Dollar Tree.
It used to have been an unreal experience witnessing the existence of these stores when they came out. Everything for a $1. No joke. The quality of some things have had corners cut and the quantity might’ve been laughable, but there was a good solid purpose for these stores.
And then I started seeing the signs after a few good solid years of shopping there. The first sign was how they stopped selling eggs. This was before the Bird Flu. They stopped selling eggs because they simply couldn’t afford to buy stock and then the price hike to $1.25 happened.
And now they’ve hiked the prices again to $1.50 for some products in a handful of stores. Additionally, they’ve incorporated items going from $2 ~ $15 so they have long lost the role and title of being the most affordable places to shop.
Gone were the days.
Peace
Flying. Ever seen those pictures where people would dress their sunday best and climb into a dual turbo prop prestine silver tube up stairs on the tarmak? Beautiful stewardesses dressed in blue with matching hats.
Compare to now. Last I “flew” they gave my seat away and I had to fly the next day with a 3 hour layover. Perhaps I’m romanticizing, but I’d love to try the old way.
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.
Oh snap, I met my wife on OKC before these changes. I believe Match had already bought them out but it was before the changes like you mentioned.
I remember it being the superior online matchmaking service at the time.
RIP
Since I started using Lemmy, I’ve wondered if a federated dating platform could ever work. Obviously you would have to solve the problem of low user numbers though…
There’s an open source one called Alovoa. I haven’t tried it yet myself, but it’s there.
I know it’s on FDroid, though I haven’t checked any other app store for it yet
Unless it is a dating platform for tech savvy gay/bi men specifically, it would also have to solve the problem of even lower numbers of women who are users. Even non-fed dating platforms struggle to reach a 10:1, men:women ratio of active, non-bot users.
As a woman (just have to phrase it that way), good luck to any who try. Personally, I can’t think of anything that would entice me to sign up for a federated dating platform.
Make the men moderate each other’s first messages. You need 3 out of five thumbs up before that first message even goes through. You have to rate five messages before you can try to send one. Make them see how many fucking weirdos there are and hopefully make them behave a little better to begin with by being self conscious about what five other dudes are gonna see. You want five other dudes to see your dick pic on the off chance 3/5 will upvote it? Good fucking luck. Don’t listen to me I just worked for a week in a hospital without running water my brain is a smoothie.
I really miss the quizzes though. You could also make it so that you can limit your visibility to a threshold of question matching. I reconnected with the guy thought was cool in group therapy a year later when we were both doing much better because we were a 98% match. I didn’t pursue it at the time because meeting a partner in group therapy is a terrible idea particularly because you’re that fresh into recovery but it kind of vaguely felt like a missed connection. Turns out it was because we’re the same fucking person. A year later we were both doing much better and I get this message on OKC like “weird question - did we meet at (the fucking psych hospital we did outpatient at)” and he’s probably the only person in the history of ever that that line would ever work for. Thanks OKC!
Also: and I say this as a crazy bitch who just got into gnosticism / esoteric Christianity, you need to include star signs. Idgaf if you think it’s fake or not (I myself am mostly in it for the cool rocks) but its already been said in this comment chain that attracting female users is gonna be rough. You need to be willing to meet people where they’re at (this also includes UI btw my female friends think a lot of fedi looks sketchy and don’t wanna be putting their photos in it). I’ve been able to make so many more female friends now that I know what my ascendant is and I’m not sure I even put the right birth time in so there’s a good chance it’s not even my real one. Its like saying you’re a packers fan or your favorite Linux distro. It’s a short set of words that quickly identify ingroups and outgroups and provides a noncommitally vague description of your personality. Just get off your high horse and roll with it we’re trying to get you laid here.
You have way more faith in humanity than I do. I think after 1-2 and the novelty wears off, a lot of people would just thumbs up without reading.
And even if people stay diligent in rating first comments, it will take 0.2 seconds for bad actors to realize they can just save their bullshit for message #2.
I don’t hate this.
Man that sounds really good
Cadbury chocolates, Fuck Kraft Carmelo doesn’t taste good at all, and their eggs have gone from the size of a chicken egg to the size of a Robin’s egg while somehow tasting worse
In that time period the costs of cocoa have skyrocketed due to blight, climate change, and legal efforts to reduce slavery in the harvesting of cocoa. Most mass market chocolate brands were harmed by this.
Dating. Everyone’s idea of it now is so to-the-point.
They want instant gratification, more like. Suckered into the whole “finding the perfect one” and thinking a dating app will help. Some dating apps fucking charge you to read inbox messages, the nerve.
I blame the dating apps.
In the us they used to be called 5&dime stores. A big chain known as woolworths was one but had to raise prices of the decades.
Inflation happens .
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.
My last phone and tablet weren’t used for anything greater than the one before it. I have no need for more powerful devices.
Yeah. App devs want their products to work on as many phones as possible, so 6yo $100 budget phones can run 99% of apps just fine. The main thing that slows down is the homescreen UI as the manufacturer pushes updates designed to make you want a new phone.
On Android, one can fix that pretty easily with a different launcher.
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.
Yeah it’s just starting to look like where no matter what search engine you use almost, they just spit out garbage results. And they try way too hard in being the swiss-army knife of everything.
Kagi Krew represent
Haven’t had the time to try it yet, but really doubt it’s better than Google at its peak performance.
Is Kagi the AI powered thing? Or am I mistaking it with something else?
I’m sorry I came to this late, but this one’s really the best answer.
We talk a lot about how kids are struggling to recognize fake news, find reputable sources, etc… but I also think about how hard it is to find decent sources these days! I honestly can’t comprehend how kids are learning to do research projects and so on without the ability to easily search for stuff on the internet.
And while there’s lots of stuff on this threat that was cool while it lasted, I think search engines are one of those things where we never even considered the possibility it would change. Businesses fail, prices go up, experiences get skimped on, but search engines were goddamn magic. They just were. Why would anyone ever want to make them worse? The idea never even crossed out minds.
Man, Google search back in the day was great. No search categories like images, shopping, videos, etc. Just give it a query and you get what you wanted. God had no idea what was on the second page of results because the first page had what you wanted in the first half. Your ability to find what you wanted depended on your ability to use the search terms and modifiers.
The week I changed from HotBot to Google was a revelation. The jump from barely scraping the surface of the web to being able to find anything was like finally getting the full promise of the internet. Can’t be undersold how great Google was from 2001-03 until around 2013-16.
It was so good that “googling it” is still in common parlance, even though the phrase has baggage and isn’t used in the same case-closed tones as it once was.
Oh man, and when all the Boolean operators were revealed to work on search, doing some “Google-Fu” was laughably easy, but blew people away. Back before there was so much noise, anything online was possible to find.
I know they took away my negative operator, which is the main one I used. The anger is still fresh years later.
Yeah, that was the last straw TBH.
I occasionally have to do some OSINT-ish research online, and it keeps getting harder and harder to get what I nerd from Big G. So much noise and trash. 2019 was the year they jumped the shark.
I haven’t used Google in a few years (in fact all Google servers are blocked on my network) but I still can’t stop saying “I’ll Google it.”
It goes deeper IMO. Search no longer respects the user as an autonomous individual with self determination. It has stollen your digital citizenship.
Definitely did not take this for granted. Between 2004 and 2010ish it was remarkable how effective Google was. It’s still alright, just not as good as before.
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.
The whole Disney World situation hits for me in particular. I was privileged growing up with my family being able to go there (altho I think my parents just had massive credit card debt lol). I know even when I was a kid it was ungodly expensive. But comparing when I was a kid to now in 2025 it is absolutely wild on the things they are nickel and diming people on.
The whole fast pass converting to a paid model after it previously being a perk with a ticket was one of the most slap in the face things I had seen.
Oh man, i was wondering if i just had shitty luck with chipotle recently, but its been BAD the last couple times…
Microsoft Windows. Oh boy has it gotten bad.
It was always bad.
Windows 3.1 was bad. It was ugly, it was slow. The Macs of that era looked better, although their multitasking was even worse than Windows, somehow. It was pretty clear that 3.1 was just a desktop GUI over a text OS.
Windows 95 and 98 were bad. They were graphical improvements over 3.1 / NT, but they were so brittle and janky. Remember bullshit like “TEXTFI~1.TXT”?
The latest versions are all terrible too. Like, try to make a change to a system setting and you get the Windows 10/11 themed settings menu. But, if you try to make any kind of advanced setting change and you’re taken over to a GUI that shows that under the hood it’s still effectively running Windows XP components.
I thought Win 2000 was an improvement. Didn’t Win 3.1 literally run on top of DOS? Like, DOS was the actual operating system and Win 3.1 was merely the graphical user interface/desktop environment, so it consumed a bunch more hardware resources? I think I remember having to run many programs out of DOS so that they would run more smoothly than if I used Win 3.1. In that sense, Win 3.1 was really Ski Free, Space Cadet Pinball, Solitaire, Minesweeper, and a nice file manager.
I also liked the improvements of Win Vista, but my laptop couldn’t seem to keep up with the requirements needed for things to run smoothly. Win 7 seemed like a smoother Win Vista, so that was nice. However, I felt let down that there were no major noticeable improvements other than performance, which could also have been attributed to improvements in hardware. Around then, I started experimenting with Linux out of sheer curiosity and slowly switched to Linux 100%. In the past several years, I know about Win only from what I hear on Lemmy, so ofc I think it’s terrible, but I wouldn’t know from personal experience and judgment. I’m happy af with Linux anyway.
Windows ME ftw.
Can you clarify? I’m confused as to whether you think Win ME was the best or worst version of Win.
In what way? I continue to use Windows 11 just fine.
Must be bliss, mate
Could you expound?
The OS is riddled with ads. How can anyone be okay with ads running at the OS level is beyond me.
The tracking is also getting much much worse, they spy on every fucking thing they can.
The OS is riddled with ads
Is there a particular edition that’s prone to this? I don’t see any on my work or personal laptop. Either that or they’re so subtle that I don’t even see them.
I have never seen an ad using Windows.
I have been using Linux 100% for the past several years without any use of Win. The last time I used Win, it was Win 7 on a work computer. All I know about Win since is from what I see on Lemmy and the very few short instances when I might look at a friend’s computer. What I remember not liking about it was a lack of control in comparison to Linux and that it would get slower and slower with updates. Is the latest Win really as bad as Lemmy makes it out to be? Are there ads in the OS? Does it truly spy on you without your knowledge?
I understand there to be telemetry. As I already said, I have never, not once, ever seen an ad using Windows from 95 to 11.
Lemmy is a bunch of Linux users who genuinely don’t know how to custom-install Windows without all the bloat
It’s bizarre, how the fuck are they managing Linux if they can’t even do that?!?
Because they like the idea of doing that and still feeling like they own their computer in every way possible.
It’s pretty sad that the best windows experience now, is just breaking it down to pieces and custom installing.
I can do that. In fact, I do that for the only device in my home that still has Windows. But my point is that you don’t want to really use a system where you need to do something like debloating the OS after every update.
My days of installing LTSC, ShutUp10, Massgrave, modifying ISOs, unchecking 20 checkboxes during install and installing hosts files are over.
Nowadays I just install Linux and it does what I want without begging for it.
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 ValleyPalisades) 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.
What’s even worse is that even with these prices, Palisades is absolutely swamped with people on most days that are worth skiing (especially holidays).
So, unfortunately, the market can clearly bear these prices…
I definitely miss skiing in Tahoe when I was younger. Much different vibe now with all the crowds :(
Democracy
You’re implying that democracy was good and worked at some point.
Our system at least was functional before primaries were invented in the 40s.
the hell is ‘our’ system
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