The internet is unusable now

https://www.newstatesman.com/quickfire/2023/06/internet-is-unusable-now-google-technology

by gnfargbl • 3 years ago

39 47 3 years ago

"Now it’s a mess. I’m not quite sure what broke it" - capitalism...

Xorakios• 3 years ago

words have meanings (though of course they evolve over time - fascism used to mean government control over businesses through regulation, now it's just "everything you disagree with")

but "capitalism" has been fairly consistent - rewarding people for investing in the future instead of spending for today.

jjgreen• 3 years ago

Not if you block the 25 scripts that this article tries to run ... physician, heal thyself ...

smoldesu• 3 years ago

Now?

RGamma• 3 years ago

Since quite some time, but general amnesia is current zeitgeist, which is part of the problem. An endless cycle of forgetting and reposting, information overload. Not that curated, long-lived library of distilled knowledge, that I imagined this would become 20 years ago.

But there's many niches; let's hope things survive where they ought to.

Havoc• 3 years ago

I notice this when I'm away from my home setup / not VPN'd in. Always jarring when suddenly experiencing the unfiltered version.

karmakaze• 3 years ago

I couldn't get myself to read it--after being presented with a far-too-large-modal-overlay-popup.

_madmax_• 3 years ago

Funny that this article has a huge cookie pop-up that takes up all the visible space on my phone while it denounces how unusable the web has become. Come on.

palikero93• 3 years ago

Probably the author has no decision power regarding the cookies the newspaper is using.

prepend• 3 years ago

We all make choices. I agree that the author probably has no power over the newspaper cookies. But they do choose to work for a newspaper with poor decisions.

And they choose to write an article complaining about usability when they know that their newspaper isn’t very usable.

evanelias• 3 years ago

Not only that, this site also breaks the back button. Seriously.

montag• 3 years ago

I started to read, but the cookie dialog popped up, covering the entire screen, and I gave up due to an overwhelming sense of irony.

dopidopHN2• 3 years ago

And I had to click 12 times the back buttons to actually get back here.

No hard feelings. But it’s not great.

Otherwise the article is pretty bland.

Not because of this but rather the zeitgeist : I will give Gemini another shot.

netsharc• 3 years ago

Past the cookie popup one gets a paragraph or two of content, and then a half-screen section of other stuff to drive engagement with the site, rinse, repeat.

wpwpwpw• 3 years ago

Although it's not a very thoughtful article and manages to ignore the sheer number of people that today use the internet compared to even 10 years ago, I can myself relate to what's said. Old days internet was about communities and businesses ran by people with their own interests and products and servers, now it's tech giants and their networks ran by algorithms trying to milk and eat and replace those communities and businesses. I myself stopped using social networks and all of sudden I have nowhere else to interact. Sad.

BizarroLand3• 3 years ago

I wonder what the world would be like if we made it illegal to advertise on the internet.

It would turn the world upside down but probably in a good way.

johnea3• 3 years ago

My theory is that there will eventually be an 2nd dot bomb, as it's further demonstrated that targetted advertising doesn't actually get any better results than just advertising on subject matter related web sites...

erichocean2• 3 years ago

Galaxy brain: ban advertising everywhere, in all forms.

hammyhavoc2• 3 years ago

Ads provide the budget to make cool things happen. I would expect that it would further widen the gap between the haves and the have-nots in terms of inequality.

bmurphy1976• 3 years ago

You forgot the spam and the porn.

johnea3• 3 years ago

Truely sad. And a perfect example of the damage that's been done.

Once people started calling typing to each other on the internet "community", it was basically over for actual community...

Now, you're pwn'd...

lazyeye• 3 years ago

Why is it "not a very thoughtful article"?

drumhead• 3 years ago

A bit of an exaggeration. There's more noise for sure, but you can get a lot more done on the internet now than you ever could before, with more new and useful things emerging all the time. And even if there are issues it's just a clear money making opportunity by improving them.

JohnFen• 3 years ago

The web is not the internet. The web itself is mostly a dangerous wasteland (and getting worse) these days, but the internet still has value.

charlie0• 3 years ago

I've seen various articles about this and frankly, yes lots of people know it's an issue. I'm tired of hearing about the problems, does anyone have any ideas for a solution to this issue? Maybe creating a curated index of sites that are dedicated to small and well known bloggers?

I recall seeing there was a site that someone was personally building with this idea in mind, but I don't recall what it was called.

WeylandYutani• 3 years ago

I run FF with ublock, clearurl, localcdn and privacy badger.

sledgehammers• 3 years ago

How do we fix social media?

Let's start with the huge societal problems:

- optimizing for addiction

- fighting for attention

People need social validation for their personalities. Social media drives people into perfectionism - yet never being enough. You need to modify your entire self image to fit somekind of hazy image of perfect whatever. You are fighting for attention, you need to do ever more crazy and better shit to get more attention.

Other huge societal problems:

- sensorship, misinformation, death of journalism and therefore truth and therefore democracy

- centralized greedy growth-seeking monopolist culture kills innovation, creates dystopia

Is a well functioning distributed system a possibility? Your own device, or your goverments, or some global 3rd party, you choose, as a host? Let's not give the control of the internet to another monopoly with hardware like amazon, or monopoly with the traffic like cloudfare or whatever. Let's avoid these giant tech monopolies.

gnfargbl• 3 years ago

The article author is non-technical. I found it interesting that things are apparently now broken enough that non-technical audiences are starting to get upset. Their complaint is really twofold: (a) search used to work but now doesn't, and (b) there is now too much extraneous bullshit on the pages that they get directed to.

Both of these complaints could be fixed by a better internet search engine. Articles like this feel like a signal that conditions for a change in search dominance are finally materialising.

johnea3• 3 years ago

Somewhere along the way, the idea that the internet existed to be useful to us has morphed into an understanding that we exist to be useful to it

This is really the current state of capitalism as a whole.

Why would anyone even get a disease except to support shareholder value...

musicale• 3 years ago

"RIP John Smith, beloved citizen and employee. Bravely sacrificed his health, happiness, and life to bring value to company executives and shareholders."

anenefan3• 3 years ago

Written from the ground perspective of general web consumption, but those who moved to higher ground looking for better places to surf the web with higher quality signal / data, saw this problem coming a long while ago. The web moved from being something that served its users, to one that needed to censor the signal / information some people were looking for, due to groupthink (eg politics,) due to copyright or other concerns. First we lost the fantastic web string search engines that could really pinpoint topics, than regular search engines depowered slowly in spits and spats in the decade that followed. Then a few years ago the tables turned and suddenly search engines figured they didn't really need to compete very hard ... here we are today, no more 1000 or 2000 results if the user wants to look over that list, it seems the main crawler search engines have agreed to serve a handful of results instead, fuck the people, what are they going to do about it ...

I have long toyed (since 2011) to address this very BS, with the idea of creating a new simple web format, but token fee for access, the likes of the music and movie industry reps need to pay a $$$$$$$$$ fee to have a limited account, BS search engines are banned outright (along with LLM,) various site types declared by default (ie banner, or a redirector) as well as each page having a token to sum up what it is, eg not spam or spam, - however I've long recognised everything my poor head has been through the last couple of decades I'm frankly not equipped to do it. Oh well, I guess at some point someone will strike on the same type of idea.

rektide2• 3 years ago

one that needed to censor the signal / information some people were looking for, due to groupthink (eg politics,) due to copyright or other concerns

At the moment, I don't feel like these factors had even a bit part in shaping where we are or what happened. I don't think the web has it any worse than anywhere else in the world generally, and I think it's much better than most places & the rest of computing, which tends to have bigger guard rails as it massifies than the web.

There's been a lot of bad incentives & profit motive slowly eroding conditions, I yeah. Massified systems & consolidation have changed the power dynamic, & stasis/stagnation has somewhat set in.

anenefan3• 3 years ago

I'm not sure what you want out of the web then, or what your experience of it is. I'm not referring to social media and associated services at all to be clear, the majority of these social media sites I've encountered the last dozen years hadn't searched well (for something specific) since many, initially or a couple years in, either by agreement with search engines or via constructed means to wall off the bulk of user content ie search for a quote text and search engines bounced around it, even if the term was highly unusual.

As for impact, very much so, just many wouldn't have had a reason to have run into or know what obstacles are on the field. I have done a lot of research on behalf of other people, a lot is plain and simple, some of it was iffy but from my point of view, legitimate. (IMO you only really own something if you can fix it, otherwise you're just paying renting fees albeit under a different name.) It has meant for much of my net use the last two decades, has been using search engines for a wide range of topics, quite the journey sometimes - frankly I've been surprised how much effort some companies put into burying information (even as far as creating a honeypot affair (site/account) to just bush any one seeking a bit of help) - a lot of the time it's something that might otherwise stop some poor sod from becoming a sucker of an overpriced fix. This action prompts spammers (some are direct, some are very subtle and involve themselves in forums) who try to capitalise on a market that's had the information contained by offering easy results to find - generally illegal downloads which further waters down legitimate search results. At some point there's a huge number of results and yes it further swamps search engines that are genuinely trying to deliver. Overall this now means I've not offered to do so much researching the last few years due to the very limited pool most search engines want to swim in.

the-printer• 3 years ago

I cannot feel sympathy when the pincers of capitalism deflate the ego of a web denizen.

wruza• 3 years ago

Tbh, “live music in …” wasn’t searchable back then either, I believe. The issue with that is that places, products and people may or may not list their full characteristics on the internet or this is simply unrankable due to the noise from other sources.

Btw, I opened a local city-map app on my phone and “cafe with live music” yielded a full map of them. Maybe you just search in a wrong place. Search for a city map instead. For decorative flowers/etc, maybe you should look for cosplay blogs and yt channels, they already solved it. Not saying that’s the true way, but naive queries were always weak google-fu, even before aggressive seo.

dopidopHN2• 3 years ago

I live in New Orleans, Live music is a serious business. Like … a major revenue stream for the City.

Theirs is a myriad of source. Most sucks. The best is : « wwoz music calendar ». A local radio station. Barebone website but it’s exhaustif or almost.

Then some ad-driven free newspapers and website combo ( « gambit », but it can’t follow the every day schedule of wwoz )

Then a long list of crappy website that will have a sub section of the above.

Recently I’ve seen a user content powered website advertise…

And it looks great : black&white not image, php website.

-/- My point : Google will bring wwoz on third places. And then a boatload of « event » websites that sucks.

Second points : the best source are incredibly low tech and free of ads.

smogger914• 3 years ago

Cookie consent pop up and broken back button. I could not read this.

The internet is unusable now

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