Technology

I can see your point when talking about broader topics that people tend to absorb over time (politics, social dilemmas, economical condition) but this is more about users intentionally searching narrower topics. What's wrong with my code, how do I fix my car, what computer should I buy, what's the best way to get rid of termites - those kinds of things.

I unashamedly call myself an expert about exactly one car. I learned everything from it's most popular forum from 2010-2015. I admin a Facebook group for it. When I started just on the dedicated forum, we'd get basic questions all the time about super common issues but a few links to good threads and recommendations about using Google with site:thisforum added helped avoid "repeat customers" in the future. That's gone. The forum is forgotten because original owners have sold and new owners don't know about it. No one wants to make an account on a site for just one topic these days when Facebook and reddit are so easy to use. Shitty answer sites following in the footsteps of Yahoo Answers (such as quora, fixya, and justanswer) have dominated normal Google searches. Google often suggests appending "reddit" to searches which is an improvement over those sites, but still atrocious for unpopular niche topics such as my forgotten car, in comparison to the forum. Having an existing account on reddit or Facebook promotes joining a relevant group/sub, not even knowing how to vet them for accuracy, and just blind-firing questions into the void. Google can sparse reddit, but the internal reddit search is rough. Facebook is locked down and the search is even worse. As I've joined other groups for cars I know less about, I can't beleive the abysmal quality of answers I've gotten myself. People act as if I personally sent them a letter requesting information and I get answers that are overly generic, downright useless as they say they don't know, or tell me to try something I said in my main post I already tried. This is the state of the world. None of these platforms value solutions, they value interaction for the sake of user volume. Wanna know why FB Marketplace is continually awful to sift through? Because every minute spent groaning about irrelevant listings and ignoring search parameters is another minute not given to Craigslist, kajiji, or any other classifieds. They don't need you to win, they need the competition to lose.

I don't want to hear anyone's bullshit about ditching reddit and meta. We're a microscopic niche of the internet, here on the fediverse. Our little bubble is not swaying half the fucking planet off meta. Do not act smug and say just go back to the original forums when they're dead/devoid/deactivated because a handful of corporations socially engineered the ideal content streaming platforms.

Blaming kids for being dumb is a cop out. You have niche knowledge from your era about vetting content and avoiding scams/misinformation. You're saying new kids are dumb in those regards. I bet you think older people are dumb in those regards too. Please realize both of those groups have their own niches and think you're dumb, too, in some other topic. You are the peak of a decade, not a century. I don't know your age, you don't know mine, but consider this quote:

“Our youth now love luxury, they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders, and they love to chatter instead of exercise. Children are now tyrants not servants of their household. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up their food and tyrannize their teachers.”

Sound accurate? Look up who said it.