Why is the internet getting worse?

[ChpBstrd]

Just read some interesting thoughts from Marissa Mayer.
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/marissa-mayer-wants-to-know-why-is-the-web-getting-worse-11668712609?mod=home-page

I do think the quality of the internet has taken a hit

When you see the quality of your search results go down, it’s natural to blame Google and be like, ‘Why are they worse?’ she added. “To me, the more interesting and sophisticated thought is if you say, ‘Wait, but Google’s just a window onto the web. The real question is, why is the web getting worse? 

(M)y sense is that recent uptick in the number of inline results is because they are concerned about some of the low-quality experiences out on the web,” Mayer said. “I think that the problem is really hard. You might not like the way that Google’s solving it at the moment, but given how the web is changing and evolving, I’m not sure that the old approach, if reapplied, would do as well as you’d like it to.”

“I think because there’s a lot of economic incentive for misinformation, for clicks, for purchases,” Mayer said. “There’s a lot more fraud on the web today than there was 20 years ago.”

In other words, today's internet content is so much worse than it was in the past, that Google's search engine cannot optimize its search results any more and the company has to directly answer certain questions themselves. So much online content is misinformation that there's no way to use the web without being exposed to it, and no way to build an algorithm to find the truth by comparing it to other online sources.

Seems to me that the continuation of this trend could discredit the entire format of the internet, in the eyes of future generations. They might call us the Gullible Generation if we stick to our old behaviors of trusting whatever the internet says and citing online content as a source, unaware that the internet has changed dramatically in our lifetimes. The mentality of the average adult today is comparable to the people who were deceived by War of the Worlds.

[Sibley]

Are you considering the impact of algorithms? Youtube, facebook, twitter, etc shows you stuff based on algorithms. Google has them too I'm sure.

[FINate]

Why is the internet getting worse? Because it's created by humans, and humans tend towards selfishness. There's a lot of money to be made in Search Engine Optimization and outright fraud, so Google is in a continuous cat-and-mouse battle. They keep tweaking the ranking algorithm, but it appears to be a loosing battle.

This shouldn't be surprising. I love science and technology, but it's clear that these are neither inherently good or bad. Sure, they've produced lots of good, but also really terrible stuff as well. Weapons of Mass Destruction... yeah, science. Anyone recall the so-called Arab Spring? Oh man, this was initially praised as social media bringing enlightenment and democracy to dark corners of the world, yet despots quickly figured out how to coop technology for their own purposes and the whole thing fizzled. Facebook being used to facilitate genocide. Tech products intentionally designed to be addictive. Gain of Function research of viruses. While technology is can be used for good, it can also be used to more efficiently murder and destroy the environment. We need to get away from this naive belief that science and technology are unambiguously good and will somehow save us.
 
In other words, we need to question the Myth of Progress that assumes everything is naturally bending toward progress over time. To be clear, this is not a screed against progressivism in general, a lot of good has come of this in terms of civil rights and what not. But we should question and be more critical of things done in the name of progress. Let's not forget that Manifest Destiny was viewed at the time as a movement of enlightenment and progress.

[roomtempmayo]

Seems to me that the continuation of this trend could discredit the entire format of the internet, in the eyes of future generations. They might call us the Gullible Generation if we stick to our old behaviors of trusting whatever the internet says and citing online content as a source, unaware that the internet has changed dramatically in our lifetimes. The mentality of the average adult today is comparable to the people who were deceived by War of the Worlds.

I suppose every generation needs to have its ah-ha moment that anyone can put anything on the internet.

I'm an elder millennial who remembers the world before the internet, and who was also told throughout high school and college that internet sources were not reliable unless we could find them in print somewhere.  We've always thought the internet was a den of deception and misinformation, where readers need to assume the worst about a source until its legitimacy is demonstrated.  It is zero surprise to anyone under the age of 45 that search engine results are basically bought and paid for with SEO, and do not reliably represent relevant content.

I'm hopeful that we'll look back on the early to mid-2010s as peak internet gullibility.  My subjective impression is that there are far fewer people in 2022 looking to their Facebook feed as a truthful representation of the world than there were circa 2015.

The internet has always been bad, I think the story is that Google is now losing their battle to manage it.  That's much more a story of Google's failures than a story of how somehow the internet itself has gotten worse.

[big_owl]

Yeah and when I was younger the big promise was that cable TV wasn't going to have any commercials since you had to pay for it.  And before that the USA Today newspaper wasn't the McDonalds of newspapers.  It's natural evolution for shit to get dumbed down to the lowest possible denominator and advertised up to the hilt to milk every last dollar possible from the user.  Same as it ever was. 

[GuitarStv]

Barrier to entry.

At one point, you needed to have a certain level of intelligence and perseverance to use the internet.  You needed even more to create a website to share an idea, and even more than that to create a decent looking website.  The amount of effort necessary meant that idiots who just thought of something stupid were less likely to get that idea out there in a professional looking package.

This leads to more crap and less value.

[curious_george]

Barrier to entry.

At one point, you needed to have a certain level of intelligence and perseverance to use the internet.  You needed even more to create a website to share an idea, and even more than that to create a decent looking website.  The amount of effort necessary meant that idiots who just thought of something stupid were less likely to get that idea out there in a professional looking package.

This leads to more crap and less value.

+1 to the above.

In addition content creators on all levels are getting monetarily rewarded by clicks, which increasingly requires emotionally sensitized click bait that pushes the boundaries between truth and falsehood. Meanwhile viewers are increasingly shown only what they are most likely to click on which creates a self filtering of information / thought bubble.

I assume this will eventually lead to us all living in virtual reality where we only see the world we have chosen to believe in first.

[ChpBstrd]

Are you considering the impact of algorithms? Youtube, facebook, twitter, etc shows you stuff based on algorithms. Google has them too I'm sure.

Yes, but I think the concern is how do you write an algorithm that produces truthful, unbiased, accurate information, when the dataset the algorithm is supposed to use is full of false info. The economic incentives to produce false information are currently higher than the economic incentives to produce good information. It's the old garbage-in, garbage-out problem, and we're trying to build an AI that cannot see the real world, and can only see what we put into the internet about the real world. How could an AI know whether or not the COVID vaccine contains microchips, or whether Q-Anon's narrative represents the truth? All it can see is what's in the internet, and all it can do is weigh the number of times various statements appear. It cannot think critically.

Why is the internet getting worse? Because it's created by humans, and humans tend towards selfishness. There's a lot of money to be made in Search Engine Optimization and outright fraud, so Google is in a continuous cat-and-mouse battle. They keep tweaking the ranking algorithm, but it appears to be a loosing battle.

This shouldn't be surprising. I love science and technology, but it's clear that these are neither inherently good or bad. Sure, they've produced lots of good, but also really terrible stuff as well. Weapons of Mass Destruction... yeah, science. Anyone recall the so-called Arab Spring? Oh man, this was initially praised as social media bringing enlightenment and democracy to dark corners of the world, yet despots quickly figured out how to coop technology for their own purposes and the whole thing fizzled. Facebook being used to facilitate genocide. Tech products intentionally designed to be addictive. Gain of Function research of viruses. While technology is can be used for good, it can also be used to more efficiently murder and destroy the environment. We need to get away from this naive belief that science and technology are unambiguously good and will somehow save us.
 
In other words, we need to question the Myth of Progress that assumes everything is naturally bending toward progress over time. To be clear, this is not a screed against progressivism in general, a lot of good has come of this in terms of civil rights and what not. But we should question and be more critical of things done in the name of progress. Let's not forget that Manifest Destiny was viewed at the time as a movement of enlightenment and progress.

Science is merely a process to discover knowledge. The "problems" we choose to solve with our knowledge are often that we need a way to harm other people for our own benefit - as you termed it "selfishness".

So my question is whether the flaw is in the science or in the selfishness? The internet is primarily a device for moneymaking, and through its own evolutionary process it is optimizing itself for that purpose.

As this optimizing process continues, and the internet becomes better and better at duping us out of money, at what point has our own behavior of using computers this way created more problems than it solved? Perhaps we will soon be turning back to science to solve the psychological problems of internet addiction and the economic problems of digital serfdom in the attention economy.

[dcheesi]

"It's not us; it's the Internet!"

I'm not sure I entirely buy this argument. As others have noticed, even fairly straightforward search options, like quotation marks, no longer operate like they used to.

Used to be, searching for "foo bar" (in quotes) would turn up results that specifically mentioned that exact phrase; now, Google is just as likely to come back with loosely related topics or terms, as if you'd never used quotes at all.

As a programmer, I use Google search (embarrassingly) often to search for specific keywords and phrases, so I'm highly sensitive to this. It seems like things went downhill rather abruptly a couple of months ago, and it hasn't gotten any better.

I suspect that they're becoming overly reliant on AI in place of deterministic algorithms. Which may be fine or even better for your average user, who has only the vaguest idea of what they want or how to ask for it. But it sucks for those of us who need the extra precision that the old algorithmic tools provided.

[curious_george]

"It's not us; it's the Internet!"

I'm not sure I entirely buy this argument. As others have noticed, even fairly straightforward search options, like quotation marks, no longer operate like they used to.

Used to be, searching for "foo bar" (in quotes) would turn up results that specifically mentioned that exact phrase; now, Google is just as likely to come back with loosely related topics or terms, as if you'd never used quotes at all.

As a programmer, I use Google search (embarrassingly) often to search for specific keywords and phrases, so I'm highly sensitive to this. It seems like things went downhill rather abruptly a couple of months ago, and it hasn't gotten any better.

I suspect that they're becoming overly reliant on AI in place of deterministic algorithms. Which may be fine or even better for your average user, who has only the vaguest idea of what they want or how to ask for it. But it sucks for those of us who need the extra precision that the old algorithmic tools provided.

As another programmer I find this thought embarrassingly terrifying as well.

[Cadman]

Barrier to entry.

At one point, you needed to have a certain level of intelligence and perseverance to use the internet.  You needed even more to create a website to share an idea, and even more than that to create a decent looking website.  The amount of effort necessary meant that idiots who just thought of something stupid were less likely to get that idea out there in a professional looking package.

This leads to more crap and less value.

Yes and no. The internet I remember was full of websites created out of a person's passion for a particular subject. Angelfire, Lycos and Geocities made it easy to put content out there, but basic HTML was all you really needed if you wanted to 'roll your own'. Plus many ISPs included a few megs of server space and a subdomain as part of your dial-up package, and it was fun to experiment. Sure, it wasn't pretty, and quality ran the gamut from boy bands to military history, but you had participation from Jr. High students to retired NASA engineers creating their own vision.

It's unknown exactly how many of the 38 million Geocities pages were lost when Yahoo pulled the plug; they had no interest in archiving and basically said, "whoops". By that point, I had moved my website to our family's blueberry iMac, after learning that every Mac had web server capability with only a couple of clicks, right out of the box. Pretty slick.

Since I FIRE'd, I decided last year to bring some of those sites back online, in a new and improved way. So much for easy. Gone are the dirt cheap registrars. You now need SSL certificates and have to figure out how to link and renew annually. CSS sheets, JS and so forth have overtaken old fashioned HTML. Dreamweaver is still a thing, but it's priced out of the reach of an enthusiast. And hosting services aren't exactly cheap anymore, either. 1. I can only imagine how intimidating this all is for a novice. 2. I get why FB is still so damn popular.

[roomtempmayo]

2. I get why FB is still so damn popular.

Not to derail the conversation, but I'm always surprised by the number of good independent restaurants who have no web presence independent of Facebook and/or Yelp.

[ChpBstrd]

Barrier to entry.

At one point, you needed to have a certain level of intelligence and perseverance to use the internet.  You needed even more to create a website to share an idea, and even more than that to create a decent looking website.  The amount of effort necessary meant that idiots who just thought of something stupid were less likely to get that idea out there in a professional looking package.

This leads to more crap and less value.

+1 to the above.

In addition content creators on all levels are getting monetarily rewarded by clicks, which increasingly requires emotionally sensitized click bait that pushes the boundaries between truth and falsehood. Meanwhile viewers are increasingly shown only what they are most likely to click on which creates a self filtering of information / thought bubble.

I assume this will eventually lead to us all living in virtual reality where we only see the world we have chosen to believe in first.

Yes, the converging trends of reduced cost to publish and increased monetization of everything via addictive attention-tactics, tracking, and ads means quality has gone down the gutter. @GuitarStv is correct that there used to be a tricky IQ test on anyone who wanted to publish information online. That was a long time ago. As I said, the internet is evolving into a more efficient predator.

I suspect this will eventually lead us to a world of digital addicts/serfs paying with their attention, led by a post-digital elite who avoid screentime or are naturally addiction-resistant, allowing them to be the only ones to excel in politics, law, medicine, science, or business. Mark Zuckerberg's admission that his kids have strict screentime limits is an eye-opener here.

In a sense, we've been living in such a world for a long time. The people watching 4-8 hours of trash TV per day in the years before social media didn't accomplish anything more with their lives than the people scrolling TikTok videos today. Now that's the vast majority of people with their phones. If you're wondering why it's so hard to find a good doctor or a good craftsman or a date who engages in focused conversation with you, this is what's causing the shortage, and it's only getting worse. Idiocracy is coming.

[less4success]

Since I FIRE'd, I decided last year to bring some of those sites back online, in a new and improved way. So much for easy. Gone are the dirt cheap registrars. You now need SSL certificates and have to figure out how to link and renew annually. CSS sheets, JS and so forth have overtaken old fashioned HTML. Dreamweaver is still a thing, but it's priced out of the reach of an enthusiast. And hosting services aren't exactly cheap anymore, either. 1. I can only imagine how intimidating this all is for a novice. 2. I get why FB is still so damn popular.

Just a couple of notes:

• .com domains are still pretty cheap, assuming you can find an unused name (< $20/year)--and you don't always need your own domain anyway
• SSL for web sites is often free these days, thanks to Let's Encrypt
• There are a surprising number of free hosts still (I haven't used it, but Netlify seems popular and, I think, free; NearlyFreeSpeech.net is cheap)

Way more expensive and cumbersome than posting a muddy stream of unconsciousness to Facebook, of course.

[Cadman]

Just a couple of notes:

• .com domains are still pretty cheap, assuming you can find an unused name (< $20/year)--and you don't always need your own domain anyway
• SSL for web sites is often free these days, thanks to Let's Encrypt
• There are a surprising number of free hosts still (I haven't used it, but Netlify seems popular and, I think, free; NearlyFreeSpeech.net is cheap)

Way more expensive and cumbersome than posting a muddy stream of unconsciousness to Facebook, of course.

Appreciate the tip on Let's Encrypt. I'm a HW guy, so I have to admit I struggled getting the latest certificate to play nice, figure out what, where and how to upload the encryption key and validate (running a couple different domains), and then there's no real incentive to make it easy to use a competitor's cert. Which brings to light how important web security is these days, and how complex it's all gotten. At least one of my domains is with one of the cheapies, but the tradeoff is that it's not exactly turn-key. These guys have figured out they can charge extra for that.

Two semi-interesting things.
1. I still have a couple websites bookmarked that are 20+ years old, created and maintained by curmudgeonly engineers, done up in basic HTML, and are the only online record of some very specific material. These use to come up in a google search. Now, I can paste verbatim text from these sites into the search bar and all I get are ads. Page 3, 4, 5, no hits.

2. I graduated HS in 2000. I remember the web before it was monetized and overly commercialized. The younger generation never really experienced that. But I was surprised that many older folks don't remember it, either. When I mentioned to my elderly father about bringing an old site online, and the amount of research I was putting into the content (for fun!), he couldn't understand it. Was I charging people for this information? Am I getting kickback for ads? Why would I do this? Clearly the internet wasn't on his radar until Ebay, Amazon, E-Trade, and others came online.

Now I sound like one of those guys claiming Eternal September. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

[GilesMM]

My internet experience is getting a little noisy but also better with richer content all the time. An acceptable tradeoff. The early internet I joined had nothing useful except for still shots of a coffee pot at some university.

[ATtiny85]

My internet experience is getting a little noisy but also better with richer content all the time. An acceptable tradeoff. The early internet I joined had nothing useful except for still shots of a coffee pot at some university.

Ha! Those were the days. Love the reference.

For me though, the richer content that I experience has degraded what I want from the internet. I prefer nothing richer than Wikipedia. Heavy on text (which is real content to me), and for sure nothing flashing or moving.

[FINate]

So my question is whether the flaw is in the science or in the selfishness? The internet is primarily a device for moneymaking, and through its own evolutionary process it is optimizing itself for that purpose.

As this optimizing process continues, and the internet becomes better and better at duping us out of money, at what point has our own behavior of using computers this way created more problems than it solved? Perhaps we will soon be turning back to science to solve the psychological problems of internet addiction and the economic problems of digital serfdom in the attention economy.

The flaw is humanity's selfishness. Science is a tool and as such is neither inherently good or bad. How many times do we need to repeat the mistake of past, naively believing that science (and by extension, technology) will magically fix the problems caused by previous iterations? In my opinion, which is very unpopular among science/tech utopists, is that we need a lot more regulation of the tech industry. Stronger privacy regulations. Limits on what kind of data can be retained and how it can be used. Actual liability for the things users post/upload, which would provide much strong incentives to verify accounts and protect against malicious use. Things like that.

[ender]

Are you considering the impact of algorithms? Youtube, facebook, twitter, etc shows you stuff based on algorithms. Google has them too I'm sure.

Yes, but I think the concern is how do you write an algorithm that produces truthful, unbiased, accurate information, when the dataset the algorithm is supposed to use is full of false info. The economic incentives to produce false information are currently higher than the economic incentives to produce good information. It's the old garbage-in, garbage-out problem, and we're trying to build an AI that cannot see the real world, and can only see what we put into the internet about the real world. How could an AI know whether or not the COVID vaccine contains microchips, or whether Q-Anon's narrative represents the truth? All it can see is what's in the internet, and all it can do is weigh the number of times various statements appear. It cannot think critically.

More importantly, what are algorithms optimizing for?

I highly doubt any algorithm or decision making process at this point is optimizing for much other than 1) ad revenue and 2) engagement.

[Just Joe]

Barrier to entry.

At one point, you needed to have a certain level of intelligence and perseverance to use the internet.  You needed even more to create a website to share an idea, and even more than that to create a decent looking website.  The amount of effort necessary meant that idiots who just thought of something stupid were less likely to get that idea out there in a professional looking package.

This leads to more crap and less value.

Yes and no. The internet I remember was full of websites created out of a person's passion for a particular subject. Angelfire, Lycos and Geocities made it easy to put content out there, but basic HTML was all you really needed if you wanted to 'roll your own'. Plus many ISPs included a few megs of server space and a subdomain as part of your dial-up package, and it was fun to experiment. Sure, it wasn't pretty, and quality ran the gamut from boy bands to military history, but you had participation from Jr. High students to retired NASA engineers creating their own vision.

It's unknown exactly how many of the 38 million Geocities pages were lost when Yahoo pulled the plug; they had no interest in archiving and basically said, "whoops". By that point, I had moved my website to our family's blueberry iMac, after learning that every Mac had web server capability with only a couple of clicks, right out of the box. Pretty slick.

Since I FIRE'd, I decided last year to bring some of those sites back online, in a new and improved way. So much for easy. Gone are the dirt cheap registrars. You now need SSL certificates and have to figure out how to link and renew annually. CSS sheets, JS and so forth have overtaken old fashioned HTML. Dreamweaver is still a thing, but it's priced out of the reach of an enthusiast. And hosting services aren't exactly cheap anymore, either. 1. I can only imagine how intimidating this all is for a novice. 2. I get why FB is still so damn popular.

This is the internet I have enjoyed using so much over the past 25 years - those websites built by people with a passion for something.

Unfortunately those people seem to be aging rapidly or gone entirely. The wealth of information these people have offered my hobbies is simply amazing. This has been my primary use for the internet. The younger folks don't seem to share these same passions or aren't as motivated to create websites about them.

I've learned that to "use the internet" means many different things to everyone.

History has been my second use. Communication (email) third. By comparison I've used social media a tiny fraction as much. My age is probably showing.

I have avoided the messy political rumor mills that so many I know have become so deeply involved with. I have used the internet more to fact check the rumors that I've be told by coworkers and friends or family. DW and I have one relative is a rabid repeater of rumors that are always easily fact checked away. And they don't want to hear the facts.

[LonerMatt]

Technology (in any form) is a tool, but a tool leads the user as well.

If you hammer, a lot of things look like nails.

There's this wishy washy 'it's how we use it' which is some of the story, but the missing piece is 'this is how we built/designed/made it'. A good example of this is social media leading to a point where content that whips up outrage generates the most time users spend on those platforms, which leads to those whipping it up to be rewarded despite that being, well, far from ideal.

Similarly, a lot of web platforms have fought not to be considered media companies and, simultaneously, throw up their hands saying moderation is too damn hard. The result? Well, ethnic cleansing in Ethiopia and Myanmar in the last few years was incited and organised almost entirely over Facebook. There is for sure an underlying human issue, but the technology is not agnostic (nor was it designed to be).

It takes two to tango here folks.

[Michael in ABQ]

Two semi-interesting things.
1. I still have a couple websites bookmarked that are 20+ years old, created and maintained by curmudgeonly engineers, done up in basic HTML, and are the only online record of some very specific material. These use to come up in a google search. Now, I can paste verbatim text from these sites into the search bar and all I get are ads. Page 3, 4, 5, no hits.

I would guess those kinds of sites fare very poorly on mobile and therefore Google ranks them very low. They may also be self-hosted and relatively slow - another ding against them. I do still come across some sites like that in Google search results and it's like taking a trip back in time. All that's missing is some terrible GIFs or animation (at auto-playing least sound on websites is no longer a thing).

I run an ecommerce business and about 70% of our traffic is mobile. And our typical customer is a woman in her 60s. Almost everyone has a smartphone, but many people don't have a desktop/laptop computer at home. Especially if they're not someone who grew up in the 90s and 2000s when that was more common. The young and the old tend to be more likely to only have a phone.


People go on the internet to get questions answered or be entertained. In that respect, it's still pretty effective. Google has gotten to the point that for many of those simpler questions (what's the population of X, etc.) you don't even need to click through to a website.

[dcheesi]

2. I get why FB is still so damn popular.

Not to derail the conversation, but I'm always surprised by the number of good independent restaurants who have no web presence independent of Facebook and/or Yelp.

Or they technically have a website, but it's only half-finished and never updated ...all updates happen on their FB page.

[ATtiny85]

2. I get why FB is still so damn popular.

Not to derail the conversation, but I'm always surprised by the number of good independent restaurants who have no web presence independent of Facebook and/or Yelp.

Or they technically have a website, but it's only half-finished and never updated ...all updates happen on their FB page.

Which would be fine if the FB face had information that was easy (for me) to find. I want hours and menu, not what looks to a bunch of posts.

[chemistk]

I'll connect two ideas from this thread:

SEO + Reduced Attention (driven by TikTok & its. derivatives) = Garbage Search Quality.

Then add: Monopolization.

I have to concur with the original thesis, that especially recently, the Internet has taken a nosedive in quality. In a couple short years, starting with Vine -> TikTok, which also birthed (to the detriment of society) Instagram, Snapchat, Youtube, and Facebook's own version of the endless video content scroll, we've conditioned many if not a bit of the majority of smartphone users to have the attention span of a flea. Having experienced a few versions of these myself, I can attest to just how addictive they are especially when you're mentally wiped and your defenses are down.

This, coupled with the proliferation of cobbled together "websites" that just host SEO optimized rewrites of "content", has led to most people (in my own estimation) not even leaving the first page of Google results.

Do you remember in 2007, clicking on each "o" in the Google at the bottom to see what came up with your search? When's the last time you did that? If you still go past the first page of results, ask someone else in your life when the last time they did was. I bet they can't remember.

Now, we get the answers to our questions in a little box below the search bar and then too many links to sites to buy something even remotely related to the thing, and the SEO garbage, and then maybe on page 7/8 of the results, there's an interesting site.

Collectively, our attention spans can only handle the first page of the Google results before we have to focus our haggard gaze at something else happening.

I frequently have to search for very technical scientific information (not necessarily papers/journals), and even in that very specific area I'm finding my results muddier and muddier as time goes on. Eventually I'm concerned that the search is going to be almost useless because I'll have 20 pages trying to sell me something and nothing substantive to actually read about.

The other part that I feel feeds into this is the death of so many news sites. As media outlets are bought out, the content that they created is obscured and then wiped from the internet. Fewer writers and smaller budgets means less time devoted to niche topics and interesting side projects (which I would argue is generally what makes the internet the most enjoyable), and more time spent on who can get the best headline put together and the best graphics slapped up to sop up the most eyeball time on a topic that's already being covered by every media outlet.

I hold firm in my belief that at some point the last decade, we've silently passed the threshold of stimulation that the human mind can accommodate. Absent careful cultivation of one's attention, we have too many inputs that require varying degrees of action. Couple that with our inherent inability to grasp the significant of statistics and large, abstract concepts, and we end up with a strangely predictable animalistic behavior wherein it can be predicted what's going to draw more eyeball time, regardless of the quality of the content.

[GuitarStv]

I'll connect two ideas from this thread:

SEO + Reduced Attention (driven by TikTok & its. derivatives) = Garbage Search Quality.

Then add: Monopolization.

I have to concur with the original thesis, that especially recently, the Internet has taken a nosedive in quality. In a couple short years, starting with Vine -> TikTok, which also birthed (to the detriment of society) Instagram, Snapchat, Youtube, and Facebook's own version of the endless video content scroll, we've conditioned many if not a bit of the majority of smartphone users to have the attention span of a flea. Having experienced a few versions of these myself, I can attest to just how addictive they are especially when you're mentally wiped and your defenses are down.

This, coupled with the proliferation of cobbled together "websites" that just host SEO optimized rewrites of "content", has led to most people (in my own estimation) not even leaving the first page of Google results.

Do you remember in 2007, clicking on each "o" in the Google at the bottom to see what came up with your search? When's the last time you did that? If you still go past the first page of results, ask someone else in your life when the last time they did was. I bet they can't remember.

Now, we get the answers to our questions in a little box below the search bar and then too many links to sites to buy something even remotely related to the thing, and the SEO garbage, and then maybe on page 7/8 of the results, there's an interesting site.

Collectively, our attention spans can only handle the first page of the Google results before we have to focus our haggard gaze at something else happening.

I frequently have to search for very technical scientific information (not necessarily papers/journals), and even in that very specific area I'm finding my results muddier and muddier as time goes on. Eventually I'm concerned that the search is going to be almost useless because I'll have 20 pages trying to sell me something and nothing substantive to actually read about.

The other part that I feel feeds into this is the death of so many news sites. As media outlets are bought out, the content that they created is obscured and then wiped from the internet. Fewer writers and smaller budgets means less time devoted to niche topics and interesting side projects (which I would argue is generally what makes the internet the most enjoyable), and more time spent on who can get the best headline put together and the best graphics slapped up to sop up the most eyeball time on a topic that's already being covered by every media outlet.

I hold firm in my belief that at some point the last decade, we've silently passed the threshold of stimulation that the human mind can accommodate. Absent careful cultivation of one's attention, we have too many inputs that require varying degrees of action. Couple that with our inherent inability to grasp the significant of statistics and large, abstract concepts, and we end up with a strangely predictable animalistic behavior wherein it can be predicted what's going to draw more eyeball time, regardless of the quality of the content.

Too long, didn't read.  Oooooh, but did you see that video of puppies going around?

[Cadman]

Chemistk, I couldn't agree more.

Google now has this nasty habit of stripping portions of my search terms in order to show me higher quantity, lower quality results. That's great that I can buy a Trane 3-ton TXV on ebay as a top hit, but I searched for a Bard 6-ton and included a very specific part number. Boolean operators, too, have been hit-or-miss for some reason.

BTW, I mentioned lamenting the loss of the old internet in another comment. While the dancing hamster was charming, I was really thinking of sites like this that have now gone dark: https://web.archive.org/web/20200112102101/http://univac1.0catch.com/

[Just Joe]

Are any of you exploring alternative search engines? I rarely use Google anymore. I've been giving DuckDuckGo my attention lately. In a few weeks I'll switch again until I feel like I have tested the top ten. I want to look at search aggregators again.

[Syonyk]

I'm inclined to blame a lot of either "AI-generated text" or "Near-AI generated text," referring to the sort of "content farms" that pay people a couple bucks for some surface level "listacle" about a topic, one point per page, filled with ads, etc.  They're usually subtly wrong, but, hey, who cares, you got someone 4 pages in before they bounced out, for 78 ad impressions, three full screen slidovers, and an autoplaying video in the browser tree!  Also, a bonus download of a cursor optimizer.

And, of course, the weaponization of attention for behavioral surplus extraction.  Zuboff's book on Surveillance Capitalism is a slog, but a very good read to understand the absolutely human-toxic crap being deployed by every tech company in pursuit of more time-on-device to extract more surplus to sell as prediction products to their actual customers.

I use the internet a whole lot less than I used to.  It's mostly a conduit for Matrix messages anymore (I self-host my Matrix server, federation... should be working), occasional forums, but even then I'm simply not using them nearly as much as I used to.  More and more people I know, myself included, are simply opting out of bothering with the internet for much.  I still self-publish my blog, but I'll see how long that lasts into the future.  Doing projects without having to document every step does save a lot of time.  And it's a decent source for ebooks and the like... but even there, I've been moving back to just buying used physical forms on eBay.  They read better under lantern light in the evening.

Similarly, a lot of web platforms have fought not to be considered media companies and, simultaneously, throw up their hands saying moderation is too damn hard. The result? Well, ethnic cleansing in Ethiopia and Myanmar in the last few years was incited and organised almost entirely over Facebook. There is for sure an underlying human issue, but the technology is not agnostic (nor was it designed to be).

Indeed, genocide is super engaging!  And everyone believes the Standard Tech Appopollylolly, so you just use that when you're caught!  "We are so, so sorry you caught us enabling this vile behavior that runs afoul of our Community Standards.  We promise to do the work to ensure you don't catch us doing it again."  Same refrain every time, for the sort of "super profitable behaviors" that you can't not know about, if you pay the slightest bit of attention.  But, you know, What's Good for Zuck is Good for Zuck and all, so what's a bit of genocide somewhere across the world in exchange for those sweet profits?  I mean, marketing to angry people watching beheadings, what could be easier?

I frequently have to search for very technical scientific information (not necessarily papers/journals), and even in that very specific area I'm finding my results muddier and muddier as time goes on. Eventually I'm concerned that the search is going to be almost useless because I'll have 20 pages trying to sell me something and nothing substantive to actually read about.

Yup.  "Trying to infer what people actually are in the market to buy" is at odds with "delivering the results requested," and the first is a lot more profitable.  I mean, scientific information?  NERD!!!!!!  What are you in the market to consume?  That's your right and proper place in the modern tech economy - a consumer.  You consume the information about the products you're about to consume.  For the profit of others.

...and we end up with a strangely predictable animalistic behavior wherein it can be predicted what's going to draw more eyeball time, regardless of the quality of the content.

Indeed.  And that's been optimized for north of a decade now, with great results for those doing the optimizing.  A class of people who can't think for themselves about anything, "trust the experts" in... whatever it is they're told to trust them about now, and who are good little producers of behavioral surplus that's then used to ensure that they consume whatever surplus they can generate, and, ideally, more.  A debt-trapped worker is a good worker!

I absolutely hate what's been done with computers, consumer tech, etc.  And I work with them at deep levels.  Anymore, I run Qubes on almost everything to isolate bits of tech stack from each other, because I don't trust them to not leak/collaborate/etc, and I'm trying to use computers less and less in the evenings.  Eventually my blog might just be typewritten by mail or something.  I should work out what that looks like...

But, short answer, I think the internet is getting worse because more and more people with any sense have simply stopped using it.  It's a good New Years resolution!

[Just Joe]

I'll sign up for your newsletter Syonyk. I've enjoyed reading your website. THAT is the kind of internet I've enjoyed for 20 years. Engineering projects, open-source software, garage shops doing interesting things, antique cars, etc. I hope it never stops.

[Syonyk]

I'll sign up for your newsletter Syonyk. I've enjoyed reading your website. THAT is the kind of internet I've enjoyed for 20 years. Engineering projects, open-source software, garage shops doing interesting things, antique cars, etc. I hope it never stops.

I've half-jokingly sent printed forms of some posts to people in the past.  I should put together a more formal system for that, every post, quarterly, etc.

I'll keep doing it until I run out of interesting things to write about (unlikely), get tired of it (possible), or the internet stops existing in a form that I care to interact with (likely).

[economista]

The most recent Freakonomics Podcast talks about this! https://freakonomics.com/podcast/is-google-getting-worse/

[Michael in ABQ]

Neal Stephenson wrote one of my favorite books about 15 years ago Ananthem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anathem - it's basically an alternate reality Earth where there is a religion based around math and science and the story centers around the monks who live apart from the secular world and basically study math and science and philosophy. A tangential part of the story is that their version of the internet has evolved to become 99.999% garbage and misinformation. The people who can navigate it have to rely on sophisticated algorithms and social trust to determine which information is true.

For instance, if you were reading a copy of the Declaration of Independence would you know if a comma was missing or added? What about a single word? Or a whole paragraph? Imagine if there were 50,000 sites each purporting to contain the real document. How would you determine which one was accurate? Perhaps you would trust the site claiming to be hosted by the National Archives or the Smithsonian. What if it was something like an engineering document where there isn't a definitive government source. What makes Engineer A's website more trustworthy a source? They could claim to be a PhD who graduated top of their class from MIT but anyone can make up whatever they want on the internet. So you would have to dig deeper and see if they actually did go to MIT. Are their photos from that time? Can someone access a video feed showing them present at the graduation ceremony being honored as the top of their class and does that person match some contemporaneous source.

You can imagine going down an almost infinite rabbit hole to determine if a source of information is worthy of trust. It's sort of replicated here on this forum. We're all just usernames but some people have spent years demonstrating their knowledge of a particular topic and have gained credibility. Even if we can't see their degree or real name or work history we can tell that some people have a deep knowledge of taxes, finances, etc.

[PDXTabs]

Since I FIRE'd, I decided last year to bring some of those sites back online, in a new and improved way. So much for easy. Gone are the dirt cheap registrars. You now need SSL certificates and have to figure out how to link and renew annually. CSS sheets, JS and so forth have overtaken old fashioned HTML. Dreamweaver is still a thing, but it's priced out of the reach of an enthusiast. And hosting services aren't exactly cheap anymore, either. 1. I can only imagine how intimidating this all is for a novice. 2. I get why FB is still so damn popular.

Just a couple of notes:

• .com domains are still pretty cheap, assuming you can find an unused name (< $20/year)--and you don't always need your own domain anyway
• SSL for web sites is often free these days, thanks to Let's Encrypt
• There are a surprising number of free hosts still (I haven't used it, but Netlify seems popular and, I think, free; NearlyFreeSpeech.net is cheap)

Yup, check out namecheap.com and letsencrypt.org. There are lots of ways to run a website these days with cloud services but with those two you could run on an AWS instance for approximately 12.50/month. Though there might be even cheaper ways with AWS, I'm not sure.

EDITed to add: with projects like bootstrap and jekyll you can get a lot done without actually needing to know CSS particularly well. If you want you can buy jekyll themes too. They are all over the place (jekyllthemes.io, hydejack, etc).

[PDXTabs]

You're probably right, but I have a skewed image of the internet. I read the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, and the BBC on the internet. Then I find open source packages to ship products. I compile them with some of the best compilers I've ever had access to in my life, all developed online. Just the other day I found this cool academic paper Are You Sure You Want to Use MMAP in Your Database Management System?

[AlanStache]

Neal Stephenson wrote one of my favorite books about 15 years ago Ananthem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anathem - ...  A tangential part of the story is that their version of the internet has evolved to become 99.999% garbage and misinformation. The people who can navigate it have to rely on sophisticated algorithms and social trust to determine which information is true.
...

Stevensons "Fall; or, Dodge in Hell" demonstrates this really well too, at least while in the land of the living. 

I cant say I have noticed any real decline in the internet but I am fairly carful of what I click on to avoid training the algorithms that I want junk served to me.  It is sad that the "the internet" is for most people on most days only like five websites. 

Even in the mmm forums I try to not click into the more political threads, just not worth the mental energy.

[driftwood]

Just an example of this issue:  One day I got curious about dandruff. I know the perception is that it's bad. But is it a health issue? A cleanlinees issue? Is having it a sign of a disease? My line of thought was similar to what we think about weeds... weeds are only "weeds" because they are plants that people don't want marring their grass lawns. There is no species of plant called "weeds" that is a bad species whose very existence is a problem to our ecology (not talking about invasive species here).

If you ask Google about why dandruff is a problem, what you find are ads on ads on ads telling you how to deal with it. But I'm starting to wonder if the whole idea is just the beauty industry inventing a problem and then selling us a supposed solution.

[Michael in ABQ]

Neal Stephenson wrote one of my favorite books about 15 years ago Ananthem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anathem - ...  A tangential part of the story is that their version of the internet has evolved to become 99.999% garbage and misinformation. The people who can navigate it have to rely on sophisticated algorithms and social trust to determine which information is true.
...

Stevensons "Fall; or, Dodge in Hell" demonstrates this really well too, at least while in the land of the living. 

I cant say I have noticed any real decline in the internet but I am fairly carful of what I click on to avoid training the algorithms that I want junk served to me.  It is sad that the "the internet" is for most people on most days only like five websites. 

Even in the mmm forums I try to not click into the more political threads, just not worth the mental energy.

Yeah, I purposefully avoid going to any website for a brand unless it's in a different browser (or private browsing session) because I know I'll start getting remarking ads an hour later.

[AlanStache]

Yeah, I purposefully avoid going to any website for a brand unless it's in a different browser (or private browsing session) because I know I'll start getting remarking ads an hour later.

I turned that in to a game at one point, "what is the lowest priced item I can get advertised to me", turns out HomeDepot will pay for adds on individual washers.  (washers as in nuts and bolts.)

[Michael in ABQ]

Yeah, I purposefully avoid going to any website for a brand unless it's in a different browser (or private browsing session) because I know I'll start getting remarking ads an hour later.

I turned that in to a game at one point, "what is the lowest priced item I can get advertised to me", turns out HomeDepot will pay for adds on individual washers.  (washers as in nuts and bolts.)

We sell some products that cost $1 or less. But even though the cheapest click is about $0.20 we might get a customer who buys 10 or 100 of that product. Or their first order is $5 but they place a second order a few months later for $100 after getting an email from us. Also, with shipping even a product sold for $1.00 (plus shipping) can still generate a bit of a profit.

[scottish]

You're probably right, but I have a skewed image of the internet. I read the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, and the BBC on the internet. Then I find open source packages to ship products. I compile them with some of the best compilers I've ever had access to in my life, all developed online. Just the other day I found this cool academic paper Are You Sure You Want to Use MMAP in Your Database Management System?

I'm with you on this Mr PDXTabs.    If you can stick to the high quality stuff it's great.    I think the problem lies in the advertising sites masquerading as social networking.