had booked a flight, three days later I got a mail from the site that the booking had failed. After that happened two times I went to a travel agent -- by then the ticket had gone up in price by 200 Euro (assuming the advertised price was ever real). And, well, you know, LJ, but that's actually a different story, I guess.
A few weeks ago I cancelled that savings account, because the bank always found new loops to have me jump through if I wanted as much as the info for the tax office from them, culminating in telling me I had to get a new smartphone before I could access my savings. (The savings account would interact only with one other account. As long as I did not change that, or change my e-mail address, the risk to the money was quite low. Still they treated it like an account for paying for online purchases.)
The loss of kitchen and household goods stores does not affect me badly yet, as there is a household goods market in town twice a year. I have an average size so I can still shop for clothes in town. I know bookstores that will order books from abroad for prices still better than in the 1990s.
So, no, things were not better before the internet. The internet is just having very bad case of enshittification and this has gone on for years.
(no subject)
Date: 2023-12-12 10:32 am (UTC)