The Internet is such an awesome place. I have not stopped using it since I was introduced to the "World Wide Web" somewhere in 2004. It was an awesome place filled with good people, cool websites, and honest information.
However, today, as the Internet became cheaper, more and more people flocked to it. During the course of 2004, there was a troll for every 35 internet users. Now, in 2009, we have a troll for every 5 internet users. That's a huge difference.
Anyway, here are some things on the Internet that made it such a corrupted place, but sorta somehow making it awesome at some point:
5. Web advertisements
Ranging from the plain Google adbot to the complex and annoying "BUY ME TO NOT DIE" adware malware, web advertisements have changed the ways of marketing and increased the efficiency of targeting customers more than 100% than of mass calling strangers on the phone and billboards. With over 75% of the human population hooked to the massive link, advertising your junk online has become a norm that has been accepted by the community for years. Some advertisements are on a good side, they depict their wares clearly, honestly, and unannoyingly. Horrible advertisements, on the other hand, gives way too many superlative qualities about the product and tries to attract your attention by hijacking your browser and opening 200 instances of the browser application that redirects to their [the advertiser's] web site, which is usually pornographic.
Web advertisements have been used by website owners to earn revenue to pay for their hosting fees. Google has AdSense that can easily earn you revenue for every retard who clicks on the Google ads, thinking that they are legitimate when they're just pointless, irrelevant words that a Google bot just picked up. There are also other companies who offer more solutions by letting you pick who you are going to sell. Least that's much better than Google ads who displays websites about child pr0n on a children's site.
4. Chat
In the first few years of the Internet, communication through computers were limited into two options. First, creating websites that would take a long while to publish. Secondly, and the best solution would be writing an email.
Emails back then were not those HTML hogs that takes a minute to load even on the fastest connection on earth. They are simple messages that resembles text messages, minus all those shortened words and abbreviations like "lol". When someone has to lol, they would say, "I must say I laughed out loud." If someone has to call somebody else a fag, he would say, "I must tell you you're a homosexual." The early days of computer communication was excellent, if only that dial-up and computers weren't so expensive.
Somehow someone got tired of taking an hour to write a simple, constructive paragraph because he can't type at a measly 20WPM. His solution? He built the instant messaging platform.
Instant messaging, otherwise known as IM, is built in order to "instantly" send messages back and forth between two parties, hence the name. It functions almost the same way as emails, although much much faster. In the course of years, IM has evolved from two-way communication to multi-way communications, otherwise known as chatrooms. They are those rooms where the first thing people would ask you is you age, sex and location, and if your credentials fit their needs they'll ask if you have a webcam.
Instant messaging allowed people to see each other through webcams shortly after. This evolved to the practice of camwhoring, or whoring yourself in front of a webcam to get paid by some creepy stranger. It won't hurt if a hot chick is camming for you, but it would suck to know that, even homos do this shit. Gives me another reason to steer clear away from cams.
3. Unnecessary paid stuff
Let's say you have to download a very small batch (.bat) file in order to run a program. So you Google for that file, then you found the only mirror hosting the file. You are ready to download when a dialog pops up, saying that you have exceeded their bandwidth limit even if you just got there for the first time. Their conditions are: Shit out your money to get your file or die.
This has been one of the most annoying nuisances in my experience. I am supposed to download something small and some download site stops me because I've exceeded bandwidth, or I'm Pinoy, or whatever. I'm guessing these "exceeded bandwidth" dialogs are probably a scam to rip money off my wallet just because it said so. And no, I'm not shelling out twenty dollar just to download a 20kb file.
A good solution for this is to enforce payment for the uploader only. The idea of shoving a toll up the downloaders' asses is retarded. No, really, it is.
2. Locality restrictions
Also know as "GTFO Asian/African/European/Australian shithead" dialog, it is the message you get when you view a site and it says that the content you requested is not available in your area. You go to a free internet TV site and it says that the video is not available in your area just because you're not in the American region, or Canada for that matter.
This applies to online selling as well. You want to buy that awesome thingy-whatever-it-is on the Internet since it's not available locally. Now you are about to pay for that thing and discover that they only ship in North America. And that doesn't include Mexico.
1. Anonymity
This is the granddaddy of all plagues plaguing the Internetrealm. The power of anonymity is all powerful. You can pretend to be a football jock to impress a hot babe when you're a 35 year old virgin living with his mother. You can be anonymous and troll on /b/. Hell, if anonymity can be applied in real life, hell is gonna break loose. In fact, China is facing the crisis of anonymity at the moment. You can look at three Chinese guys and tell that they're all named Chan at some point. Or, a couple of Muslims and tell that they're all named Muhammad.
Anonymity is the process of creating a separate identity that is partially or completely different from your real life credentials. You can be a sexy babe on the Internet when you're a 350-lb woman in real life. You can pretend to be Michael Jackson; you can pretend to be 2pac; you can pretend to be just about anything. Hell, I guess that's what the Internet is for.
