Sums up my experience growing up
-
@jackyan @ilovecomputers SEO was the beginning of the death of the usable web.
Proud to say that in all my web-based endeavors over the years I have never once used SEO. It's fucking evil.
@retrosponge @ilovecomputers I agree, and Iʼm like you. Unless you count having honest meta tags as SEO. Iʼve published web stuff since the 1990s, and it gets found without resorting to any tricks.
I would even go so far as to say I hate “SEO”. For nine months in 2024, "SEO” arseholes got their “AIs” to write at least one BS article about me per day. I wrote this early in the year, unaware that I still had seven months of this shit ahead:
Read all about the SEO algorithm that I developed for Google
P.P.PS., May 31, 2024: Since this post keeps getting linked by people posting disinformation, and seemingly by those using LLMs and are illiterate themselves, let me make things...
Jack Yan: the Persuader Blog (jackyan.com)
-
@retrosponge @ilovecomputers I agree, and Iʼm like you. Unless you count having honest meta tags as SEO. Iʼve published web stuff since the 1990s, and it gets found without resorting to any tricks.
I would even go so far as to say I hate “SEO”. For nine months in 2024, "SEO” arseholes got their “AIs” to write at least one BS article about me per day. I wrote this early in the year, unaware that I still had seven months of this shit ahead:
Read all about the SEO algorithm that I developed for Google
P.P.PS., May 31, 2024: Since this post keeps getting linked by people posting disinformation, and seemingly by those using LLMs and are illiterate themselves, let me make things...
Jack Yan: the Persuader Blog (jackyan.com)
@retrosponge @ilovecomputers I sometimes send this to the idiots who enquire about “SEO” with us, even though we say we donʼt do guest posts or “outreach” on our contact pages:
We do not do paid or guest posts—here’s why
Once again, we don't do paid posts from “outreach” or “SEO” companies. Here's why.
Jack Yan: the Persuader Blog (jackyan.com)
-
@ilovecomputers I feel like the core of what we loved about the internet is there - it's hiding in chat rooms, little closed member forums, hand crafted websites. It's not gone, just harder to see, but if you dig through the muck, you find yourself in a small meadow with a few other folks who might share with you something good.
Any recommendations?
I agree that the web is usable and pretty nice using RSS to follow blogs. I also love blogs with a comment section with the same community of people discussing the topic.
What I miss somewhat are dedicated web forums that are active. Something like Head-fi and Steve Hoffman's forum for music.
I wish for forums like that for other topics, as well.
-
Sums up my experience growing up
@ilovecomputers but but but Confetti! (Le Sigh)
-
Any recommendations?
I agree that the web is usable and pretty nice using RSS to follow blogs. I also love blogs with a comment section with the same community of people discussing the topic.
What I miss somewhat are dedicated web forums that are active. Something like Head-fi and Steve Hoffman's forum for music.
I wish for forums like that for other topics, as well.
@mutkitta @triptych @ilovecomputers Not sure whether it's possible, but what if we could use our Mastodon accounts for forums?
-
Sums up my experience growing up
This close to discovering that the real problem is, and always has been, capitalism (and, beyond it, greed).
-
@mutkitta @triptych @ilovecomputers Not sure whether it's possible, but what if we could use our Mastodon accounts for forums?
@hackillu There are fediverse versions of forum-like interfaces that look a little like reddit, or discord, or other things. They can interoperate with your mastodon accounts - you may have to set up new accounts to use them, but the interoperability is still there AFAIK. I haven't (yet) tried them out.
-
Any recommendations?
I agree that the web is usable and pretty nice using RSS to follow blogs. I also love blogs with a comment section with the same community of people discussing the topic.
What I miss somewhat are dedicated web forums that are active. Something like Head-fi and Steve Hoffman's forum for music.
I wish for forums like that for other topics, as well.
@mutkitta Look up:
https://melonland.net/ and its forums - plus all the "handy links" on the page
https://www.naiveweekly.com/ (yes I know it's based on Substack)
Good Internet
A magazine for the non-corporate and independent web, use of code as an art medium, and web development enthusiasm of hobbyists and professionals alike.
Good Internet (goodinternetmagazine.com)
Browse some webrings: https://brisray.com/web/webring-list.htm
-
@mutkitta Look up:
https://melonland.net/ and its forums - plus all the "handy links" on the page
https://www.naiveweekly.com/ (yes I know it's based on Substack)
Good Internet
A magazine for the non-corporate and independent web, use of code as an art medium, and web development enthusiasm of hobbyists and professionals alike.
Good Internet (goodinternetmagazine.com)
Browse some webrings: https://brisray.com/web/webring-list.htm
@mutkitta Re forums, I miss them too. Many groups that would have been on forums are now on Reddit, in Discord servers, or Facebook Groups.
-
Sums up my experience growing up
@ilovecomputers
I remember a #search machine developped by an university in the early 1990s (?), before #Google came up. They found the best content, even for very complicated scientific searches, they found the smallest private website on any island in the Pacific, or in Asia, Africa. The world outside the USA was still connected.They were destroyed by Google and the users prefering the #convenience of the biggest, believing their hollow promises. The biggest got the money for development.
-
@ilovecomputers I feel like the core of what we loved about the internet is there - it's hiding in chat rooms, little closed member forums, hand crafted websites. It's not gone, just harder to see, but if you dig through the muck, you find yourself in a small meadow with a few other folks who might share with you something good.
@triptych Yes, it's up there but more and more hidden by AI Slop.
And people don't dig the mud, they are tired.
For a normal, simple professional search, I nowadays need more than 3 times longer: to find "something", to fact-check, to find traces for more. I work with a bunch of internal databases/platforms but it's crazy to get results inside the fog. Often I don't get these results anymore. I'm not very optimistic.
-
@mutkitta @triptych @ilovecomputers Not sure whether it's possible, but what if we could use our Mastodon accounts for forums?
@hackillu We have something like #groups https://fedi.tips/how-to-use-groups-on-the-fediverse/ but it feels more like RSS than a forum. It's just boosting everything for the group.
Unfortunately, the very vibrant gup.pe groups are destroyed and the new ones are only slowly taking traction.Everyone can set up such a group with @hello
-
Sums up my experience growing up
I was actually talking to my cousins about this the other day, a lot of people in our generation (Millennials but also Gen X and older Gen Z) were using the Internet before all of the really bad dark patterns were added in so we got them at a trickle rate and could develop defenses for some of them as they got more refined
How can we replicate that slow creep for kids now so that they can also build up their defenses instead of getting hit hard while unprepared?
-
Sums up my experience growing up
@ilovecomputers every good library eventually must burn
-
Sums up my experience growing up
@ilovecomputers we should've seen the signs when it got harder to filter chronologically, and then outright impossible. they told you algo knows better what to give you. when's the last time, outside Masto, you've seen a post with zero likes, fresh out of the poster's mind?... because I can't find any (unless among follows, sometimes) on any other damn social media.
tl;dr #yeah
-
Sums up my experience growing up
@ilovecomputers Don't buy the pulp. Your clicks are like dollars; don't give them away for nothing.
We all need to spend time away from the machines, myself included. -
Sums up my experience growing up
@ilovecomputers speaking of cutting up good paper to sell back as pulp...
you think you're making a joke, but this is how International Paper gets the recycled percentage they claim. they send pallets of new reams by the truckload to be broken open and rebaled as consumer waste, which is then sold back to them for a small fee.
-
Sums up my experience growing up
It is really an old story. Money doesn't just talk it dictates.
Using the propaganda model...news businesses favoring profit over the public interest succeed, whilst those favoring reportorial accuracy over profits fail — and are relegated to the margins of their markets (low sales and ratings).
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent:_The_Political_Economy_of_the_Mass_Media)
-
@ilovecomputers speaking of cutting up good paper to sell back as pulp...
you think you're making a joke, but this is how International Paper gets the recycled percentage they claim. they send pallets of new reams by the truckload to be broken open and rebaled as consumer waste, which is then sold back to them for a small fee.
@bweller This sounds both terrifying and a familiar behavior, I'm curious about this process, would you have a source at hand? For reasons exposed in the original post, I'm afraid a web search won't cut it. -
Sums up my experience growing up
@ilovecomputers This hits home hard, as I for with almost anything, from programming to learning Linux and all, there was very little resources in the early 90s. After learning the first steps of Linux from a booklet that came with the Walnut Creek CDROMs, it was almost insane that 5 years later you could just use Altavista to find help for your problems and discover someone's Geocities site on how to put Linux in a certain laptop and have all the devices working.
My distaste for the current state of the Internet is very hard to put in words without it being mostly swearing. I also mourn the death of actual web sites and how all the nuggets of information are nowdays social media posts, that do not get archived the same way as bare web sites were. SEO gives me the most unadulterated feelings of rage as it makes web search completely pointless chore.
If things weren't bad enough, the LLM generated web sites may start as a promising lead on something, but need to be quickly scanned through first so they don't end up just being pointless suggestions that end with "if things won't work for you, buy our Wonder Repair product".
