sauerkrautsaulFucking seriously ruining the general web in terms of looking up information.
I don’t think we can overestimate the impact this “knowledge collapse” will have yet. Thank goodness for the fediverse, not that it is immune but holy shit the rest of the internet and ALL of corporate social media sure has gone to the dumps fast hasn’t it…
The general reduction in quality of search engine results in the last 2-3 years alone is sobering.
I think it is tantamount to a mass delusion that people refuse to think about the fact that social media will tear society apart unless it is structured in at the very least a semi-decentralized federated fashion not under the control of one or two massive corporations. It feels like for my whole life I have had conversations like this with people and most often people just don’t care, they would rather be under a more convenient and more centralized authority. Regardless it is no less surreal to me than it must be to those people in denial about this that we are seeing the unavoidable consequences of refusing to understand a crisis of centralization rip our societies apart into violence and bigotry.
and “sobering” is literally the last fucking thing I need to be happening to me in 2025
Is the fediverse good? Can you find information that was posted here by searching in DDG/Google/…?
Why would you rate service quality by SEO performance? There’s almost nothing you can do to make high quality information avilable to search engines while being drowned out by an infinite flood of garbage.
I think that what is lost about reddit from reddit specifically being such a shitty company that has so desperately enshittified itself to the point of comic absurdity in what feels like a blink of an eye is that… reddit is the start of a great concept. Of course any system can be gamed, we all could just be dogs on the internet pretending to be humans, but most of the time the upvoting and downvoting along with the multilayered threaded conversations allows for conversation, links and facts to surface that I find harder to find in other places and in general surprisingly sophisticated compared to other places on the internet, so yes!
Of course there is only so much here, which is where you come in!
mercBack in the day people posted sales notices, meeting information, etc. on cork boards or bulletin boards in high traffic areas in public places. The practice dates back to ancient Greece at a minimum. The availability of cheap paper was one of the first revolutions in the technology. When people were first able to use modems to connect personal computers to each-other, it’s no surprise that one of the first things created was a digital Bulletin Board System (BBS).
Reddit isn’t all that much different from a BBS. Along the way usenet news groups added some features, like organizing discussions into niche topic groups. Someone came up with the idea of adding upvotes and downvotes which (at least partially) makes good comments more visible and bad comments less visible. That’s been around since at least the Slashdot era. But, Reddit and Lemmy would be pretty familiar to someone using a BBS in the early 1990s. And the basic concept would be familiar to Aristotle.
There’s a reason the concept has been around so long. It’s a good one. Making the forums searchable will means years or even decades worth of useful information becomes available long after the conversation ended. The problem is that when the focus becomes “how do we make money from this”. That hurts multiple ways. First of all, it leads to spam comments, paid posts, and other inauthentic content. Someone sees the forum as a way to get their stuff in front of a lot of eyeballs, and that makes the site worse for everyone. Second of all, forum owners start thinking “all these eyeballs on my site, I should get paid for it” and either sells out to the first group, or restricts visibility of the information so that you have to go through them to see it (see Reddit’s deals with Google and OpenAI).
IMO, the system works best when there’s no one owner and most people running and moderating things are volunteers. That describes the early days of Usenet where volunteers were running Usenet nodes, often on computers owned by their schools. It also somewhat describes Reddit in the early era, when a corporation owned the site but it was basically run by volunteer mods. It also describes Lemmy and Mastodon now. The problem is that the more prominent something gets in the search results on a search engine, the bigger a target it is for scammers, spammers, propagandists, etc.
I like where the fediverse is now. It could be a bit more popular, but it’s a risk that the more popular it gets, the worse it gets in other ways.
IMO, the system works best when there’s no one owner and most people running and moderating things are volunteers.
I agree with most of what you are saying but I don’t think everyone has to be volunteers on the fediverse. Moderating and IT work are forms of labor, there is no reason people can’t be materially supported for doing that labor, the problem comes in when the structures and systems become profit driven for social media/BBS systems. One is not the other, we can and absolutely should prioritize materially supporting the people who make the fediverse run and we need to consciously divorce that concept from monetizing fediverse social networks themselves or else we will keep burning out and taking advantage of volunteer devs, admins and moderators.
I’m not saying that the moderators should be volunteers, it’s just that it tends to work best when that’s the case. It means that people care enough to volunteer their effort. They care about the community so they want to put in that effort.
By all means, if there’s a community you like or a fediverse server you like, try to find a way to pay them if you can. But, if it gets to a stage where moderators feel they deserve to be paid, it’s often a bad sign.
skulblakaYes, actually. I know Kagi in particular has a fediverse “lens” that filters results to things found here. Unsure if anyone else has implemented that yet, or how deeply it scrapes fedi for results, but it’s there.
Regardless everything that is posted here is publicly visible so any search engine that wanted to could scrape results from here.
Honestly, the fact it doesn’t show up on search engines much likely contributes to it staying healthy. If it becomes valuable to post here for SEO then we’ll see an increase in bots using it for promotion or whatever else.
clifThe general reduction in quality of search engine results in the last 2-3 years alone is sobering.
And only partly related. It’s not AI’s fault that searching “Tetris Attack” can return generic results for Tetris, and clicking “Did you mean–?” is a blank page.
No, in a morbidly fascinating way you are right, it isn’t really “AI’s fault” and it isn’t really a problem that originated with LLMs… rather somehow AI and LLM bullshit is a further outgrowth, an extension and evolution of the same mindset and process that lead to cryptocurrency and then right up to the creation of AI. Not the technology considered in abstract mind you I am specifically referring to the conceptualization and deployment of the technology within a cultural and economic context and the resulting consequences on the general public’s understanding or misunderstanding of these technologies. There is a bright clear line directly through a series of “next big things” that makes it obvious the actual specific function of technology is less important than other aspects of these bubbles and movements.
AI as a cultural construct is a solution to many important pressing questions of 20th century capitalism on how best to monetize the rather… uncapitalist tendency of computers to undermine capitalism by allowing ideas, experiences and culture to be shared endlessly. Computers devastate scarcity in the basic aspects of how they conceptualize information and this has always been the original sin of computers ever since a gay antifascist created them. AI allows wonderfully transparent search engine indexes to be obscured behind layers of AI training that filter in more and more bullshit/monetized influencing/ads into every crevice of objective reality present in the digital realm and eat it away.
While it is a strange to say, I think it is perfectly reasonable to think of AI as spiritual experience for Google executives as it brings together the two horribly amputated concepts of actual content and promoted content that fatally pre-empted endless profits and growth from search engines.
This is why I hasted my self hosted adventure.
I have to selfhost before everything go to crap
And the craziest thing, is that I got ads in my servers logs. Some company think it is a good thing to advertise in http headers and cookies while scanning all ports
RonnyZittledongBetween SEO garbage and AI slop the internet is fucked. As a 42 year old dude who fell in love with the internet and programming in the late 90’s and made a good living at making websites up until about 5 years ago it really hurts. Nothing is left of what I loved about it. The giant conglomocorps have taken everything over and turned it all to shit. Oh well… Old man shakes fist at sky I guess…
diegantobassNo no no no. We are legion. You are not alone. Let them have it. Here, have some popcorn while we watch our ship of Theseus go down in flames. Beautiful isn’t it. Now, what would you like to build next? Imagine the possibilities!
Same age, same story, same feeling. But somehow, I think we should cheer each others up.
SpotYou can haz cheezburger!
It’s an older code, sir, but it checks out.
Absolutely! We also need to share existing clubs we are part of, where, why, etc.
ah, I think we just need to adapt. there has always been counter culture, and every opportunity to suck any culturally relevant thing dry will happen, as you’ve observed. so, new spaces need to be cultivated ya know? I think lemmy is one of em to a certain extent, although it is already a little under siege
In the age of SEO and AI slop, may your niche hobby or interest never become trendy.
RebekahWSDUnfortunately canning and recipes in general are now concerning and I have to worry about food safety so much more!
Can’t speak for canning, but for the recipes in particular, I was really shocked at the state of things the first time I looked at a recipe on an English website (not my first language).
I only look at recipes in my native language, partly because of the fact that this bullshit is not yet generalised and a fair few website have them still in a good format.
If that’s not the case for you, maybe translating a foreign recipe would help? Don’t know how long for though…
Te acompaño en este momento de dolor.
Canning now boils down to for me, “only use the sites you know are safe” and it’s annoying.
Maybe it’s just back to physical cookbooks again!
I went back to my mum’s method of writing down the recipes I like in a dedicated notebook… Does not help with finding new things, but it does with having to skip slop in recipes I want to do again.
survivorlibrary.com/…/canning_and_preserving-1887…
Here, knock yourself out.
Thanks for this, saved so I can access it offline. There’s a lot to be said to tested, proven methods even if they’re not exciting foods sometimes. My (70yr old) aunt made some canned chicken that looked extremely questionable a few years back. It was canned in its own broth so ended up being encased in a disgusting chicken gelatin. But I fuck with canned meats I’ll try it.
Once we finally got around to using it we were a little sad we hadn’t sooner. It was some of the tenderest most flavorful, real chicken I’d ever had.
The problem with old old recipes is they haven’t been tested probably uh, ever. Ball/Kerr has a good website with tested recipes, as does the National Center for Home Food Preservation, which are the two sites I know are considered safe (well I consider safe??).
That book is very very cool in the “Damn I love old books” way though!
Yes, and, please don’t use old canning and preserving recipes as written. Not all of those recipes were safe. People died of botulism regularly. And some recipes that used to be safe aren’t safe anymore because of changes in technology, in ingredients, in chemicals available, and so on.
For example: it used to be you didn’t need to add acid to tomatoes when canning them, because tomatoes are pretty acidic already. (Acidic foods are safer to can because botulism and other particularly nasty bacteria can’t grow in acidic environments.) But modern tomato varieties are less acidic than the old varieties were, so modern canned tomato recipes have you add lemon juice to increase acidity.
The USDA Guide to Home Canning (most recent edition 2015) is safe and reliable and is available free online.
God. The first line of the preface to that book is:
In this age of adulteration we know not what we eat
We keep making the same mistakes, don’t we?
Salwill investigate
I’ve said it before, but a whitelist search engine would be preferable for information. Immediately disregarding any website created after 2023 seems like a decent start.
So I have noticed a new trend of websites hitting the top of the search results on duck duck go.
The website is always 3 names in a row or more like 3 random words, pretending to a be a blog writing about something.
Then it is usually a bullshit paragraph and then a bunch of seemingly unrelated affiliate links because it is just grabbing anything barely related to what you originally searched for.
Seriously hampered my ability to find out anything about the bread maker I was looking at other than the cost of replacement parts.
Search engines have been made a joke.
AceFuzzLordWe may need a whole ass new internet.
I’d be down if we left the clearweb to the corpos and moved all the human interaction to maybe something like Usenet or I2P.
I would say I’d even be down to learn Gopher protocol, but I looked up their website and they have their own memecoin, so I’m hesitant based off that alone.
You don’t think they wouldn’t ruin that too if that was by some miracle where all the human capital went?
Their plan is to make your internet useless and your PC unaffordable so you have to subscribe to their AI and ask it everything; so they can know everything about you and get ahead of stories that make them look bad, from time to time maybe even kill people.
You will own nothing, and they will force you to like it.
perhaps we can just make Otherworld Wide Web and still use http and everything but its oww.funwebpage.net NO DUMB CORPO CRAPPE ALLOWED
geminiprotocol.net (has nothing to do whatsoever, and predates, the Google AI product with the same name)
queermunist she/herWe need a publicly funded and democratically controlled search engine. As long as there’s a profit motive, enshitification will follow.
ok lets do it. do you know anything about compuders?
“Publicly funded” as in government funded, like the Post Office.
… in fact, in the US it should literally be run by the Post Office.
Why not the library system?
Public libraries are run by states and cities and universities and NGOs and such, which would limit their ability scale. After all, the American Library Association is actually just a non-profit. At best they could buy a subscription service or something, like Kagi.
On the other hand the Post Office has a Federal mandate, which gives it a lot more power and potential funding. The Post Office could actually build the infrastructure needed to become a useful search tool, rather than rely on public-private partnership.
I’ve long said we need a return to how search engines worked pre-google. In the mid-90s, sites like Altavista and Yahoo! made site owners add their sites manually, and you had to choose what category to put them in, and they’d be vetted by a human to make sure it was what it said it was.
BurntWitsAs someone who actually knows a thing or two about automatic watches, I decided to give it a read. While the info is actually not as awful as I thought (no hallucinations surprisingly), I still would not recommend it as a guide, even if it were written by a human. Especially this part:
2. Demagnetize:
If your watch suddenly starts running fast, have it demagnetized.
While, yes, a magnetized movement will cause it to suddenly run fast, demagnetizing a movement isn’t completely harmless. If you’re wrong and the movement isn’t magnetized and instead a different type of damage, attempting to demagnetize it will actually magnetize it, and the combination of a magnetized movement plus whatever other damage caused the movement to run fast suddenly could be far worse. I think an added disclaimer would be helpful here. There are ways to test if a movement is magnetized, that should be mentioned. Blanket recommending demagnetizing a movement without a disclaimer is dangerous. I know this is written by AI and not a human but that part really bugged me.
well thats the thing, its crap written by an LLM. I read the first paragraph then went and found an article written by a person, but Id say a good percentage of people would read the whole damn thing and take it as fact.
personally ive always objected to the term hallucination for these LLMs fucking up. its not hallucinating, its shitty computer code outputting shitty output
for what its worth, I just needed to manually wind my watch a bunch. I just had it bequeathed to me and didnt know anything about them. keeping time now of course
GladaedConsidering you gave the article a high factuality rating, may it be supervised AI output?
edgemaster72As opposed to a manual watch that I have to advance every second?
(yes yes I’m sure they’re referring to a watch you don’t have to wind but like, who has ever referred to anything as an “automatic watch”?)
This is to differentiate watches you have to wind. It’s automatic winding rather than manual winding. It’s lingo that has stuck around since watches became a common item. All watches were manual winding at first. Then the automatic winding watches came out. Then the quartz battery. We still have all these types of watches but to differentiate they’re called quartz, automatic, manual.