@carnage4life Google search's decline has been the biggest shock; that was the answer to our prayers back in the late 1990s, and how far has it fallen!

Can't agree about paywalled new sites though; they have to pay for their journalism somehow. I subscribe to three of them.

@carnage4life I’m with you (except for the news paywall, good local journalism and online ad margins don’t scale).

Is this all a symptom of the end of near-zero interest. Growth at all costs leading to a focus on mostly good user experience vs. now everyone wants the “right” users and fat (or any) margins?

@carnage4life The good stuff is there but the trash is like an overwhelming fungus. Google Search is much more A.I.-like now: you often get a better, cleaner result using a conversational question than a search phrase of keywords.*

We, in libraries, are the answer. Visit your nearest library and work with us. Our job has always been to sort out all the things. In our library, you can even borrow a kettlebell.

*Try it: just type: what time is it? in Google Search, for example.

@carnage4life A hypothesis:

For most of the last 150-200 years technology advances have been transformative because our ability to change the world lagged our thinking on social structures. New tech let us do things we had only thought about.

Now that’s played out. We want new tech to transform, but it reinforces. Our social imagination (and implementation) lags our technical proficiency.

We need less Allen Newell and more John Stuart Mill, Paulo Friere, bell hooks,Thomas Paine….

@carnage4life Right - bizarre the degree to which spam filters on services like Google Voice and Google Fi are failing, too

And with all the noise everyone's making about conversant AI, Google Home and Alexa keep getting worse and worse at answering questions they'd have answered well c2019.

We are absolutely in a period of decline.

@carnage4life

True.

@duckduckgo works still ok to fine for me and #Mastodon is (still?) free.

@carnage4life

decentralization will fix it

@carnage4life Thanks for your work on bing. ;)

I’ve used it since start.com and have been mostly happy with the results.

(Except the click-jacking at the top. That’s not great.)

@carnage4life I tell people are civilization is collapsing. We didn't take into account how hard it is to maintain & fix stuff.

I hope that's just a joke!

@carnage4life I lived through the bubble of 2000. Don't worry, it'll be back for a while.

But there will be a shit crust added, as all generations leave their shit crust on top of one another.