Why do all websites get redesigned to become inflated messes of code. Deviantart feels awful to use nowadays. reddit feels awful to use too. whats the grand idea behind all this?!!

Some sites opt to remove features or put features behind a subscription. Deviantart, twitter and youtube are some ofthem.
Furarchiver used to be completely free, but recently there's this stupid limit on the amount of art or artists. To bypass this you need to be a patron on patreon. Ive stopped using it entirely for casually downloading art, I rely on a script instead. Thhis is still a useful site when someone deletes their fa because it archives everything, this is the only reason I use it at all.

Every site with any sort of age requirement or filter could be used without an account a decade ago, not anymore...
Youtube, deviantart and twitter always haD nsfw content, but you were freely allowed to see it by clicking on a button or by changing some guest settings. Now you need an account for all 3, on top of that youtube wants to see your id card to know you aren't just putting in a fake birth date.
If this isto protect minors it's not working, parents should be the ones monitoring their children. Just thinking of predators on Discord give me the shudders.

I want to go back to simpler times. I am done with this modernization of the internet

wolfmanfur said:
Why do all websites get redesigned to become inflated messes of code. Deviantart feels awful to use nowadays. reddit feels awful to use too. whats the grand idea behind all this?!!

Some sites opt to remove features or put features behind a subscription. Deviantart, twitter and youtube are some ofthem.
Furarchiver used to be completely free, but recently there's this stupid limit on the amount of art or artists. To bypass this you need to be a patron on patreon. Ive stopped using it entirely for casually downloading art, I rely on a script instead. Thhis is still a useful site when someone deletes their fa because it archives everything, this is the only reason I use it at all.

Every site with any sort of age requirement or filter could be used without an account a decade ago, not anymore...
Youtube, deviantart and twitter always haD nsfw content, but you were freely allowed to see it by clicking on a button or by changing some guest settings. Now you need an account for all 3, on top of that youtube wants to see your id card to know you aren't just putting in a fake birth date.
If this isto protect minors it's not working, parents should be the ones monitoring their children. Just thinking of predators on Discord give me the shudders.

I want to go back to simpler times. I am done with this modernization of the internet

It's not done with you. Everything about the internet will get worse and you will hate it even more.

Reddit, at least, has a setting that lets you use the old-school version of it (2018) rather than the modern version. I use the old version because everything with it is just better. Better layout, you can see a thread's upvote percentage, subreddit banners actually display properly...

EDIT:

youtube wants to see your id card to know you aren't just putting in a fake birth date

For everyone? Or just some people? Since when?

crocogator said:
Reddit, at least, has a setting that lets you use the old-school version of it (2018) rather than the modern version. I use the old version because everything with it is just better. Better layout, you can see a thread's upvote percentage, subreddit banners actually display properly...

EDIT:
For everyone? Or just some people? Since when?

I thought this affected everyone, but no only europeans.
https://www.neowin.net/news/youtube-will-launch-a-new-age-verification-requirement-for-some-european-users/

wolfmanfur said:
I thought this affected everyone, but no only europeans.
https://www.neowin.net/news/youtube-will-launch-a-new-age-verification-requirement-for-some-european-users/

Wow, that's pretty dumb, since YouTube doesn't allow for porn in the first place (nudity is only allowed for educational purposes).

For content owners who feel their videos were erroneously restricted, YouTube will let them appeal the decision.

Yeah, right, lol. That's a really good joke... "Appealing" on YouTube generally means instantly getting an automated message lying that the appeal was reviewed by a "human"™ and the "human"™ determined the restriction is still valid....

crocogator said:
Wow, that's pretty dumb, since YouTube doesn't allow for porn in the first place (nudity is only allowed for educational purposes).

Youtube's on a big crackdown on even moderately mature content right now.

Everything gets worse overtime. Life itself does.

Another thing is every other goddamned Internet service demanding phone based verification nowadays.

Trying to keep your kinky shit pseudonymous to avoid the possibility of your digital footprint being used for regular old blackmail or persecution in a not so farfetched authoritarian techno-fascist dystopian future?
Fuck you, give us a radioactive link to your identity.

The thing with dragnet surveillance is that data being collected today can be used in the witch hunts of tomorrow.

A) They have to justify expenses and pay for stuff, so a little commercialization is expected. Like, I indirectly pay Pixiv by buying digital products on Booth. They can overdo it though and have the nailing jelly to a tree situation - overtightening leads to stripped screws, etc. analogies.
B) Using a site to do archives instead of using scripts/extension doesn't make sense, anyways. The fact that it lead to a walled garden situation is not shocking, either. :/
C) The user interface changes are based on some stupid metrics or office politics/developer trends. We got wide screens? OH OK, MAKING PAGE ONLY USE THE CENTER 50% OF THE SCREEN AND NOT LETTING YOU RESIZE TO FIT ANOTHER PROGRAM NEXT TO IT. <-- This is hilaribad but better than pages with 500 banners or slideshows.
D) You can actually replace some UI elements on browsers because a lot of it is just CSS. Some really obnoxious sites won't even display until 3rd-party JS(and potentially spyware) enabled, though.
Instead of old.reddit, try i.reddit. <-- This is raw hypertext that it requests to build the DOM.

magnuseffect said:
Youtube's on a big crackdown on even moderately mature content right now.

They're also going after a lot of other stuff. Science and education videos, even. Military subjects (not gore), etc.
Wikipedia seems to be going through a big dumbing-down movement, as well. Carefully looking at edit histories of some articles is depressing... Quality and reliability aren't the priority, apparently. Hilariously, seen huge amounts of stuff like "a vacuum" -> "vacuum" edits which... are pointless. Removing citations and references is also en vogue. Soon to be followed by different editors removing content because no supporting references. Repeat the cycle when another person re-adds the references and subject matter in 10 years. :D

Regarding phone numbers:
You can get a phone number from US Mobile and others for around $5/month. I use the $8.25/month option to have a second phone number. You also can just change it or not keep it, technically. This is a T-mobile or Verizon network connection so it appears as a normal SMS number to those 'checker' services that ban the online SMS sites. It's still connected to your credit card number or the like, but at least it's easy enough to use a different one. The sites asking you to verify with old canceled numbers are dicks, though.

Ugh, mentioning. US Mobile's web site (which you need scripting working to order from, anyways, duh, hehe) loads and then goes blank on a browser before I enable whitelist on uMatrix. Don't be shocked if it's a couple of dollars more in taxes, BTW. My $5 plan came out to $8.25 if I remember right.

Q: Why are all the services I use becoming worse?

A: Capitalism.

supina said:
Q: Why are all the services I use becoming worse?

A: Capitalism.

Youre right, somewhat, but I think government restrictions like COPPA are more to blame. Capitalism has only contributed to make some sites shittier, but most of them would have been headed that way anyway, with or without capitalism

wolfmanfur said:
Youre right, somewhat, but I think government restrictions like COPPA are more to blame.

Government restrictions aren't the cause of sites removing features or requiring subscriptions. It's a regular thing sites do, changing things for the sake of changing them in an attempt to feel new and updated, to entice more users to try the site, and subscriptions are a common thing for sites that make it easier to track what you're doing to get info on you, info that can be sold to affiliates (it also helps create a psychological hook, since once you have an account, you may as well go back there instead of looking for an alternative). Of course, there are sometimes reasons for a site to change or need accounts for users, but there are plenty of sites that don't need to and do it anyway to get more monetizable users.

supina said:
Q: Why are all the services I use becoming worse?

A: Capitalism.

OR B: We're just old and everything changed. Change itself is often annoying enough. :P

alphamule said:
OR B: We're just old and everything changed. Change itself is often annoying enough. :P

I know change can be annoying, but they want to know what you are doing, where you are doing it, when you are doing it and with whom you are doing it. Bloatware and ads can be annoying, but that's not the biggest problem. When they want to know every single detail about you, that's the big problem.

As zenkyuuto said, someone may use that data to blackmail you. Would not you mind if your mother, old fashioned friend, school/workmates or voters knew every single fetish and kink you have? Even the most repulsive and nauseating stuff?

I know it may be illegal to disclose such data, but something being illegal does not stop people from doing it. Some people just do what they said they would do if you do not comply, no matter the consequences.

Also, there is the issue of authoritarian countries, like those where lolis are illegal. You may get killed if they find out you where the one saying mean things about the government or are a journalist reporting on things the government does not want people to know. You are still at risk even in a democratic country, it's just that instead of the government, you may get killed by some powerful criminal if they find out you were the one who said mean things about them or are reporting on something they don't want people to know.

supina said:
Q: Why are all the services I use becoming worse?

A: Capitalism.

It's easy to blame a single thing, but i don't think that's the only reason. In a free market, you should be able to choose another sevice that is not as crappy as the others. Of course, that's assuming it's an actually free market and not one controlled by a few companies. The problem becomes worse when the government requires web sites to collect data and keep it for at least a certain amount of time. That makes the entire market equally bad in that regard. With those laws, you would be committing a crime if you were running a web site without collecting data.

A darker thing is telemetry being used to make sure that a site gets worse.

This is starting to feel like a tinfoil discussion, but I get the info-scare. I'm just frankly too lazy and mired in the system to switch over to a more protective way to browse stuff on the internet.

Platforms getting worse is unfortunately getting way too common, and they can get away with it too since there are little to no good/popular alternatives. Nothing good comes from a monopoly, but unfortunately most big companies have them.

arthurfloof said:
This is starting to feel like a tinfoil discussion, but I get the info-scare. I'm just frankly too lazy and mired in the system to switch over to a more protective way to browse stuff on the internet.

Platforms getting worse is unfortunately getting way too common, and they can get away with it too since there are little to no good/popular alternatives. Nothing good comes from a monopoly, but unfortunately most big companies have them.

Well, if it uses a standard protocol, then you can use a non-shit client. But of COURSE that's the entire point of requiring the browser running their site to view it. You can use tools to modify the browser, or programs like Nitter instances to create not-horrible Twitter interfaces for browsers without extensions, but it's kind of like that race years ago on Instant Messenger clients. It eventually got to point where Yahoo IM, AOL IM, MSN's IM, ICQ, and all the others could be made to interact. Then cell phones happened and killed it. :D

It's not really paranoia if they really are out to get you(r money)? It's sad that for the more technical users, expecting the worse, and being surprised by the good, is not even 'tinfoil', anymore.

Example: MMORPGS - if someone actually finds a way to make grinding not so horrible on a quest... the systems now will automatically make it harder again. It works like a profiler does for software resource usage. Gacha games are not-so-shockingly evolved versions of the old quarter-muncher arcade machines that probably are before most users' times. :P

alphamule said:
Well, if it uses a standard protocol, then you can use a non-shit client. But of COURSE that's the entire point of requiring the browser running their site to view it. You can use tools to modify the browser, or programs like Nitter instances to create not-horrible Twitter interfaces for browsers without extensions, but it's kind of like that race years ago on Instant Messenger clients. It eventually got to point where Yahoo IM, AOL IM, MSN's IM, ICQ, and all the others could be made to interact. Then cell phones happened and killed it. :D

It's not really paranoia if they really are out to get you(r money)? It's sad that for the more technical users, expecting the worse, and being surprised by the good, is not even 'tinfoil', anymore.

Example: MMORPGS - if someone actually finds a way to make grinding not so horrible on a quest... the systems now will automatically make it harder again.

I guess I'm just not technical enough to give too much of a toss. At this point, I'm not too bothered by it, but understand why people who can see the writing on the wall are potentially panicking about it.

arthurfloof said:
I guess I'm just not technical enough to give too much of a toss. At this point, I'm not too bothered by it, but understand why people who can see the writing on the wall are potentially panicking about it.

Panic implies hope j/k

Seriously though, it's not so much panic, as... like this song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KCSA7kKNu2Y Weird Al: Stop Forwarding that Crap to Me
Foil is funnier

I mean this has kinda been answered here, but my take is that things have gotten worse, because people assume everything to be free and do not want to pay for anything.
So what that means you get new free (or extremely cheap) service, it's better than competitors and gets huge audience, but in background they are working at loss so they can generate that huge audience, so that they can slowly start to monetize the thing with the amount of users they have.

Also because these websites need to rely on advertisers and/or payment processors, they also need to play by their books, which means that platform needs to avoid specific things which could've been that made the platform to begin with. This is why Patreon has been in such scrutiny as they rely so heavily on Paypal and Paypal has extremely strict rules on what they allow money to be send on and as such are in hard place where they try to still keep Paypal as without it they would lose most likely massive amount of business. With Youtube they have needed to enforce so much more heavy guidelines even on silly matters like cursing, because advertisers don't like being shown next to complete trainwreck.

Another one is copyrights. Because creators get exclusive rights to things they produce that could be produced infinitely, now they can limit them to allow them to be more valuable than they actually are. Because of this, they now can do shitty service to put that stuff into and everyone has to use it, because that's the only place it's available and they have no choise, there's no competition.

wolfmanfur said:
I thought this affected everyone, but no only europeans.
https://www.neowin.net/news/youtube-will-launch-a-new-age-verification-requirement-for-some-european-users/

magnuseffect said:
Youtube's on a big crackdown on even moderately mature content right now.

This one is also twofold: goverment and advertisers.
If I sell you PEGI 18 game, adult only magazine, tobacco, lottery, scratch tickets, gambling, alcohol, etc. I'm legally required to verify customers age if they appear to be under 30 and additionally if there's likelyhood that the customer isn't buying it for themselves but rather to someone else whose age I cannot verify, deny the sale. Othervice the place that sold it is in many sorts of trouble. This is why I have been kinda annoyed with PEG 18 games, because somehow this has been just acceptable to give to minors, when extremely graphic 18+ movies and pornography has not. It's rated PEGI 18 for a goddamn reason :V

So the fact that online, it has been "yeah I'm 18" kinda deal, has been kinda ridiculous from that standpoint. Because in real life you already need to show IDs and such, but on internet you can just click checkbox.
At the very least credit card is considered acceptable proof (well, debit card as basically all cards here are debit, but they are listed as credit card payments everywhere online), as banks in european union area also have requirement to know their customers, so they have also verified your age in secure meaningful manner and EU has also put in place GDPR and PSD2, which should theoretically nullify missuse of these informations if company and customer are both within EU (they can't store full data and they can't use your card information at all outside that 1€ verification payment which is always given back to your account within days).

With youtube it's also that advertisers don't feel comfortable being shown on videos where feral horses are fucking each other or penis pump reviews.
This is why I have been personally paying for youtube premium as the main issues with youtube has been demonetization thanks to not being advertiser friendly, but if I just pay for my views, it doesn't matter for me or the creator in any way. Additionally get music streaming that's compareable to Spotify, even if not as good as GPM.

TL:DR: if people actually paid for stuff they consumed there would be no problems, if there was more payment processers and advertisers that weren't afraid of porn we could have more services with more open content, if license holders needed to sell their goods to all available parties like milk to grocery stores, there would also be more fair competition in that front.
But alas, current capitalism.

Not to negate your comment, mairo, but I completely disagree with this:

mairo said:
This is why I have been kinda annoyed with PEG 18 games, because somehow this has been just acceptable to give to minors, when extremely graphic 18+ movies and pornography has not. It's rated PEGI 18 for a goddamn reason :V

PEGI is a joke, and so is ESRB. I remember allegedly hearing Saw, yes that movie where the characters are put in gruesome situations for the entertainment of a psychopath, had a lower rating than say the Witcher 3.
https://yewtu.be/watch?v=v22Q4kAP9T4
https://yewtu.be/watch?v=dIjpldfAGU0

I don't take PEGI nor ESRB seriously and the fact that other people don't take them seriously makes me happpy to oppose this derelict system.

wolfmanfur said:
Not to negate your comment, mairo, but I completely disagree with this:

PEGI is a joke, and so is ESRB. I remember allegedly hearing Saw, yes that movie where the characters are put in gruesome situations for the entertainment of a psychopath, had a lower rating than say the Witcher 3.
https://yewtu.be/watch?v=v22Q4kAP9T4
https://yewtu.be/watch?v=dIjpldfAGU0

I don't take PEGI nor ESRB seriously and the fact that other people don't take them seriously makes me happpy to oppose this derelict system.

Firstly, hate those links, keep 3rd party alternate frontend websites to yourself. I already hate every single time I see nitter as source, it's not a source, it's third party website and if you want to use that then you can manually change links or use scripts or plugins to forward yourself in those yourself.

When talking about stuff like alcohol, it's quantifiable, so it's easier to say "this amount is legal for everyone, this amount is legal in grocery stores, this amount is legal in liqour store", simple.

With artistical and informal medium, it's harder, even e621 alone there's constantly debates what post should be rated for even when guidelines are relatively objective. Then you get into area of stuff like nudity, even if there's full frontal nudity, it's not necessary pornographic or even adult orientated or with violence there's everything from looney tunes slapping to full on gibbing. That's why you can get erect dicks on youtube and spread vaginas on deviantart, even though neither allow adult orientated entertainment or pornography.
Same with e621 post approvals, it's so common to have people coming up when something is deleted and go like "well but what about post X then?" and it's so annoying, because if every single time something is curated and I would need to double check literal millions of other posts for it to be absolutely true and fair, there would be nothing done.

But at the same time, games and movies aren't necessity and if you are an adult, they literally do not effect you in any way.
I could get argumentation that parents ignore these labels because of PEGI 18 game being so extremely mild, but there also does need to be some level of labeling to differenciate experiences clearly for adults from those that could be enjoyed by everyone.
This is basically the same problem as with everything complex that is tried to put into a single number, with games the same goes for review scores, because they are essentially nonsense, but nobody has hour to spend on researching every single individual game to degree where they know if they can have their kid play it or not.

Only real reason for this kind of stuff to be outrageous basically boils down to "I got to play DOOM/GTA when I was 12" and I don't really agree with that notion personally either. Content made for adults, should be for adult consumption only and those who aren't adults can simply wait and if I'm adult I should have possibility to consume adult material if I so please.
I mean at the same time I know parents who have given their kids alcohol and tobacco because "they're gonna do them anyways" and I don't have kids, so what am I to talk about parenting I guess.

mairo said:
Firstly, hate those links, keep 3rd party alternate frontend websites to yourself. I already hate every single time I see nitter as source, it's not a source, it's third party website and if you want to use that then you can manually change links or use scripts or plugins to forward yourself in those yourself.

Just going to pop in real quick on the Nitter front; in that particular case Twitter third parties get used because twitter itself constantly breaks things when it comes to actually linking to things on their site.

Cursory research suggests Yewtube is just a viewer to cut down on the excessive junk code Google runs on the site itself, chill, it ain't gonna give your computer herpes, and it seems like a really silly thing to get worked up over. You're going to see more and more of these as sites become less and less optimised.

mairo said:
Firstly, hate those links, keep 3rd party alternate frontend websites to yourself. I already hate every single time I see nitter as source, it's not a source, it's third party website and if you want to use that then you can manually change links or use scripts or plugins to forward yourself in those yourself.

votp said:
Just going to pop in real quick on the Nitter front; in that particular case Twitter third parties get used because twitter itself constantly breaks things when it comes to actually linking to things on their site.

Cursory research suggests Yewtube is just a viewer to cut down on the excessive junk code Google runs on the site itself, chill, it ain't gonna give your computer herpes, and it seems like a really silly thing to get worked up over. You're going to see more and more of these as sites become less and less optimised.

There are some that consider the Twitter link to be the inferior one. :P Yeah, for source links, no. For casual links like above post, it's a GD public service. Nitter loads about 100x faster or something ludicrous like that.

A lot of the time, the answer is "because they know they'll get away with it".

This is especially the case with YouTube. They have a monopoly on an entire medium. They know that they're so central to the Internet that, if they went down, it would be a preservation crisis to rival the Library of Alexandria.

So many people have tried to create alternatives, and every single one has failed miserably.

So they keep tightening that thumbscrew because... what are ya gonna do, just never watch any video on the internet ever again?

lendrimujina said:
A lot of the time, the answer is "because they know they'll get away with it".

This is especially the case with YouTube. They have a monopoly on an entire medium. They know that they're so central to the Internet that, if they went down, it would be a preservation crisis to rival the Library of Alexandria.

So many people have tried to create alternatives, and every single one has failed miserably.

So they keep tightening that thumbscrew because... what are ya gonna do, just never watch any video on the internet ever again?

What about Odysee?

electricitywolf said:
What about Odysee?

They likely meant there wre no other platform as popular as YouTube. Odysee is only one of them, there is Bitchute and Storyfire going strong.

Though, I like the logic, it would tantamount to say that Linux failed as an operating system Firefox failed as a web browser and every search engine that isn't Gogle failed as a search engine.

electricitywolf said:
What about Odysee?

That NFT-based video site? No thanks; that's like trying to escape from a dictator by signing a pact with the devil.

lendrimujina said:
That NFT-based video site? No thanks; as much as I want to escape from a tyrant, signing a pact with the devil isn't a way to do it.

New youtube CEO is a crypto and NFT enthusiast, btw.

m3g4p0n1 said:
New youtube CEO is a crypto and NFT enthusiast, btw.

I've heard about that, and I'm holding out some atom of hope that whoever took over that guy's old position — where the real power is — will keep things away from that cliff.

Regardless, supporting Odysee is embracing that future from the start. If it succeeds, it will only convince the new YT CEO that it's the right way to go.

Bitchute and Storyfire I don't know enough about to comment on; I just hope they don't suffer the same fate as vid.me (which was the most promising candidate for being a YouTube-killer, but couldn't weather the giant hosting costs that video files demand).

lendrimujina said:
That NFT-based video site? No thanks; that's like trying to escape from a dictator by signing a pact with the devil.

It is not only videos. Also, it has a dislike button and they allow content that would be immediately removed from YouTube.

I am not defending those who claim they own an image and tell people to not use it; i don't like that use of NFTs.

It's kind of funny... When Internet was young, and connections weren't so horribly asymmetrical, it made perfect sense to distribute the effort peer-to-peer. But as speeds got way faster for downloading, and convenient (and legal!) services became manageable, we got sites like YT because who has time for torrents? :P Also, peering with largely ass-symetric connections is horribly broken. You're bound to get some situation like Netflix and Verizon.

regei said:
The internet is getting milked for all it's worth. The Tom Scott joke ads in the sky unfortunately may become a terrifying reality. The moment companies and the government get hands on something it usually goes like this.

kora_viridian said:
Always has been dot png.

lendrimujina said:
A lot of the time, the answer is "because they know they'll get away with it".

This is especially the case with YouTube. They have a monopoly on an entire medium. They know that they're so central to the Internet that, if they went down, it would be a preservation crisis to rival the Library of Alexandria.

So many people have tried to create alternatives, and every single one has failed miserably.

So they keep tightening that thumbscrew because... what are ya gonna do, just never watch any video on the internet ever again?

electricitywolf said:
I know change can be annoying, but they want to know what you are doing, where you are doing it, when you are doing it and with whom you are doing it. Bloatware and ads can be annoying, but that's not the biggest problem. When they want to know every single detail about you, that's the big problem.

As zenkyuuto said, someone may use that data to blackmail you. Would not you mind if your mother, old fashioned friend, school/workmates or voters knew every single fetish and kink you have? Even the most repulsive and nauseating stuff?

I know it may be illegal to disclose such data, but something being illegal does not stop people from doing it. Some people just do what they said they would do if you do not comply, no matter the consequences.

Also, there is the issue of authoritarian countries, like those where lolis are illegal. You may get killed if they find out you where the one saying mean things about the government or are a journalist reporting on things the government does not want people to know. You are still at risk even in a democratic country, it's just that instead of the government, you may get killed by some powerful criminal if they find out you were the one who said mean things about them or are reporting on something they don't want people to know.

It's easy to blame a single thing, but i don't think that's the only reason. In a free market, you should be able to choose another sevice that is not as crappy as the others. Of course, that's assuming it's an actually free market and not one controlled by a few companies. The problem becomes worse when the government requires web sites to collect data and keep it for at least a certain amount of time. That makes the entire market equally bad in that regard. With those laws, you would be committing a crime if you were running a web site without collecting data.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLLxpAZzy0s

letforeverdieslow said:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLLxpAZzy0s

https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/36983/tower-of-somnus This sort of story... Or the classic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadowrun

It's funny to compare a race downhill to one where everyone's already buried under it.

alphamule said:
https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/36983/tower-of-somnus This sort of story... Or the classic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadowrun

It's funny to compare a race downhill to one where everyone's already buried under it.

But in a sense, is it not a little affirmative and uplifting to finally see what was happening all along?

We never Had to end up here, just the same as we don't Have to arrive there.

We were never Damned to these results, which have gone against everything we predicted during the cold war.

It's sad, but it's also not a pre-determined end to all meaning and worthwhile living.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MIHC4NNScEI

letforeverdieslow said:
But in a sense, is it not a little affirmative and uplifting to finally see what was happening all along?

We never Had to end up here, just the same as we don't Have to arrive there.

We were never Damned to these results, which have gone against everything we predicted during the cold war.

It's sad, but it's also not a pre-determined end to all meaning and worthwhile living.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MIHC4NNScEI

Well, there's also the classic Robocop that... probably aged poorly, and then there's grimdark Batman/Punisher/2000 A.D.-style stories where violence is just part of the style. That last one was basically all about the cold war. The first was all about when industrial complexes go mad.

I tried watching that video but about 9 minutes in... Ugh.