Mastodawn

Eaton Jul 16, 2023

The failure of the Internet to deliver its promise is particularly noticeable when you hunt for repair manuals for a product from the 90s. Used to be, the information would either be there or not there, finable or unfindable.

Now, there are hundreds of algorithmically generated sites claiming to have it just because it appeared in their search logs, generating potemkin village content traps with endless paging, broken-thumbnail named-like-the-file-you-want but actually-just-ebay-photos bullshit

bioluminescently

@eaton This is also why it's such a problem that independent websites are now falling so far down search engine rankings. When I was younger, if you had a problem with A Thing from a larger category of Things, you'd go to a website run by some Thing Enthusiast or group of them, and look your Thing up in the site's index or inbuilt search box. If it wasn't there, you'd post on the site's forum and another Thing Owner might help. But now... good luck even finding out that indie site exists.

Eaton Jul 16, 2023

@bioluminescently yep. It’s one of the reasons that enthusiast communities with curated lists of links have turned into a more promising resource for many subjects. Thankfully, Reddit is still going stro— aaahhh fuck

bioluminescently Jul 16, 2023

@eaton I really didn't see the Reddit thing coming - I've got an account but I've rarely been an active user; it's where I go because people have linked to an AMA or a discussion, and it feels (I mean this kindly) like a living fossil: as crocodiles are to the dinosaur age, so Reddit is to the age of forums: it's the thing that survived, so it seemed like it would be around in that form forever and everything else would change around it.

ArneBab Jul 16, 2023

@bioluminescently @eaton that’s a perfect descriptions of what I loved about the Internet.

You could find the enthusiasts and get their expertise by simply reading what they wrote for the world to see.

EDIT: though that was also the time when running a Forum wasn’t a full-time job just to keep the spambots out …

James Devine Jul 17, 2023

@ArneBab @bioluminescently @eaton

Totally agree, it applies to basically everything with a product code or make/model number today.

The answer was a community of humans, it used to be called Reddit until someone burned it down. I have heard great things about Lemmy, though I have yet to try it myself. I guess that the best response to AI spam is the return to the original search engine, a 1st generation Yahoo like index with categories, and a way to keep the SEO out.

Https://join-lemmy.org

Lemmy - A decentralised discussion platform for communities

Lemmy

ArneBab Jul 17, 2023

@james I think the first index — dmoz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DMOZ — with categories would be hard to scale.

The only thing getting close to it nowadays is Wikipedia.

…

And then I read up on it and realize that it’s actually still active: https://curlie.org/

That’s the followup project of DMOZ. License is cc attribution.

@bioluminescently @eaton

DMOZ - Wikipedia

Matthew Skelton Jul 17, 2023

@ArneBab @james @bioluminescently @eaton with the enshittification of the web with AI, I wonder if human curated directories like DMOZ might be valued again?

bioluminescently Jul 17, 2023

@matthewskelton @ArneBab @james @eaton I do see potential there: when AI is the standard, human curation might become more prized because it feels more accurate and is able to respond to personal and idiosyncratic sensitivities. I can think of many medical info curation contexts online where no AI will be half as useful as an experienced patient, for instance.

bioluminescently Jul 17, 2023

@ArneBab @james @eaton Thank you! I'm so glad that this conversation is throwing up examples of what we want!

Geo Jul 17, 2023

@ArneBab @james @bioluminescently @eaton I use Wikipedia so often because I think this is a big issue in general: Assume I want to compare, for example, software. I don't know anything about it initially. Wikipedia is often one of the few useful sides because all other ones are created for marketing purposes, not information. It is surprisingly often easier to find basic facts about a product on #Wikipedia than on the product's webpage.

bioluminescently Jul 18, 2023

@Geo @ArneBab @james @eaton And it also tends to have a Controversies section, where that is relevant, which can be very good for those times when there's ethical question marks over the person or the product, and you'd rather be warned so you can take your money elsewhere. But it's not even just about that; I'd also want to know if an app I'm interested in had a famous avoidable snafu where it leaked sensitive user data.

ArneBab Jul 18, 2023

@bioluminescently yes, that’s pretty awesome. @Geo @james @eaton

bioluminescently Jul 17, 2023

@james @ArneBab @eaton Thanks, I hadn't come across that! And yes, it's so strange how dreamlike the Yahoo categories seem now: of course with humans there's always biases, but I think that before AI swept in and took over we were getting a lot better at acknowledging that and boosting curatorial work from marginalised perspectives. The book blogosphere especially had become genuinely useful in that way.

Haelwenn /элвэн/

@bioluminescently @eaton Did you give https://search.marginalia.nu/ a try for this kind of use case?

Marginalia Search

search.marginalia.nu is a small independent do-it-yourself search engine for surprising but content-rich websites that never ask you to accept cookies or subscribe to newsletters. The goal is to bring you the sort of grass fed, free range HTML your grandma used to write.

search.marginalia.nu

Keen Grasp Jul 17, 2023

@bioluminescently @eaton So much this. I hate feeling like the "old man yells at cloud" meme is now about me, but like: people really ought to be yelling, and that is not a natural cloud, it is the smoke from a bunch of corporate scumbags setting everything good in the world on fire

bioluminescently Jul 17, 2023

@keengrasp @eaton That is a really apt way of putting it: the very fact we do have all this tech means the pace of change is faster and more far-reaching than what people had to deal with even a generation ago, and we have to reconfigure our assumptions about caveating and resisting advances (or "advances") in that light.

Keen Grasp Jul 17, 2023

@bioluminescently @eaton I sometimes feel like half my toots are evangelism for Cory Doctorow, but his analysis of the Luddites is so spot on and so helpful for understanding today’s tech hellscape.

bioluminescently Jul 18, 2023

@keengrasp @eaton He is honestly spot on an amazing amount of the time.