this post was submitted on 10 Sep 2023
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The loss of the actual internet + The loss of actual search engines.
Let me explain. The internet used to be an open playground where anyone could post a website dedicated to their interests, and did so. There were websites about octopuses and electomagnets and all sorts of obscure niche interests. Free website space with plentiful, and everybody used it. You could see 50 pages of information about someone's dog Fifi, just because they wanted to put it out there. Or hand loading ammunition if that was their bag. Or why the Communist manifesto was a better document than the declaration of Independence. Anything went on your own web page.
And it became massive; so big that we needed search engines to find the exact thing we were looking for. When we wanted to find information about octopuses, we needed to search through all those obscure websites and find what we needed to find about octopuses.
So the search engine wars began.
We also had things like stumble upon, where you could be surprised by some interesting site, and there were rings, where interesting sites of the same genre linked together so you could follow a threat of interest through a bunch of obscure sites.
None of this was forced on you.
Now we have possibly 20 to 30 large websites that account for 95% of all the traffic on the internet? We have search engines that show us what they think we meant by our question, but not the exact answer to our question.
It's gone. We wondered how they were possibly going to tame the internet how they were going to close Pandora's box.
It's all gone.
1993-2002ish was the golden age of the web. Now everybody just goes to the same handful of websites for everything. Even if you hate Spez, you still can't find any quality answers to anything without adding site:reddit.com to your searches. Everything else is SEO-optimized blogspam generated by a bot. There are no real personal webpages being run by a single person or a small entity anymore. Everything is corporate and centralized.
Time cube is so around, right?
Edit: it is not :(
Use DuckDuckGo. I left google years ago as results became ridiculous
I do (it's my default search engine) but I more often than not have to go back to Google anyway cause DDG promotes those bot-written blogs to the top even more than Google does. Ironically Bing does better than both because at least it's GPT-powered.
That said, none of these search engines can provide me the results I'm looking for most of the time. I need something different.
A duckduckgo search is a Bing search
DuckDuckGo might be more private, but it won't solve the SEO problem. I know they have some of their own trackers, but in practice duckduckgo is basically a front-end for Bing.
We need a good solution to the search engine problem. With that we can just metaphorically load a save at the last known point before everything started sucking
That's some rose tinted glasses, and misunderstands why we don't do that anymore, despite being perfectly able to.
Those obscure websites you were referring to had a high barrier to entry, they required the person to know how to host and code some basic HTML. Sure, it had more personality, but that barrier meant there was far less people who could do that. So then platforms like geocities came out, where instead you now needed just an account and to fill out some forms to create your own little site, you didn't even have to host anymore! That was the beginning of web2. Those people who now were creating pages on geocities didn't have a voice before, they could have posted their own websites but simply did not have the means to, nor should they be required to just so they can post online.
Well, now we're on geocities on crack, which the websites we post our content on have gotten much more advance, to the point that we are now. Those big internet monoliths exist because of web2, because people didn't want to handle their own self hosting stack just to post some stuff to the internet, so no wonder we've reached this point. People then gravitated to the best places to post their content, and to explore other's content. Because that's essentially what the internet is, exploring other's content.
That's not right and I'll tell you why. You're not wrong about geocities opening up the ability to create websites to a lot more users. Geocities and other website creator sites like that were great, and did exactly that. Even MySpace did the same thing. But then here's where corporations threw the control element in.
They added a social element. They took away a bare website presence, maybe a counter to see how many people came by, and replaced it with an upvote and downvote system where your thoughts were subject to peer pressure and social correction. MySpace, Geocities, all of those independent free website creator tools died in favor of Facebook, digg, Reddit, Twitter. The odd stuff, the weird stuff, the truly countercultural stuff, disappeared under the tyranny of the masses. People turned to blogs for a while. But soon those died too.
So now we have the new element of control. The control of what you get to see. What the web search engine shows you. What rises to the top of your feed. Hell a lot of the times you have to really work hard to find your own friend's posts. I'm looking at you Instagram.
But by all means disagree with me. But you won't convince me that this is better. Not in a million years.
I appreciated both sides of this discussion.
Not just control. Manipulation, subtle and not-so-subtle.
This could be the tagline for the entire internet.
What's more, they created a standardized format for how people add content. Facebook has template, Instagram has a template and users just plug in what they want to contribute. It has made it easier for more people to post things, for better or worse, but it sucked so much creativity from the internet. The individuality of personal websites has been crushed by these entities forcing people to use their format.
MySpace actually let you put in custom CSS and it was a huge free-for-all, everyone's page looked completely different, and usually it was a tacky unreadable mess of hot pink comic sans text over a bright purple texture background, absolutely horrible but very charming. Facebook very explicitly in contrast allowed no customization at all as a reaction to how bad users could make their pages look.
Don't get me started. How about "meme" templates? Just stick a few lines of text onto this well-known picture and everyone will have chuckle as they pass by.
It's exactly what you said.
There's only so far to go technologically speaking. Making websites and message boards was a solved problem a long time ago. Search engines were pretty much perfected about a decade ago.
Tech companies stopped being tech companies too. I dunno what they are anymore. The dystopian cyberpunk evil corporations.
Barrier for entry? I had a geocities page when I was around 11 or 12 (and it was free, geocities ran banner ads on my page. I could host something like 50mb-100mb in pictures). I learned HTML because I played a webgame called Neopets, and you could customize little webpages for your pets and your shopfront. I think it had CSS too (and it was the new thing!).
The barrier wasn't making a website, it was visibility. How many human visitors do you think my geocities page got? Pretty sure just the people in the webring I joined, and my mom. But I spent a lot of my time looking at other people's obscure geocities pages about pokemon or their doodles or whatever. Was my page very useful or interesting? No, but it was my little corner of the internet, and I was so excited to visit other people's fan pages and add them to my links list or whatever. Or figure out how they pulled off some new rad html stuff that I had to do for myself.
I had to take my geocities page down. There was a form on my site so people could send me cool facts about pokemon (it would show up in my email which my mom had access to), and someone typed up some awful pokemon sex story, so my mom made me take it down!
Anyway, I'm not sure what I was trying to say, but no, it was braindead simple and freely available to make a website. The internet was more human. Other kids at my school knew how to do it. Not sure what kids would say these days if you asked them to put their doodles on the internet. They'd upload it somewhere, where people can comment on it, upvote it, downvote it. My geocities page was entirely mine, nobody was there to judge or monetize my shitty doodles (outside of banner ads)
I appreciate you responding, I loved reliving through your experience.
I neglected to mention in my long winded response that before Geocities existed, ISPs gave you free web page space, free web page builders, free templates, there was no barrier to building a web page.
I'm a dumbass, and I had one.
I too feel nostalgic sometimes for the "turnpike" days...
Check out perplexity search engine. It's like having Google back the way it used to be
How so, isn't this just another AI search engine? How is that like old school Google in any way? It's like, literally the complete opposite lol.
Are you talking about perplexity.ai ? because it looks like a shitty LLM answering questions instead of an actual search engine. It looks absolutely atrocious privacy-wise, too.