Redditor Accomplished-Town636 wanted to talk about all the ways the web has changed the world, not for the better.
"What was ruined by the internet?"
I miss not being addicted to the internet. That's my issue.
Messages
season 9 episode 24 GIF by SpongeBob SquarePantsGiphy"I used to have a pen pal. Then we both got the internet and the novelty was gone."
i_like_flies_
"I’ve recently started writing letters on aged paper and using a wax seal kit. It honestly makes the process a ton of fun and I’m loving it more than texting or email."
JacksonianEra
Endless Streams
"My attention span."
landonh12
"This. I don't feel like I can just wonder about things anymore, I have to look it up. Never thought endless streams of information would be my downfall, but here we are."
starladear82
"Reading books helps me getting my attention span back to normal. Maybe you can give it a try. In the beginning it’s a nightmare, though, after 30 min I feel tired and ready to go to sleep. But it gets better quickly."
darth_vladius
Amplification
"I think the internet just amplified everything humans do, both good and bad. Like music? Here's a few million aspiring artists, some of which have a few dozen followers at most, have fun! Like art? Here's thousands of drawing every day. Like murdering people and lighting buildings on fire? Here's hundreds of tips on how to do it!"
RelinquishedGhosts
Not for public consumption...
"Privacy."
Supplyguy404
"Up until, I want to say, maybe 3 years ago, companies were the main threat when it came to privacy. They still are bad, but there's a new trend of individuals not understanding why anyone would want privacy."
"Particularly young people who never knew the Internet pre-privacy violations, and always thought it was okay to give away information, asking for and providing loads of private stuff, and don't understand why someone wouldn't want to be filmed in public."
"Even stuff that doesn't matter. I've seen so many people asking trans and nonbinary folk their AGAB, even when the point of transitioning was to be addressed by a different gender, and it's wild that people just expect them to be okay with sharing it."
LR-II
Cheating
season 5 episode 10 GIF by WorkaholicsGiphy"Trivia pursuit night at the bar/pub."
Feels2old
"People who cheat at trivia night at bars are crap people. Most people play honest."
micmea1
I admit it... I'm one of those cheaters. I can't help it.
Love is Dead
chris hemsworth tinder GIF by lunarpapacyGiphy"Romantic relationships. People on social media spread oodles of toxicity and make you overthink every little thing, it’s insane."
thetonkaguy2
From Within
"The internet was ruined by the internet."
Jimmybobhorton2019
"No it was when webpages became monetized by showing ads. Suddenly every webpage including the obscure blog you like to read had become infested with 5-30 ads."
"Once people and corporations found out they could just jam a ton of ads on a page, suddenly articles and pages that have no reason to exist pops up everywhere. Remember when sites with lists would show them on one page? Now you get one result per page. This way they get 20x the ad revenue."
kkehoe5
It's a Mess...
"Childhood innocence."
W0nk0_the_Sane00
"I read in Time Magazine a few years ago the average age a child is exposed to porn is nine years old, and not finding your dad's Playboy either. That just seems wild. That and seeing execution videos drug cartels upload. That has to mess a kid up."
arlenroy
"This one I agree with. The Internet made it easy to see some pretty nasty stuff you can never unsee."
blurri
Good Stuff
"Yard sales. All the good stuff gets sold on FB Marketplace/Kijiji etc. now."
Logical-Guide-2437
"Same with thrift stores. Every jabroni thinks they're an entrepreneur because they scan everything and list it on Amazon, now good deals are harder to come by because they sit and wait all day for the shops to put stuff out."
MechaSheeva
"Pawn shops too. You're not finding that 61 Gibson SG at a pawn shop, and the owners don't know what they have, so you buy it for a couple hundred bucks and play it every day for the rest of your life. (This happened to a friend of mine in the mid 90s, but will never happen again)."
CowboySpencer
What a Difference...
Make It Rain Vhs GIF by Polyvinyl RecordsGiphy"Blockbuster."
FluffyTid
"Well, to be fair, they kinda did that themselves, Redbox DID try to get with Blockbuster, but they just laughed at Redbox and Netflix."
yeah_yeah_therabbit
I forgot how much I missed life before the net. Ah memories.
I've never visited the dark web, nor do I know how to find it. Thankfully. But tell me some stories.
The Regular
Spongebob Squarepants Internet GIFGiphy"Mostly just like the regular web but with illegal stuff. Drugs, weapons, passports or Kreditcard, apparent hitman service (not sure if that was real though). It is super slow though and the link collections you find for the Tor browser are mostly dead."
PvtPill
Layers Lag
"Slow."
SixBitDemonVenerable
"Just like VPN slows down your connection a bit like 5-10% slow if it's a good VPN with it's company spending lots of money on running thousands of servers. Dark web required multiple layers of encryption and proxies just like a using 3 VPNs on top of each other so that alone makes it much slower, moreover the proxies servers are cheap low budget ones run by volunteers (and some by intelligence agencies)."
idorandombs
Ah... simpler times indeed
"I've seen scarier stuff in the untamed age of the internet than I did when going through it."
hats4bats22
"We lived in simpler times back then, I loved growing up on the internet. Back when most people didn't even know what social media was, AOL chat rooms, MSN and Yahoo chat rooms."
funnystuffmakesmelol
Not a Browse
"'What it's like.' is just websites. What you find depends on what you look for. There's a bunch of piracy sites, a lot of counter-culture blogs, sites on hacking (not just blackhat stuff, but a lot of whitehat stuff too)."
"You will also find a lot of sites in other languages too, especially ones you don't normally see, as a lot of darkweb stuff is used to circumvent censorship (the most famous Darkweb network, TOR, was developed by the US Naval Research Lab), and most major news orgs will have some sort of presence there, just as a way to get tips they can't get otherwise."
"A lot of what people assume is there, isn't as common as you might think, and a lot of what is there of that, are government-run honeypots. It's not generally a 'browse' thing, you tend to go to the darkweb with a specific topic in mind, and go to that."
P2PJones
Watching You
Glitch Snes GIF by Death OrgoneGiphy"I think of the darkweb as a honeytrap. Drugs, guns, antisocial groups. There's no way a place with that potential isn't being monitored."
5point5inch
Sounds pretty run of the mill so far. With a few naughties here and there.
Bad Clicks
computer clicking GIF by South Park Giphy"Turns out the accessing the deep Web doesn't do you any good if you don't have any idea where to go. Like I know of websites that are supposed to be on the dark web but I don't want to go to them. That seems like a short road to a long prison sentence."
TheOneWes
Window Shopping
"A lot of freaking searching for correct url’s. Idk, I was just window shopping, if you’re not there to shop, and been around for a while, it’s not that interesting."
Chickenmilk_
"This is the best way to describe the deep web imo. I tried using it once out of stupid impulsive curiosity, and it was just rather boring, slow, and overall rather tedious to use. A lot of the websites are poorly designed and dated, and that's if they work at all. Not worth it if you have no business being there and don't know what you're doing."
J0HNNY-D0E
Meh...
"Oddly boring. I disconnected and covered up my webcam. Because all of those stories I heard, people accessed your webcam. The first thing I noticed was that it was as slow as hell. Can you imagine running a livestream on this thing? The next thing I found was surprisingly weird."
"It was selling fake magazine paper or fake newspaper paper to print forged coupons on. Not a single person opened a chat window saying 'I SEE YOU! You are x in y!' No red rooms, and any videos of creepy things would probably take days to load. No links to those either. I did find fake accounts to access scientific journals though."
CrazyCoKids
Risk
"Awkward and slow to use. It's hard to find what you are looking for, even harder to find a reliable source. The only currencies used are crypto currencies and anonymity is taken extremely seriously. PGP encryption is widely used for direct messaging."
"You have access to a reliable site it is just the same as using a website url and clearnet only slower and the interface is much older looking. I won't get into any details on how its accessed for very obvious reasons but the process of purchasing is normally just found a listing on one of the market websites (think eBay only much shadier), make sure the seller is reliable by checking reviews etc and then place an order."
"You message them directly using PGP (encrypted messages only they can decrypt) with your address and pay them using some crypto. After a few days a package shows up with whatever you brought in it. Usually disguised as something else. For example what I bought came disguised as a sim card!! It's all quite similar to the clearnet just with more security steps added in and a bit more risk!"
Cheekythrowaway69420
Rarities
Working On It GIF by KAT BALLGiphy"I haven't, but a guy I watch on YouTube used to do a weekly video series where he would look at stuff on the deep/dark web."
"Obviously for video purposes he was showing stuff that was YouTube friendly, but he frequently talked about how the dark web is pretty boring, and 99% of the stuff on it would be perfectly fine on the normal web. Yes, illegal content does exist, but it's actually pretty rare in the grand scheme of things."
Zoomii555
Letdown...
"Boring. There was a page with a bunch of links to illicit things that were probably just the FBI or some other glowie organization."
simpkill
"I agree. The creepy illegal websites Are either honeypots or scams. Dread is a reddit for the dark web but that's it. There aren't effective search engines but you can find postings of the onion addresses of websites but half the time they don't work."
crustybuttplug
American prices...
"Drugs mostly. Insanely cheap prices as well. I could get 20g of molly for like 4g's worth here. Boy that cra[pwas risky. Glad I don't do that anymore mostly."
Sm0ahk
"Where was that? All the drugs I ever saw were substantially above street prices. Like people were buying crap at normal street prices then trying to make a profit by selling on tor. At least American prices. Are you in Australia? I hear stuff is crazy expensive down there."
People
"Word of mouth. If you don't know people. You're just going to end up nowhere. Website urls are more like passwords... And you won't find them listed anywhere. Then there is the surface shit that's crawling with law enforcement and honey pots."
AiharaSisters
"TOR has a bunch of search engines at least. If you fool around a bit you can find sites that work. ZeroNet has a bunch of indexes, so finding sites is a lot easier. But once your curiosity is satisfied, there isn't really anything there to keep you interested."
SixBitDemonVenerable
Who Knows
"Ten years or so back, it was crawling with under-age porn. The Dark Wiki at that point had links to several sites. And people would post links to others in comment threads. Then Anonymous (or someone claiming to be Anonymous) took an interest and hijacked a lot of the sites and shut them down. I'm assuming that there is still a lot of that traffic but it isn't easy to find. There must be some, as I keep hearing about arrests. I haven't looked around for a year or two, so I don't know what it is like now."
rock_and_rolo
Ratings
Giphy"Dark markets for drugs are the equivalent of a black market eBay. The sellers have ratings and everything."
Soggy_asparaguses
That's Depressing
"I was always curious what was on the dark web, I've heard some stories, but when I went on I had no idea what I was looking for so I just went to my usual sites like ESPN and shit, lol."
CaptainSlappyBear
"It's literally just unlisted websites you can't google. Conceptually it's really not that exciting. Media just likes to hype it up."
snek-without-oreos
Guns. Guns. Ammo
"I didn't do it directly. My friend showed me. He used to use it to get drugs for self use or to sell to close friends. Nothing hard, but like mdma, acid, dmt, coke. Anyway, it was about 8-9 years ago and all I really remember is pages and pages of guns and drugs for sale like it was eBay or something."
"It was honestly pretty crazy just seeing lists for any drug you can think of or damn near any gun like I was scrolling through any typical online shop. He showed me other weird stuff, but nothing too insane to be remembered. I do remember seeing some hitman ads though."
InanimateSensation
Let's Chat
"Not as terrible as games and media made me think of it. It isn't riddled by hackers and murderers. Although one time my antivirus blocked a trojan and I didn't download anything so not sure what that was about. There was a website to chat with random people on the dark web and I found someone exactly like me who was just curious about it."
kryptek_86
Well that is underwhelming but comforting. Maybe there is more good in the world than sleaze.
Redditor NanoPope asked:
"What’s the most ridiculous thing you saw a computer illiterate person do with a computer?"
Mice
"I have two coworkers who aren't sure how computers really work. Both have wireless mice."
"Coworker A's mouse stops working and can't figure out why. Coworker B takes his mouse and walks over to her desk, puts his mouse down and jiggles it around, remarking 'Huh, mine isn't working either here. Must be your desk or something'."
"Meanwhile his cursor is doing a dance around his screen back at his own desk."
"All I could do to keep a straight face."
- SecretlyHistoric
Giphy"I was born in the early '80s, but I grew up with computers (Atari 800XL, followed by Atari ST, before we got our first 486 "IBM Clone" PC), so I was pretty computer literate from an early age."
"When I was in elementary school, my grade took a field trip to a temporary pop-up dinosaur museum. There were several hands-on exhibits set up, some of them involving computers."
"I remember seeing a group of students and a teacher crowded around one of the computers trying to figure out how to get it to work. The teacher had the mouse in her hand, turned upside down, and was trying to move the cursor by rolling the ball around (this was before optical mice)."
"Also, this was NOT a trackball, but an actual rollerball mouse with a mousepad."
- drummer_who_codes
GiphyKeyboards
"My father in law one day rearranged just the keys on his keyboard in alphabetical order."
"A was still Q, B still W and so on."
"In the end he smashed that keyboard and bought new one."
- lemonedpenguin
Giphy"Early 2000s, I opened an email account for my parents. I set it up on their work computer since I was waiting for them to finish work when I set it up."
"Everything worked great until one day I told them to open an email I sent them and they kept insisting they'd do it the next day when they were at work."
"Long story short they thought their email lived in the work computer and they couldn't access it from other computers. A quick lesson in email and suddenly they got much more responsive to emails."
- cybergaleu
Giphy"When I was the computer support person at my local library back in 04 an elderly lady was at a machine with an envelope and a confused look on her face."
"I approached and asked if she needed help and she said, 'I'd like to send this letter to my daughter in email, but I don't see anywhere to put it in'."
"She was holding a sealed envelope with her daughter's email address as the address and her return address in the regular spot. No stamp though."
"The look on her face was so earnest that I couldn't even be angry. I patiently explained what email was and helped her set up a Gmail account and typed up the letter in the email for her to send."
- Lobsterbib
GiphyPicture This
"My mom wanted to paint a picture of the Pope, so in a Youtube video that showed a picture of him she took a picture with a camera, developed the picture into a 4x6, and gave it to me to enlarge."
"So I just searched for the original image and hit print..."
- 3-DMan
GiphyDisk Drive
"Back in the days of the original Apple Macintosh (beige case, black and white display, new-fangled 3.5" floppy disk drive), one of the secretaries where I was working managed to force 2 floppies into the single drive at once."
"'It kept asking for disk 2,' she explained."
- corndogco
GiphyDon't Turn It Off And On Again
"Back around 2000 I did IT for a country club. Every Friday and Saturday night, without fail, the server which was in a locked room would crash."
"This caused the food and beverage ordering system to go down for about 20 minutes."
"One weekend, I stayed late on a friday and sort of camped out."
"At about the time the server normally crashed, at the height of the dinner rush, the food and beverage manager walked in and unplugged the server from the ups, then plugged it back in."
"I asked him why. He said it 'made everything run faster' and further said this was a normal weekend routine."
- -Blixx-
Giphy"I used to be sort of a sysadmin for remote signals intelligence sensors for the Army. A few times a week for a few hours, an entire region of a specific network would go down and we'd just go kinda dark for a bit on that platform."
"No one could figure out why, and we normally have near 100% uptime. Colonels are calling asking wtf is up, teams are dispatched to check the sensors, no one could give an answer."
"Then we noticed they were only in hours that fell between 7am-3pm local time, Monday-Friday... hmm okay. Let's check everything again, teams go out to reboot each sensor individually, every node and server between us and the sensors, physically reseat cables... nothing, still goes out randomly for hours."
"Then one day during an outage the techs forward go check out that specific server room."
"There was a lone Navy Lieutenant Commander in there doing office work (even though he had a private office) and he didn't like how loud the servers were so he just powered them all down when he wanted to work in his hideaway."
"This dude just casually blacked out a bunch of national security missions for a whole a** country instead of you know, closing his office door."
- napleonblwnaprt
GiphyWe Don't Know How To Use Their Tech Either
"My grandmother has complained to me that store clerks are shocked and confused when she informs them she doesn't have an email address to provide, or a computer to make one on."
"She was born in 1929 and is 93 years old. The most modern device she owns is her TV, which has a VCR attached to it."
"She listens to music on a radio with a tape deck in it. Her phone hangs on the wall of her dining room. She doesn't even own a microwave."
"I think someone who was almost an adult when WWII ended can be given a break for not having an email address."
- Chris_Buttcrouch
GiphySo, are you the tech savvy one or the one who says "oops, my bad"?
Share your tech troubles in the comments.
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Reddit user Acid_In_My_Eyes asked:
"People who can't sleep, what do you do all night?"
Yeah ... turns out, it's certainly not a space of creation for everyone. Unless the thing you're creating is anxiety.
Over and Over
"Toss and turn. Overthink. Replay conversations on my mind."
- strawberrytohoney
"Yeah man... anxiety takes it toll on sleep. The more stressful the day, the worse the sleep."
- zfgnjzfgnjmzrfgjk
"100%!!!! And how I could have acted differently or what else could’ve happened."
- strawberrytohoney
GiphyIncreasing
"Be increasingly pissed off about not being able to sleep."
- Froggielaflame
"It's the most vicious cycle ever."
"Can't sleep, pissed off that you can't sleep, now it's even harder to get to sleep. Now you are stressing out because it's getting closer to the next day, adds to the fact you cant sleep."
"Been there..."
- Zer0C00L321
Calculations
"Calculate how many hours of sleep I could at least still have if I was able to fall asleep at that moment."
- Adept-Elephant1948
"Same."
"It’s literally the worst because I end up priming myself for a day where I believe I’ll perform suboptimally; thereby ensuring I perform suboptimally."
"It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy."
- Samson8765
"Being tired and having a sh*t day at work because you laid awake all night thinking about how you were going to be tired and have a sh*t day at work is the worst."
- OfficeChairHero
Not No Regrets
" 'Dream’ random scenarios in my head where I either could have done better or changed things, or I’m dreaming of scenarios I want to happen, either because they might or just because I want it in the future"
-Genderneutral_Bird
"So its not 'no regrets' it's 'some regrets?' "
-Acid_In_My_Eyes
"Every single day. They can be as small as ‘I wish I had just given x person x compliment’ to ‘I never should have told x person about x secret’ etc"
-Genderneutral_Bird
Happy Place
"I have found success in just accepting that I cant sleep, OK I GUESS IM NOT GONNA SLEEP RIGHT NOW...and then getting in to a comfy position."
"EYES WIDE OPEN, NOT TRYING to sleep. Just lay there and let my mind wander."
"I build what I call, happy places."
"What kind of life do I WISH I had? What kind of world do I wish this was?"
"I build the whole world, I usually have powers but no one knows."
"I'm rich. I'm single. The world is safe enough to leave your front door unlocked and no one goes in to your house."
"I just build and build and build the most kickass scenarios, and eventually I'll wake up and be like 'OH I FELL ASLEEP!' and after that I usually keep sleeping."
-finalglimmer
GiphyBed Time Stories
"I am really bad at falling asleep. Unless really tired and/or using alcohol."
"Since that's not an everyday solution I listen to an audiobook, in my case the Harry Potter series."
"I know the books so well that my brain, while focusing on the story, grows numb an I fall asleep."
"The audiobook, unless the device is shaken, will turn off after 30 minutes. I mostly fall asleep within the hour now and I have something fun to listen to."
"Haven't tried it using a story I don't know, but that will probably keep me awake."
-Mr_Zoelmond
"I do this with Forensic Files."
"It’s crazy, but I’ve seen all 20 thousand of them and the familiarity and voice puts me in a calm trance."
"It takes what it takes lol"
-Leading_Funny5802
Crash When You Crash
"Read, browse reddit, music, get some work done, daydream/think whatever u wanna call it."
"I don't adhere to a schedule, I just crash when I crash, get up when I get up."
"It's healthy trust me."
-69stuffstuff69
"Do u work or go to school right now?"
-Acid_In_My_Eyes
"School, and online. All it complicates is the occasional obligation. May not align for everyone, but it's what works for me and if it works for you it could be all cool."
-69stuffstuff69
Relish The Rare
"Turn off blue light on all devices an hour before sleep."
"Use a white noise app or something similar so your mind blocks out and focuses on only 1 sound."
"Reading or listening to podcasts."
"Turn a lot."
"Most importantly for me is to get comfortable and relish in that rare comfort."
"The times I'm not worried about my lack of sleep, the better sleep I get. I normally remember that being comfy and switched off from the world (even if it doesn't work) is much more preferable to being uncomfy, looking at a screen and working for 7 hours straight."
"If nothing else, Masturbate."
-VirgilVanDoink
Transporting Myself
"I’m going through chemo treatments right now and on Tuesday nights through Thursday, into Friday, I can’t sleep."
"I will get up, go to the living room, pour a cup of coffee and read."
"I’ve finished a few books since January and I’m running out. I’m taking in the peace and quiet and transporting myself to a different world for a few hours."
"Then, I’ll take a nap for a bit. Rinse and repeat every other week."
-PickleSmack
GiphyTurning Japanese
"I remember a few weeks back, I was quite nervous about my girlfriend's wellbeing as she was super stressed about things."
"That made me super stressed about things to the point I couldn't sleep."
"I ended up trying to assemble basic sentences in Japanese for a few hours to take my mind off things."
-BagOfToenails
That Scrubbing Sound
"I really don’t know if this will help anyone, but I watch reconstruction videos of old vintage items and welding of items."
"Such as cleaning a old and broken PS1 and forging weapons from video games, hearing the sounds and the scrubbing at a low sound does help me sleep"
-Character-Ostrich-54
There you go, fellow insomniacs.
Now you've got a project list for the next time sleep decides it's not your friend.
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