this post was submitted on 03 Jun 2024
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Youβre missing the part where the results are infuriatingly answering a similar but not the same query because itβs more profitable to do so.
For example, looking up the part number of a transmission on my car, and then half the page is links to dealerships and repair shops. Not the answer to my question.
That's what bothers me most--i used to be able to find technical help and info very easily. Nowadays it's all buried behind pages of bullshit--if you can find any of those forums at all. There's very few places to get good help at this point, and I'm afraid it's going to be even more difficult to find those places as time marches on.
This is what worries me.
Forums were some of the best places to find specific information on niche topics. Were moderated and controlled in such a way to maintain the information and improve when new information was discovered.
But then social media killed many forums. Along with capitalism.
Many forums emulated social media, until they were no longer forums.
Others went the way of more ads than real posts.
All had their readership decrease, and many lost ability to host due to that.
And so much of that info is now potentially locked up in discord servers that you can't just view on a browser. You gotta join their server, pick the right roles and hope they actually keep their old troubleshooting solutions archived or ask about your problem and get yelled at for asking something that's already been asked because discord search function sucks.
I wonder if this will increase the social value of being an expert in your field. These specific questions might become unsearchable in the near future due to AI garbage polluting the Internet.
Doing research on the Internet will become more in-depth once again. The search engines only a first step. You have to know what the meaningful resources are and how to use them. Back to the days of the academic database.
But... but my technical expertise was based on being able to google stuff...
The sponsored stuff even has made its way into Waze. I placed a lunch Jimmy John's a few minutes ago, got in my car, told Waze to navigate to Jimmy John's, and the first result was for another store 32 miles away. Enshittification is stupid.