Ask Lemmy

Google. It used to just work, and really well

The United States government.

The internet. We've had a solid few years, but it has become a giant heap of shit for the most part.

Back then, not everything was an AI generated, SEO, ad riddled, interaction fishing, time wasting, data collecting nightmare with auto-playing videos and a dark pattern employing cookie banner.

Google Search. Or search in general. Now it's all shit and you have to convince it that you actually want to search what you want and not what it thinks you want. Which is sometimes hard and other times impossible. I miss Google Search, it seriously was the best.

Netflix back in the day. A near-limitless catalog of ad-free movies and TV for $8/month. If you tried selling that today, people would think it was a scam

OkCupid used to be the best for finding matching people: they crowdsourced thousands of relevant multiple choice questions from which you built your search filter: which answers you accept, how important each is to you, and a voluntary explanation. The questions and match results were factored into friendship, dating, and sex.

Then Match Group bought it. First they let it be, but then they:

• removed the factoring - no more looking for friends or sex, only complete packages
• removed search - no more finding the best matches anywhere on the planet, now you just swipe like Tinder
• removed keyword search - no more finding rare interests not included in the questions, like "furry"
• removed the search filter - now everything has to be the same to match: both of you must have or not have tattoos for example, never mind what you like - one of my likes went from 95% to 50% match
• deleted the voluntary explanations without warning, so no one could back theirs up
• deleted ~95% of the match questions without warning
• deleted all accumulated likes, which were my best matching people around the world with the maximum couple/friend/sex partner potential except location for now. I had the links saved, but they broke all of them.
• they delete matches (mutual likes) if they haven't been messaging in a while, as if that meant they're not a match - no, we're just distant for now
• they police inconvenient statements in the users' introductions as the political situation evolves - the day after the mass murderer CEO got shot, the section in my profile containing "fuck the healthcare system - make a better one" was deleted without sending me a copy to edit

Avoid the whole Match Group.

Now that I think of it, the destruction of OkCupid looks like a politically motivated attack against the minorities and intellectual power users who used to flock there.

Tourism, in general, but all the world's romantic, marvellous and 'unique' spots: Venice, Rome, Athens, Paris, London, NYC, San Fran....

Crowds, rules, fees, more fees, lineups, crowd control, advanced ticket sales(with specific time slots) for natural wonders.

There's a Grotto at a National Park on the Bruce Peninsula in Ontario, Canada that requires you to book at least a day in advance - to park and hike.

Brutal.

Chipotle has fallen HARD.

Disney World and their fast passes.

SubWay. That $5 foot long was a good deal, even if it was not that great.

DC Shoes - They used to be SICK shoes and now they are basically WalMart shoes.

Microsoft Windows. Oh boy has it gotten bad.

Granted it’s a bit niche, but: skiing + snowboarding.

I learned to ski as a kid back in the 90s, and have always loved it. Used to be you could get a lift ticket at alpine meadows (where I learned to ski) up in Tahoe for like 40 bucks. Palisades Tahoe (the merged resorts formerly known as Alpine Meadows and ~~Squaw Valley~~ Palisades) now costs between 2-300 a day (surge pricing, ofc) if you buy a ticket day-of - not including rentals/demos/parking/food/etc that a snow enjoyer might also opt for.

Yeah, fine, it’s a kinda bougie sport, but it’s kinda awful that all these PE firms who are gobbling up all the mountains in the country are not even pretending to keep the prices even remotely reasonable. I don’t need a “curated resort experience”. I just want to slay some gnar pow.

I think as phones have sort of plateaued we take for granted the joy in more mechanical devices like a calculator, ipod, radio, calendar, etc.

Democracy

Private messaging. We used to all use an open protocol to message each other (email) and now everyone is fractured into proprietary closed centralized messengers.

A lot of fast food places have undergone this due to private equity acquisitions.

Whataburger and Dunkin Donuts used to be much better around me.

Re: Dollar Tree. Even in the pre $1.25 days or $1.50 or whatever they are now, it was well known that they made ends meet by deliberately padding certain items and in the process, preying on the poor people who shopped there who would be unable or unwilling to go to two different stores to complete their shopping trip.

This was primarily on packaged food products which are easy to comparison shop for if you have the means. Canned goods from them were the worst. They'd charge $1 for lots of things you could get at the grocery store at the time for 59 cents or 79 cents or whatever. And if that wasn't the play, if you checked the quantities on stuff you'd find that the $1 version they sold was inevitably a smaller can, bottle, or jar versus the $1.79 version from the grocery store. So even if one container appeared less expensive, it was actually a worse deal per ounce.

I think they also propped up their business an awful lot with disposable party supplies: Balloons, plates, cups, paper hats, napkins, and all that kind of stuff. I imagine that definitely was not a winner for them during Covid.

Dating. Everyone's idea of it now is so to-the-point.