I read this a few days ago and it is a pretty depressing, but not necessarily inaccurate view of our current situation. I'm not quite so jaded as the author (yet), but I do feel like tech...
I read this a few days ago and it is a pretty depressing, but not necessarily inaccurate view of our current situation. I'm not quite so jaded as the author (yet), but I do feel like tech companies are doing their best to turn me, a life long tech enthusiast, into a tech adverse luddite.
Interesting point- luddites, at the time, were only opposed to technology in so much as they were against it taking their jobs, income, livelihoods. So, in a sense, the rebranding of "luddites" as...
Interesting point- luddites, at the time, were only opposed to technology in so much as they were against it taking their jobs, income, livelihoods. So, in a sense, the rebranding of "luddites" as anti-technology-in-general is sort of another win for the ruling class in the struggle against the working class.
Yeah, it's important to remember two things about the Luddites: They were primarily a labor movement. In the end their fears were proven correct. Automation made products more affordable for...
Yeah, it's important to remember two things about the Luddites:
They were primarily a labor movement.
In the end their fears were proven correct. Automation made products more affordable for everyone but they came at the cost of decimating large swaths of the middle class.
The economy is not a zero-sum game. There is no reason to assume that money was "vacuumed up by the wealthy" and one cannot simply assume that if the wealthy had less money, the poor would have...
The economy is not a zero-sum game. There is no reason to assume that money was "vacuumed up by the wealthy" and one cannot simply assume that if the wealthy had less money, the poor would have more money.
The economy is not a zero-sum game, but the money made in a set period of time is a fixed sum that we can directly observe how they were divided. And thanks to historians we can see how and why it...
The economy is not a zero-sum game, but the money made in a set period of time is a fixed sum that we can directly observe how they were divided. And thanks to historians we can see how and why it happened.
Can you point me to a historian who explains how the period we are discussing here - the period of unprecedented growth of the middle class - the money was "vacuumed up by the wealthy"? I am no...
Can you point me to a historian who explains how the period we are discussing here - the period of unprecedented growth of the middle class - the money was "vacuumed up by the wealthy"? I am no historian, but that claim contradicts my elementary knowledge of history and I am skeptical.
Is this a serious post? Are you familiar with the context of the Luddites? The people who owned the machines no longer had to pay the workers for that labor and kept that money for themselves?...
Is this a serious post? Are you familiar with the context of the Luddites? The people who owned the machines no longer had to pay the workers for that labor and kept that money for themselves? This is the general truth of all technological advancement so far in Western history. Ways to prevent or reverse that has historically been labor unions/action.
If we consider only their immediate circumstances and specific industries, their concerns were valid - automation did threaten their traditional jobs and livelihoods. However, looking at the...
In the end their fears were proven correct. Automation made products more affordable for everyone but they came at the cost of decimating large swaths of the middle class.
If we consider only their immediate circumstances and specific industries, their concerns were valid - automation did threaten their traditional jobs and livelihoods. However, looking at the broader economic development, the introduction of automation has generally led to increased productivity, economic growth, and eventually, job creation in new sectors. The industrial revolution actually led to the growth of the middle class.
I would question your history. Here in the US, the industrial revolution brought us the gilded age, which was characterized by robber barrons and extreme income inequality. The labor movement is...
I would question your history.
Here in the US, the industrial revolution brought us the gilded age, which was characterized by robber barrons and extreme income inequality. The labor movement is what created the middle class.
The Luddites were members of a 19th-century movement of English textile workers. Why are you moving goalposts to the US specifically? This was not the context of this discussion. I do not know...
The Luddites were members of a 19th-century movement of English textile workers. Why are you moving goalposts to the US specifically? This was not the context of this discussion. I do not know enough about the US history specifically to be sure there were not some differences, but generally speaking, I don't think it can be said that Luddites were "proven correct" or that automation decimated "large swaths" of the middle class. I believe my description of what happened during the industrial revolution is pretty mainstream interpretation of history and I would need a good explanation from a reputable source to be convinced otherwise. So, I remain skeptical.
I'm not trying to move any goalposts, I'm just explaining things from the contexts with which I am most familliar. "Middle class" means drastically different things across English and US contexts....
I'm not trying to move any goalposts, I'm just explaining things from the contexts with which I am most familliar. "Middle class" means drastically different things across English and US contexts.
I find talking about the history of the original Luddite movement to be somewhat fraught because it seems every time I look up the history a lot of the details seem to change on even basic things like where the name came from.
I am aware of the history of the actual luddites, but the rebrand as you put it, is cemented in and you nailed it that it is a win for the ruling class. I think that a lot of the recent AI...
I am aware of the history of the actual luddites, but the rebrand as you put it, is cemented in and you nailed it that it is a win for the ruling class. I think that a lot of the recent AI adjacent "advances" are going to take a lot of jobs, income, and livelihoods so we're likely to see a return of the movement.
To the average internet user, this article might seem groundbreaking or even depressing. But for those of us who have been around since the early days of the internet, it's more of the same. I...
To the average internet user, this article might seem groundbreaking or even depressing.
But for those of us who have been around since the early days of the internet, it's more of the same.
I believe many of today's online issues stem from users locking themselves into digital ecosystems, becoming fiercely loyal to either Google or Apple.
Over the last decade, I've taken a different route: gradually moving towards self-hosting the services I used to subscribe to.
I use Adblock across all my devices and have been steadily migrating my computers to Linux. For games that don't play nicely with Linux, dual-booting Windows remains an option.
I fail to see Apple’s role in any of the content dilution the article is talking about. Almost all of this is a result of Google’s terrible page rank algorithm and inability to rein in malicious...
I believe many of today's online issues stem from users locking themselves into digital ecosystems, becoming fiercely loyal to either Google or Apple.
I fail to see Apple’s role in any of the content dilution the article is talking about. Almost all of this is a result of Google’s terrible page rank algorithm and inability to rein in malicious SEO, and that includes the services like DoorDash and AirBnB making the reservations for hotels and restaurants worse. They’re able to outcompete mom-and-pops because they have better SEO to the point where they outrank the shops/restaurants themselves in searches for their own names.
Social Media’s role has largely been at eliminating the habit of visiting websites directly, thereby depriving the companies that actually produces the articles or media of access to their own audience. This has destroyed people’s ability to independently research and fact check things online.
The author does mention Wikipedia at the end as a good example, but that’s being steadily taken over by activist squatters on many topics who explicitly set out to structure the articles with an agenda. The page on any topic that’s even adjacent to topics like astrology or alternative medicine, for example, read more like /r/Atheism screeds about how it’s all fake than they do like encyclopedia articles.
I put forward that it may well be intentional. The search leadership was been replaced by people who live in the ad world, after building a near monopoly on ad networks for web sites. The...
inability to rein in malicious SEO
I put forward that it may well be intentional. The search leadership was been replaced by people who live in the ad world, after building a near monopoly on ad networks for web sites.
The optimization path is simple: Google no longer wants you to quickly find what you're looking for. Google wants to maximize the number of AdSense impressions they can force you to see. They want you to see the ads on the search results page, and they want to to click many links out to pages that are also AdSense partners. Spammy sites with SEO fluff and AdSense placements make Google more money, so they're optimizing for what is now the status quo. I wouldn't be surprised if the presence of the JavaScript tag for AdSense banners was even a factor in ranking.
The part about the JavaScript tag would be an explosive revelation if it became public. Even the FTC’s anemic anti-trust enforcement powers could go nuclear if they caught wind of that. (Though...
The part about the JavaScript tag would be an explosive revelation if it became public. Even the FTC’s anemic anti-trust enforcement powers could go nuclear if they caught wind of that. (Though they can probably approximate the same end through less obvious means I’m sure).
Other than that you’re right. Everything shitty about Google makes ads more lucrative, but even DDG can’t seem to surface useful content anymore. I think the Google dominance has just choked it out.
If is the operative word. From what we've been hearing out of the antitrust investigations lately, Google has very shady internal communications policies that avoid paper trails, and setting...
If is the operative word. From what we've been hearing out of the antitrust investigations lately, Google has very shady internal communications policies that avoid paper trails, and setting expectations for things to implement without putting them in written requirements.
I'm sure there isn't an explicit function that parses the page and checks for the AdSense URI, but I wouldn't be surprised if some machine learning element in the ranking system was trained in such a way that "desirable" pages in the training set mostly had AdSense placements and undesirable ones mostly did not. "Coincidentally," of course.
Finding metrics that correlate with other metrics you can't legally use is an unfortunately common thing.
Google also controls both sides of the search and ads equation. It's a commonly held notion that SEO is the reason why recipe sites are full of expository text instead of just a simple recipe...but that's also a product of the AdSense content policies. To be approved to host ads, your site has to meet certain criteria, which incentivize the same sort of behavior as the search optimization side.
I started paying for Kagi search this year, it's definitely $11/mo better than Google, and they have guides for setting Kagi as default search engine for all browsers and platforms.
I started paying for Kagi search this year, it's definitely $11/mo better than Google, and they have guides for setting Kagi as default search engine for all browsers and platforms.
Gonna need an example there for the last claim, I've seen a lot of pseudoscience believers complain about an "agenda" that just happens to be the observable reality we all live in.
Gonna need an example there for the last claim, I've seen a lot of pseudoscience believers complain about an "agenda" that just happens to be the observable reality we all live in.
Just read any of the alternative medicine articles. They aren’t written in the style of an encyclopedia article, they’re written to emphasize that they’re pseudoscience and often have almost no...
Just read any of the alternative medicine articles. They aren’t written in the style of an encyclopedia article, they’re written to emphasize that they’re pseudoscience and often have almost no information about what the people who believe in that stuff actually believe about it. It’s utterly uninformative.
Whether it’s organized or not is immaterial. An emergent tendency that arises through to systemic factors, like Wikipedia being disproportionately dominated by rationalist Melvins, still amounts to the same thing.
Part of the reason for the tone of pseudoscience Wikipedia articles comes from edit wars with true believers and the reliable source criteria. Given equal numbers of edits, those coming from...
Part of the reason for the tone of pseudoscience Wikipedia articles comes from edit wars with true believers and the reliable source criteria. Given equal numbers of edits, those coming from people with totally unfounded beliefs tend to be replaced more successfully by edits that have reliable sources, but the frustration level increases with each exchange. You can frequently see the evidence of this in the associated talk page.
Yeah that’s pretty evident, but I also see some social groups forming and alliances forming around “holding the line” that leads to groupthink and overzealousness. I don’t really care how it got...
Yeah that’s pretty evident, but I also see some social groups forming and alliances forming around “holding the line” that leads to groupthink and overzealousness. I don’t really care how it got there, but it really makes me not trust Wiki as a useful source to get a sense for the actual consensus positions on contentious topics, it seems to tilt in favor of whichever cohort in an argument is more proficient at successfully edit warring and rules lawyering.
For a good example compare the NHS page explaining the Alexander Technique against the Wikipedia page. The Wiki page actually looks much better than the first time I came across it, but it still dedicates almost half of its character count to this “Health Effects” section that reads very much like a skeptic of the technique trying to advance the agenda that it’s pseudoscience rather than giving an overview of the literature on it. It also barely even covers what the technique entails or how it’s practiced. If you look at the talk page it becomes pretty clear that the people squatting on the page are absolutely not engaging their critics in good faith.
Now if someone said to you “Hey you should try the Alexander Technique” and you decide to look it up. Would you walk away from that Wikipedia article with anything more than the foggiest notion of what you’d be in for if you called up a teacher or coach or whatever? I suspect not! The article just reads like pedantic arguing about the persuasiveness of various studies rather than an overview of the subject.
Way way back in my college days I ended up in an extremely tedious edit war over Ancient Indian history topics because the entire subject area was being squatted on by, like, three guys who had a weird fixation on maximizing the accomplishments of Greek civilization and Alexander the Great’s successors. It was basically impossible to dislodge them because the bureaucratic processes around arbitration were so vague and esoteric, and they were all pretty obviously coordinating with each other outside of Wikipedia, to push their agenda. Me and my roommate finally did manage to get the ringleader of that group banned because a different person they were edit warring with on a different topic reached out to us and she was proficient enough in the Wiki bureaucracy to guide us towards how to hand him the rope to hang himself with.
I gave up after that small victory, but did develop the ability to smell agenda-posting in Wiki entries thereafter.
I must be one of those horrible pedants you're talking about, because I'm not seeing the problem. That page has about as much detail as I would expect from an encyclopedia, and I find it extremely...
I must be one of those horrible pedants you're talking about, because I'm not seeing the problem. That page has about as much detail as I would expect from an encyclopedia, and I find it extremely helpful that Wikipedia entries tend to err on the side of skepticism.
I just had a quick look at the Wikipedia entry for homeopathy. It didn’t seem particularly unhinged to me. It clearly lays out the history of homeopathic medicine and its underlying theory, and...
I just had a quick look at the Wikipedia entry for homeopathy. It didn’t seem particularly unhinged to me. It clearly lays out the history of homeopathic medicine and its underlying theory, and simply states that there is no evidence that homeopathic remedies work. That is just a fact, and an important one to point out, considering that it’s dangerous to rely on medical treatments that don’t actually do anything.
Again, a specific example to illuminate your argument would be helpful. I'm looking at the Astrology entry right now and even perused the talk page. Attacking rationalism as somehow undesirable of...
Again, a specific example to illuminate your argument would be helpful. I'm looking at the Astrology entry right now and even perused the talk page. Attacking rationalism as somehow undesirable of a repository of knowledge makes me suspect that you're mad that your edits in favor of ear candling or whatever keep getting reverted.
No need to cast aspersions or declare your suspicions about the above person just because they didn't immediately and fully provide you with bulleted sources. Maybe they were busy, maybe they...
No need to cast aspersions or declare your suspicions about the above person just because they didn't immediately and fully provide you with bulleted sources.
Maybe they were busy, maybe they couldn't be bothered doing the wikipedia'ing for you. In any event, they replied to you quickly and you hurled back an unfounded accusation based on your 'suspicions'.
Making an unsupported claim and replying with "do your own research" when pressed should be "not how we treat each other on Tildes." I wasn't asking for a thesis paper. They did reply to someone...
Making an unsupported claim and replying with "do your own research" when pressed should be "not how we treat each other on Tildes." I wasn't asking for a thesis paper.
They did reply to someone else and I don't think their argument is particularly convincing, but others have chimed in so I'm leaving that alone.
A lot of this is less depressing if you use the Internet as a tool instead a source of life. Watching a YouTube trailer, enjoying an online magazine or social media site, online streaming...
A lot of this is less depressing if you use the Internet as a tool instead a source of life.
Watching a YouTube trailer, enjoying an online magazine or social media site, online streaming services:
These are all modern Internet luxuries for entertainment. What about using word-of-mouth from your friends to judge which movie to see? Reading real print magazines or books over lunch? Getting DVDs from the library?
Coworkers using ChatGPT to produce garbage:
Hold them responsible. Just like the old days when normal human coworkers were being lazy, if someone's producing bad work, then it's their fault. Don't take the fall for them.
Recipes filled with ads, useless search results, getting mistaken for an American:
Do more stuff locally. In your neighborhood, town, city. Get a cookbook from the library, ask a friend for their favorite recipe. Spend more time talking to real people, learning from experience and advice.
(Admittedly, Wikipedia is hard to beat.)
Airbnb and Uber being terrible:
We all knew these companies were just propped up by VC cash. It was never going to last, and hotels & taxis haven't died off.
But damn, it began as so much more. What's terrible for everyone is the potential that this thing had to be something more than the status quo, but that we're back to where we were through no...
But damn, it began as so much more. What's terrible for everyone is the potential that this thing had to be something more than the status quo, but that we're back to where we were through no fault of our own.
Nobody wanted this and I feel so shitty giving up on a thing that we all believed in for so long.
Attachments aren't part of email anymore, good luck with your free OneDrive subscription! UPS never delivers to your door anymore, each time, before the estimated delivery time slot even starts...
Your Gmail is approaching storage capacity.
Attachments aren't part of email anymore, good luck with your free OneDrive subscription!
UPS never delivers to your door anymore, each time, before the estimated delivery time slot even starts you get a mail notifying you your parcel can be picked up at a location nearby. The mail also states that a signature and verification by ID are required but you can't remember the last time you were asked for any of those.
Your bank's old card reader broke. In vain you scour their website to find some info about how to replace it. You call and after 45 minutes of mildly irritating muzak a customer service rep tells you you can go swap it for free in an office a couple of miles away. Once you get there it appears to be closed. You ring the bell but nobody answers. You go home. You call again and after 55 minutes of irritating muzak a customer service rep tells you you should've gone during "public" opening hours which is a 3 hour time slot early in the morning on one particular day of the week. You put it off because you still have an app that can identify you and log you in to your online bank account.
Your bank app needs an update. Your phone's memory is insufficient even after you deleted all your whatsapp data. You buy a new phone. You reinstall your banking app. You can't verify your identity because your card reader is broken. You install the identity app, it needs to verify your identity through your banking app.
An automated voice calls you to ask about your recent purchase of 600 euro in bitcoin on coinbase. You get redirected to a human who, in a thick Indian accent, assures you you're talking to Paypall. You're not buying it and hang up.
Your mom calls you for a second opinion, she bought it. You scour her bank's website for a number...
When Google made its support more and more nonexistent for the common user, is when I realised companies can just about get away with providing less and less support. It's beginning to be the case...
When Google made its support more and more nonexistent for the common user, is when I realised companies can just about get away with providing less and less support. It's beginning to be the case wherein companies take the "my way or the highway" approach to user experience, knowing full well that for some reason users keep using their platforms despite atrocious support, for the mere reason being that the alternatives are either terrible or don't have the same resources to compete.
There was a talk I attended that spoke of the statistical justification for the economics of "allowing a few to fall through the cracks," which is when companies deliberately make support harder and harder to contact and obtain. Although this may seem like "a few" falling through the cracks, it will eventually be the case wherein a greater majority would not even be able to find an avenue wherein they can get the services that they need. When that happens, and when society becomes technocratic enough, socioeconomic inequalities would deepend and the divide would just get larger.
They had it as late as 2012 IIRC. You could open support tickets and talk to a real person from the support pages. Edit: Actually, it's still there. Not sure of quality. https://support.google.com/
They had it as late as 2012 IIRC. You could open support tickets and talk to a real person from the support pages.
Edit: Actually, it's still there. Not sure of quality.
A while back I've written a, well rant, here about the utter rejection of even the most basic surface knowledge of technology that is integral to the current way of life of an average person by...
A while back I've written a, well rant, here about the utter rejection of even the most basic surface knowledge of technology that is integral to the current way of life of an average person by the society at large and by an average person.
Currently average person is simply not willing, at all, for any reason to acquire the absolute basics of technical proficiency required to be able to use alternatives to proprietary blobs. That are by the way always just not user-hostile enough to prevent mass migration.
And economic situation being what it is, it is basically inevitable that the internet will approach maximum lock-in, minimal user choice, maximum monetization and minimal utility as time goes by.
I read this a few days ago and it is a pretty depressing, but not necessarily inaccurate view of our current situation. I'm not quite so jaded as the author (yet), but I do feel like tech companies are doing their best to turn me, a life long tech enthusiast, into a tech adverse luddite.
Interesting point- luddites, at the time, were only opposed to technology in so much as they were against it taking their jobs, income, livelihoods. So, in a sense, the rebranding of "luddites" as anti-technology-in-general is sort of another win for the ruling class in the struggle against the working class.
Yeah, it's important to remember two things about the Luddites:
They were primarily a labor movement.
In the end their fears were proven correct. Automation made products more affordable for everyone but they came at the cost of decimating large swaths of the middle class.
Which was completely avoidable. There's no technical reason that money had to be vacuumed up by the wealthy, it was and is a policy choice.
The economy is not a zero-sum game. There is no reason to assume that money was "vacuumed up by the wealthy" and one cannot simply assume that if the wealthy had less money, the poor would have more money.
The economy is not a zero-sum game, but the money made in a set period of time is a fixed sum that we can directly observe how they were divided. And thanks to historians we can see how and why it happened.
Can you point me to a historian who explains how the period we are discussing here - the period of unprecedented growth of the middle class - the money was "vacuumed up by the wealthy"? I am no historian, but that claim contradicts my elementary knowledge of history and I am skeptical.
Is this a serious post? Are you familiar with the context of the Luddites? The people who owned the machines no longer had to pay the workers for that labor and kept that money for themselves? This is the general truth of all technological advancement so far in Western history. Ways to prevent or reverse that has historically been labor unions/action.
If we consider only their immediate circumstances and specific industries, their concerns were valid - automation did threaten their traditional jobs and livelihoods. However, looking at the broader economic development, the introduction of automation has generally led to increased productivity, economic growth, and eventually, job creation in new sectors. The industrial revolution actually led to the growth of the middle class.
I would question your history.
Here in the US, the industrial revolution brought us the gilded age, which was characterized by robber barrons and extreme income inequality. The labor movement is what created the middle class.
The Luddites were members of a 19th-century movement of English textile workers. Why are you moving goalposts to the US specifically? This was not the context of this discussion. I do not know enough about the US history specifically to be sure there were not some differences, but generally speaking, I don't think it can be said that Luddites were "proven correct" or that automation decimated "large swaths" of the middle class. I believe my description of what happened during the industrial revolution is pretty mainstream interpretation of history and I would need a good explanation from a reputable source to be convinced otherwise. So, I remain skeptical.
I'm not trying to move any goalposts, I'm just explaining things from the contexts with which I am most familliar. "Middle class" means drastically different things across English and US contexts.
I find talking about the history of the original Luddite movement to be somewhat fraught because it seems every time I look up the history a lot of the details seem to change on even basic things like where the name came from.
I am aware of the history of the actual luddites, but the rebrand as you put it, is cemented in and you nailed it that it is a win for the ruling class. I think that a lot of the recent AI adjacent "advances" are going to take a lot of jobs, income, and livelihoods so we're likely to see a return of the movement.
To the average internet user, this article might seem groundbreaking or even depressing.
But for those of us who have been around since the early days of the internet, it's more of the same.
I believe many of today's online issues stem from users locking themselves into digital ecosystems, becoming fiercely loyal to either Google or Apple.
Over the last decade, I've taken a different route: gradually moving towards self-hosting the services I used to subscribe to.
I use Adblock across all my devices and have been steadily migrating my computers to Linux. For games that don't play nicely with Linux, dual-booting Windows remains an option.
I fail to see Apple’s role in any of the content dilution the article is talking about. Almost all of this is a result of Google’s terrible page rank algorithm and inability to rein in malicious SEO, and that includes the services like DoorDash and AirBnB making the reservations for hotels and restaurants worse. They’re able to outcompete mom-and-pops because they have better SEO to the point where they outrank the shops/restaurants themselves in searches for their own names.
Social Media’s role has largely been at eliminating the habit of visiting websites directly, thereby depriving the companies that actually produces the articles or media of access to their own audience. This has destroyed people’s ability to independently research and fact check things online.
The author does mention Wikipedia at the end as a good example, but that’s being steadily taken over by activist squatters on many topics who explicitly set out to structure the articles with an agenda. The page on any topic that’s even adjacent to topics like astrology or alternative medicine, for example, read more like /r/Atheism screeds about how it’s all fake than they do like encyclopedia articles.
I put forward that it may well be intentional. The search leadership was been replaced by people who live in the ad world, after building a near monopoly on ad networks for web sites.
The optimization path is simple: Google no longer wants you to quickly find what you're looking for. Google wants to maximize the number of AdSense impressions they can force you to see. They want you to see the ads on the search results page, and they want to to click many links out to pages that are also AdSense partners. Spammy sites with SEO fluff and AdSense placements make Google more money, so they're optimizing for what is now the status quo. I wouldn't be surprised if the presence of the JavaScript tag for AdSense banners was even a factor in ranking.
The part about the JavaScript tag would be an explosive revelation if it became public. Even the FTC’s anemic anti-trust enforcement powers could go nuclear if they caught wind of that. (Though they can probably approximate the same end through less obvious means I’m sure).
Other than that you’re right. Everything shitty about Google makes ads more lucrative, but even DDG can’t seem to surface useful content anymore. I think the Google dominance has just choked it out.
If is the operative word. From what we've been hearing out of the antitrust investigations lately, Google has very shady internal communications policies that avoid paper trails, and setting expectations for things to implement without putting them in written requirements.
I'm sure there isn't an explicit function that parses the page and checks for the AdSense URI, but I wouldn't be surprised if some machine learning element in the ranking system was trained in such a way that "desirable" pages in the training set mostly had AdSense placements and undesirable ones mostly did not. "Coincidentally," of course.
Finding metrics that correlate with other metrics you can't legally use is an unfortunately common thing.
Google also controls both sides of the search and ads equation. It's a commonly held notion that SEO is the reason why recipe sites are full of expository text instead of just a simple recipe...but that's also a product of the AdSense content policies. To be approved to host ads, your site has to meet certain criteria, which incentivize the same sort of behavior as the search optimization side.
Kagi is supposed to be good. I haven't tried it yet but I am tempted
I started paying for Kagi search this year, it's definitely $11/mo better than Google, and they have guides for setting Kagi as default search engine for all browsers and platforms.
Gonna need an example there for the last claim, I've seen a lot of pseudoscience believers complain about an "agenda" that just happens to be the observable reality we all live in.
Just read any of the alternative medicine articles. They aren’t written in the style of an encyclopedia article, they’re written to emphasize that they’re pseudoscience and often have almost no information about what the people who believe in that stuff actually believe about it. It’s utterly uninformative.
Whether it’s organized or not is immaterial. An emergent tendency that arises through to systemic factors, like Wikipedia being disproportionately dominated by rationalist Melvins, still amounts to the same thing.
Part of the reason for the tone of pseudoscience Wikipedia articles comes from edit wars with true believers and the reliable source criteria. Given equal numbers of edits, those coming from people with totally unfounded beliefs tend to be replaced more successfully by edits that have reliable sources, but the frustration level increases with each exchange. You can frequently see the evidence of this in the associated talk page.
Yeah that’s pretty evident, but I also see some social groups forming and alliances forming around “holding the line” that leads to groupthink and overzealousness. I don’t really care how it got there, but it really makes me not trust Wiki as a useful source to get a sense for the actual consensus positions on contentious topics, it seems to tilt in favor of whichever cohort in an argument is more proficient at successfully edit warring and rules lawyering.
For a good example compare the NHS page explaining the Alexander Technique against the Wikipedia page. The Wiki page actually looks much better than the first time I came across it, but it still dedicates almost half of its character count to this “Health Effects” section that reads very much like a skeptic of the technique trying to advance the agenda that it’s pseudoscience rather than giving an overview of the literature on it. It also barely even covers what the technique entails or how it’s practiced. If you look at the talk page it becomes pretty clear that the people squatting on the page are absolutely not engaging their critics in good faith.
Now if someone said to you “Hey you should try the Alexander Technique” and you decide to look it up. Would you walk away from that Wikipedia article with anything more than the foggiest notion of what you’d be in for if you called up a teacher or coach or whatever? I suspect not! The article just reads like pedantic arguing about the persuasiveness of various studies rather than an overview of the subject.
Way way back in my college days I ended up in an extremely tedious edit war over Ancient Indian history topics because the entire subject area was being squatted on by, like, three guys who had a weird fixation on maximizing the accomplishments of Greek civilization and Alexander the Great’s successors. It was basically impossible to dislodge them because the bureaucratic processes around arbitration were so vague and esoteric, and they were all pretty obviously coordinating with each other outside of Wikipedia, to push their agenda. Me and my roommate finally did manage to get the ringleader of that group banned because a different person they were edit warring with on a different topic reached out to us and she was proficient enough in the Wiki bureaucracy to guide us towards how to hand him the rope to hang himself with.
I gave up after that small victory, but did develop the ability to smell agenda-posting in Wiki entries thereafter.
I must be one of those horrible pedants you're talking about, because I'm not seeing the problem. That page has about as much detail as I would expect from an encyclopedia, and I find it extremely helpful that Wikipedia entries tend to err on the side of skepticism.
Pseudoscience must be pointed out every single time it comes up.
I just had a quick look at the Wikipedia entry for homeopathy. It didn’t seem particularly unhinged to me. It clearly lays out the history of homeopathic medicine and its underlying theory, and simply states that there is no evidence that homeopathic remedies work. That is just a fact, and an important one to point out, considering that it’s dangerous to rely on medical treatments that don’t actually do anything.
why is that a bad thing?
Again, a specific example to illuminate your argument would be helpful. I'm looking at the Astrology entry right now and even perused the talk page. Attacking rationalism as somehow undesirable of a repository of knowledge makes me suspect that you're mad that your edits in favor of ear candling or whatever keep getting reverted.
No need to cast aspersions or declare your suspicions about the above person just because they didn't immediately and fully provide you with bulleted sources.
Maybe they were busy, maybe they couldn't be bothered doing the wikipedia'ing for you. In any event, they replied to you quickly and you hurled back an unfounded accusation based on your 'suspicions'.
That's not how we treat each other on Tildes.
Making an unsupported claim and replying with "do your own research" when pressed should be "not how we treat each other on Tildes." I wasn't asking for a thesis paper.
They did reply to someone else and I don't think their argument is particularly convincing, but others have chimed in so I'm leaving that alone.
A lot of this is less depressing if you use the Internet as a tool instead a source of life.
We don't need the Internet to live happily.
But damn, it began as so much more. What's terrible for everyone is the potential that this thing had to be something more than the status quo, but that we're back to where we were through no fault of our own.
Nobody wanted this and I feel so shitty giving up on a thing that we all believed in for so long.
Attachments aren't part of email anymore, good luck with your free OneDrive subscription!
UPS never delivers to your door anymore, each time, before the estimated delivery time slot even starts you get a mail notifying you your parcel can be picked up at a location nearby. The mail also states that a signature and verification by ID are required but you can't remember the last time you were asked for any of those.
Your bank's old card reader broke. In vain you scour their website to find some info about how to replace it. You call and after 45 minutes of mildly irritating muzak a customer service rep tells you you can go swap it for free in an office a couple of miles away. Once you get there it appears to be closed. You ring the bell but nobody answers. You go home. You call again and after 55 minutes of irritating muzak a customer service rep tells you you should've gone during "public" opening hours which is a 3 hour time slot early in the morning on one particular day of the week. You put it off because you still have an app that can identify you and log you in to your online bank account.
Your bank app needs an update. Your phone's memory is insufficient even after you deleted all your whatsapp data. You buy a new phone. You reinstall your banking app. You can't verify your identity because your card reader is broken. You install the identity app, it needs to verify your identity through your banking app.
An automated voice calls you to ask about your recent purchase of 600 euro in bitcoin on coinbase. You get redirected to a human who, in a thick Indian accent, assures you you're talking to Paypall. You're not buying it and hang up.
Your mom calls you for a second opinion, she bought it. You scour her bank's website for a number...
When Google made its support more and more nonexistent for the common user, is when I realised companies can just about get away with providing less and less support. It's beginning to be the case wherein companies take the "my way or the highway" approach to user experience, knowing full well that for some reason users keep using their platforms despite atrocious support, for the mere reason being that the alternatives are either terrible or don't have the same resources to compete.
There was a talk I attended that spoke of the statistical justification for the economics of "allowing a few to fall through the cracks," which is when companies deliberately make support harder and harder to contact and obtain. Although this may seem like "a few" falling through the cracks, it will eventually be the case wherein a greater majority would not even be able to find an avenue wherein they can get the services that they need. When that happens, and when society becomes technocratic enough, socioeconomic inequalities would deepend and the divide would just get larger.
Google had support at some point? When?
They had it as late as 2012 IIRC. You could open support tickets and talk to a real person from the support pages.
Edit: Actually, it's still there. Not sure of quality.
https://support.google.com/
A while back I've written a, well rant, here about the utter rejection of even the most basic surface knowledge of technology that is integral to the current way of life of an average person by the society at large and by an average person.
Currently average person is simply not willing, at all, for any reason to acquire the absolute basics of technical proficiency required to be able to use alternatives to proprietary blobs. That are by the way always just not user-hostile enough to prevent mass migration.
And economic situation being what it is, it is basically inevitable that the internet will approach maximum lock-in, minimal user choice, maximum monetization and minimal utility as time goes by.
My son the teacher's summary on the interwebs: "Social media was a mistake"
I'm literally in the process of writing my first short stand-up routine, and it's about this - I call it "The Enshittifcation of Everything."