We Finally Have Proof That the Internet Is Worse
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
10 years ago: find anything using google, youtube is still interesting, few AI generated content, lots of communities
Today: Never thought I'd switch to fu*ing Yandex of everything, Youtube ignores my search queries and instead shows me shorts of people dancing, every article accessible via Google is censored or AI written or sells me something, no forums and you have to be on facebook and discord and telegram and reddit to read on anything and since those are big platformes speech is heavily censored and you get left with that void for more/opposing view or with cognitive dissonance, everyone is trying to convert you into buying something or viewing ads.
I find way more interesting stuff in youtube today than 10 years ago. Maybe it is more that you changed rather than youtube changed?
It’s YouTube’s rage bait that is extremely annoying as even one video can take over your entire recommended.
I watched ONE single half of a video of that drunken reviewer who’s actually just a massive bigot and pushes a lot of misogyny in particular, and it took like 14 months of blocking and “do not recommend” for the rage bait to stop being the primary piece of recommended, though I still get the odd “here’s why women are trash and belong in the kitchen, not working” video.
As a result I mostly get recommended great stuff on when watching signed in.
What is supposed to happen when you search using that is that it shows you just results for that channel. It still does that for some searches, but for other searches it seems to be doing a normal site wide search.
Whether or not a given search term works correctly seems to be a function of the search term, not a function of the channel being searched.
For example, let's say you are on a channel that reviews movies, and you want to see if they have reviews of some family friendly animated moves.
Search for "zootopia", "trolls", "cars", "coco", "dragon", "stitch", or "panda" and it gives just results from that channel, or tells you the channel has no matching content.
Search for "luca", "soul", "moana", "puss", "megamind", "ratatouille", "rio", "croods", or "lilo" and you get site wide results.
For multi-word searches order matters: "lilo & stitch" gives site wide results and "stitch & lilo" gives results for the channel so it is not the case that certain words trigger the problem.
I assume this is a bug, since I can't see any connection between the words that break out of channel search. They were all movies in my examples, but similar things happen with words from other categories. Example: "soprano", "tenor", "countertenor", "mezzo-soprano", and "bass-baritone" work correctly, and "baritone", "alto", "base", and "contralto" do not.
The link to Megan Gray's article goes here:
https://www.wired.com/story/google-antitrust-lawsuit-search-...
EDITOR’S NOTE 10/6/2023: After careful review of the op-ed, "How Google Alters Search Queries to Get at Your Wallet," and relevant material provided to us following its publication, WIRED editorial leadership has determined that the story does not meet our editorial standards. It has been removed.
Wayback says:
Hrm.
Wayback Machine has not archived that URL. Click here to search for all archived pages under https://archive.md/o/6zvqS/https://www.wired.com/story/googl...
(nada)
Welcome to the enshittified internet.
On the desktop, archive.* just failed when I am using iCloud Private Relay. Mobile works with the same setting. (wi-fi and wireless only) With ICPR, you can choose country+timezone or general location.
Just another thing to check. May not apply to you.
As much as I'd like to jump on this bandwagon. It's above my pay grade.
The important social media apps (Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and to a lesser degree Twitter) are barely part of the Web. They mostly treat the WWW as a minor traffic acquisition platform.
> but as I see it "pedantic" is just a euphemism for "correct in a way I don't like".
And this is HN; if you want to use words incorrectly and not get called on it, this is a bad place to post.
Of course things need to be paid for, but throwing up a giant stop sign is maybe the worst possible user experience. The web needs a native value transfer mechanism, but so far all efforts have failed.
I didn't read beyond the paywall, and that's okay. I subscribe to other things and if I see enough enticing high quality content from someone I might pay.
It's the folks like me, using an adblocker, that have been getting the good deal in a time with fewer paywalls.
Instead we ended up with all of our costs being hidden away and borne through advertisement, or other indirect forms of bundling. No ordinary person knows the value or cost of what their interacting with in these "free interactions", or even the value of their interactions. This gives all of the incentives and cover required for fresh bullshit to happen.
I'd actually argue that despite all the downsides of paywalls, paywalls are at least in principle up front with what's happening. Incentives and costs are clear.
In other words, I'd argue that Google (especially) has managed to doubly exploit our love of "free". Obviously the ordinary person loves free, but Google was also able to for a long time to also coast off and exploit enormous amounts of good-will amongst the professional developer ranks by aligning itself with "information wants to be free".
There are also working people behind the articles we read that have to put food on the table, how are they to be remunerated?
I'd argue that an internet where paying for stuff was normalized would greatly reduce the need for tracking, and therefore the amount of pushback against any type of regulation.
This disdain for paying for things disproportionately advantages propagandists who aren't in the business to make a profit, and undercuts outsiders who want to genuinely dive into long-form, investigative pieces.
As will CNN, MSNBC, etc. Your (un?)intentional omission of left-leaning sites, ironically, reads like propaganda.