Realistically, we’ve seen the dying of the open web.
It may not be dead for good but it’s very diseased.
With LLMs/AIs now polluting all sorts of things with rubbish (the fake bug report for cURL is my “favourite” story so far) that is hard to distinguish from genuine human content …
… I’m now thinking it’s dead. Like, we are going to start thinking about using processes of getting and sharing information that don’t just go over the internet.
Closed online environments with gated membership. In person processes where humanity is physically verified. Live conversation to verify actual human understanding. Static sources of information like books and manuals etc.
Not for everything, obviously. But for some things it seems the open internet may soon have a new cost that undermines its value proposition.
I’m personally not interested anymore in just using the open internet. I’m sniffing for some verification that something is worth reading or interacting with.
I remember that what you are describing was already present in the “open web” of old.
You’d come to some place “openly”, but then (in case of RP forums)
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until you’d write a long character description and discuss it with mods for long, you wouldn’t be allowed to post in most parts of that forum, and
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until you had chatted over ICQ with a few people from that forum and knew who they are and they knew who you are, you wouldn’t be really welcome, people would just ignore your posts.
You would come to a place quite socially, not unlike IRL meetings. It wouldn’t be FB or Google confirming your registration and giving you right to post, it would be a real person you were going to communicate with later.
And maybe I’m not that asocial\autistic\etc, if that was fine with me back then and what’s now isn’t. Maybe I’m just afraid of silent eyes and silent hands managing my social interactions, which is sane.
Well said.
I’ve said it a number of times else where … but it’s easy to forget that the era of mega corp online platforms was a weird time of rampant extraction and manipulation. We’ve got quite a bit of stuff to unlearn and relearn (like your examples).
And of course now with the big corps turning on us to extract more money and use the data they’ve milked from us build AIs to take our jobs away … we have the final proof of what we should have known the whole time … that social media should have kept its roots in organic human organisation.
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This whole SEO business disgusts me. It’s destroyed the web, meaning the content is no longer as important as the stuff you do to make Google suggest your site. I try to restrict myself to sites I know well, ones whose content I trust. Yay web! Not.
You’ve got to add “reddit” to any search term to get answers to anything. Sadly, and perhaps due to the distributed nature of lemmy (and the relatively young nature of the network), lemmy results are still not great.
I run a small business – a niche business in scientific equipment. I have about a half dozen competitors in North America, and maybe a few dozen globally. So you’d think it would be fairly easy to dominate the search results for those specific terms – and we do!
However, mixed in with the search results are a bunch of shell companies that don’t actually have any equipment – they exist only to drive traffic to another company through their website to get a referrer bonus. So it looks like there’s more competition than there is, but really it’s just a bunch of optimizers creating these shell companies to earn referral income. And those sites are terrible! We refuse to stoop to that level.
Unfortunately, google makes too much money now, and is too beholden to their shareholders to change it. So unless a competitor shows up with “don’t be evil” back on the menu, with their own algorithms (and not just repackaged bing or whatever), we’re stuck with this for now I guess.
I miss the google of ~1999 when it was disrupting the crap search engines. Now it’s just another crap search engine.
Actually other search engines do much better with Lemmy. Kagi’s search works wonders if you select the filter for Fediverse Forums. And you can assign that filter to a bang, such as !lemmy, so that when you search “!lemmy query here” it’ll search only on the fediverse A few examples:
Interesting. I just signed up for their “trial” version and punched my keywords in – “geophysical equipment rentals canada” and my region to Canada – my company came up first, followed by our primary Canadian competitor. It wasn’t until item number 8 that the SEO crap pages started showing up. Very nice. Now I just need to figure out how to make this a business expense ;)
Their search results constantly impress me and honestly it’s 10 bucks for unlimited searches, it’s worth it even if it’s not a business expense, plus since you’re paying for the service they’re less likely to track you. I wish their code was FOSS, but I’ll take it, still better than google, bing, and all the others I’ve tried.
Also they actively promote the small web and you can even personalize your search results by removing websites you don’t like from the searches (for example I have a lot of big tech websites blocked)
Actually a good article
I used to think that SEO only affected people trying to sell products directly. It’s sad how badly it’s polluted the ability to find any content at all on the internet, as it’s cheap enough and easy enough to do at this point that they’re just trying to sell on ad revenue/clicks.
And this ladies and gentlemen is another reason why we should try to escape big tech’s grasp.
I’ve really been seeing this for programming questions and it’s infuriating. It’s dozens of different sites that are either copying the one stack overflow forum or an endless repeat of the same question. It wasn’t even 2 years ago that you could find the answer easily. Now it’s all crap and so hard to find the official documentation.
I’ve started to ask ChatGPT first to avoid this.
