Dan Q

Day: 6 August 2025

The rise of Whatever

This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

A freaking excellent longread by Eevee (Evelyn Woods), lamenting the direction of popular technological progress and general enshittification of creator culture. It’s ultimately uplifting, I feel, but it’s full of bitterness until it gets there. I’ve pulled out a couple of highlights to try to get you interested, but you should just go and read the entire thing:

…

And so the entire Web sort of congealed around a tiny handful of gigantic platforms that everyone on the fucking planet is on at once. Sometimes there is some sort of partitioning, like Reddit. Sometimes there is not, like Twitter.

That’s… fine, I guess. Things centralize. It happens. You don’t get tubgirl spam raids so much any more, at least.

But the centralization poses a problem. See, the Web is free to look at (by default), but costs money to host. There are free hosts, yes, but those are for static things getting like a thousand visitors a day, not interactive platforms serving a hundred million. That starts to cost a bit. Picture logs being shoveled into a steam engine’s firebox, except it’s bundles of cash being shoveled into… the… uh… website hole.

…

I don’t want to help someone who opens with “I don’t know how to do this so I asked ChatGPT and it gave me these 200 lines but it doesn’t work”. I don’t want to know how much code wasn’t actually written by anyone. I don’t want to hear how many of my colleagues think Whatever is equivalent to their own output.

…

I glimpsed someone on Twitter a few days ago, also scoffing at the idea that anyone would decide not to use the Whatever machine. I can’t remember exactly what they said, but it was something like: “I created a whole album, complete with album art, in 3.5 hours. Why wouldn’t I use the make it easier machine?”

This is kind of darkly fascinating to me, because it gives rise to such an obvious question: if anyone can do that, then why listen to your music? It takes a significant chunk of 3.5 hours just to listen to an album, so how much manual work was even done here? Apparently I can just go generate an endless stream of stuff of the same quality! Why would I want your particular brand of Whatever?

Nobody seems to appreciate that if you can make a computer do something entirely on its own, then that becomes the baseline.

…

Do things. Make things. And then put them on your website so I can see them.

Clearly this all ties in to stuff that I’ve been thinking, lately. Expect more posts and reposts in this vein, I guess?

Repost posted at UTC on .

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Internet Services^H Provider

Do you remember when your domestic ISP – Internet Service Provider – used to be an Internet Services Provider? They were only sometimes actually called that, but what I mean is: when ISPs provided more than one Internet service? Not just connectivity, but… more.

Web page listing 'Standard Services' for dial-up and leased line connections, including: user homepages, FTP, email, usenet, IRC, email-to-fax, and fax-to-email services.
One of the first ISPs I subscribed to had a “standard services” list longer than most modern ISPs complete services list!

ISPs twenty years ago

It used to just be expected that your ISP would provide you with not only an Internet connection, but also some or all of:

  • A handful of email inboxes, plus SMTP relaying
  • Shared or private FTP storage1
  • Hosting for small Websites/homepages
  • Usenet access
  • Email-to-fax and/or fax-to-email services
  • Caching forward proxies (this was so-commonplace that it isn’t even listed in the “standard services” screenshot above)
  • One or more local nodes to IRC networks
  • Sometimes, licenses for useful Internet software
  • For leased-line (technically “broadband”, by the original definition) connections: a static IP address or IP pool
Stylish (for circa 2000) webpage for HoTMetaL Pro 6.0, advertising its 'unrivaled [sic] editing, site management and publishing tools'.
I don’t remember which of my early ISPs gave me a free license for HoTMetaL Pro, but I was very appreciative of it at the time.

ISPs today

The ISP I hinted at above doesn’t exist any more, after being bought out and bought out and bought out by a series of owners. But I checked the Website of the current owner to see what their “standard services” are, and discovered that they are:

  • A pretty-shit router2
  • Optional 4G backup connectivity (for an extra fee)
  • A voucher for 3 months access to a streaming service3

The connection is faster, which is something, but we’re still talking about the “baseline” for home Internet access then-versus-now. Which feels a bit galling, considering that (a) you’re clearly, objectively, getting fewer services, and (b) you’re paying more for them – a cheap basic home Internet subscription today, after accounting for inflation, seems to cost about 25% more than it did in 2000.4

Are we getting a bum deal?

An xternal 33.6kbps serial port dial-up modem.
Not every BBS nor ISP would ever come to support the blazing speeds of a 33.6kbps modem… but when you heard the distinctive scream of its negotiation at close to the Shannon Limit of the piece of copper dangling outside your house… it felt like you were living in the future.

Would you even want those services?

Some of them were great conveniences at the time, but perhaps not-so-much now: a caching server, FTP site, or IRC node in the building right at the end of my dial-up connection? That’s a speed boost that was welcome over a slow connection to an unencrypted service, but is redundant and ineffectual today. And if you’re still using a fax-to-email service for any purpose, then I think you have bigger problems than your ISP’s feature list!

Some of them were things I wouldn’t have recommend that you depend on, even then: tying your email and Web hosting to your connectivity provider traded one set of problems for another. A particular joy of an email address, as opposed to a postal address (or, back in the day, a phone number), is that it isn’t tied to where you live. You can move to a different town or even to a different country and still have the same email address, and that’s a great thing! But it’s not something you can guarantee if your email address is tied to the company you dial-up to from the family computer at home. A similar issue applies to Web hosting, although for a true traditional “personal home page”: a little information about yourself, and your bookmarks, it would be fine.

But some of them were things that were actually useful and I miss: honestly, it’s a pain to have to use a third-party service for newsgroup access, which used to be so-commonplace that you’d turn your nose up at an ISP that didn’t offer it as standard. A static IP being non-standard on fixed connections is a sad reminder that the ‘net continues to become less-participatory, more-centralised, and just generally more watered-down and shit: instead of your connection making you “part of” the Internet, nowadays it lets you “connect to” the Internet, which is a very different experience.5

But the Web hosting, for example, wasn’t useless. In fact, it served an important purpose in lowering the barrier to entry for people to publish their first homepage! The magical experience of being able to just FTP some files into a directory and have them be on the Web, as just a standard part of the “package” you bought-into, was a gateway to a participatory Web that’s nowadays sadly lacking.

'Setting Up your Web Site, Step by Step Instructions' page, describing use of an FTP client to upload web pages.
A page like this used to be absolutely standard on the Website6 of any ISP worth its salt.

Yeah, sure, you can set up a static site (unencumbered by any opinionated stack) for free on Github Pages, Neocities, or wherever, but the barrier to entry has been raised by just enough that, doubtless, there are literally millions of people who would have taken that first step… but didn’t.

And that makes me sad.

Footnotes

1 ISP-provided shared FTP servers would also frequently provide locally-available copies of Internet software essentials for a variety of platforms. This wasn’t just a time-saver – downloading Netscape Navigator from your ISP rather than from half-way across the world was much faster! – it was also a way to discover new software, curated by people like you: a smidgen of the feel of a well-managed BBS, from the comfort of your local ISP!

2 ISP-provided routers are, in my experience, pretty crap 50% of the time… although they’ve been improving over the last decade as consumers have started demanding that their WiFi works well, rather than just works.

3 These streaming services vouchers are probably just a loss-leader for the streaming service, who know that you’ll likely renew at full price afterwards.

4 Okay, in 2000 you’d have also have had to pay per-minute for the price of the dial-up call… but that money went to BT (or perhaps Mercury or KCOM), not to your ISP. But my point still stands: in a world where technology has in general gotten cheaper and backhaul capacity has become underutilised, why has the basic domestic Internet connection gotten less feature-rich and more-expensive? And often with worse customer service, to boot.

5 The problem of your connection not making you “part of” the Internet is multiplied if you suffer behind carrier-grade NAT, of course. But it feels like if we actually cared enough to commit to rolling out IPv6 everywhere we could obviate the need for that particular turd entirely. And yet… I’ll bet that the ISPs who currently use it will continue to do so, even as the offer IPv6 addresses as-standard, because they buy into their own idea that it’s what their customers want.

6 I think we can all be glad that we no longer write “Web Site” as two separate words, but you’ll note that I still usually correctly capitalise Web (it’s a proper noun: it’s the Web, innit!).

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