I need to write a zoology paper on bugs

All search results are for pest control businesses or are AI generated garbage that have wrong information.

Yes, the internet always had problems, but I cannot stress how much worse it has gotten for information over the last ten years.

I used to be able to search a species and get scientific papers or at least articles that referenced scientific papers in the results. None of that anymore. All search results are for someone trying to sell you something, and articles are regurgitated AI monstrosities that waffle on with no real information and no references. If your search even manages to direct you to news articles every news site will have identical, poorly written tabloid hidden behind a paywall. All of it useless for even the most basic academic research.

I literally can't do my job if every search result for species identification is behind a paywall, or an AI generated image of a bug that doesn't really exist.

It's no longer the information age. But not because of Trumpism and other things liberal whine about, it's because capitalism has hollowed out the internet into a husk of what it was meant to be.

I literally had to go and buy an expensive field guide from a museum to finish this paper. I haven't had to do that before.

  • Dessa [she/her]
    ·
    2 months ago

    Its weird because for some things you can see the change still. I'm replaying an old pokemon game (platinum), and if I add platinum to the search for a bit of info, I get the old reliable sites: Bulbapedia, Serebii, Pokemondb. Specific questions route to gamefaqs, top answer is exactly what I need.

    If I do this for the latest pokemon, i get gamesradar, game8, gamewith. I have to scroll past asinine bullshit that nobody was ever asking to begin with, and the info is months out of date or incomplete. Thankfully, the old sites still keep that info up and old heads search out the good sites specifically, so it always hits the top page .

    Interesting to have the comparison right there and see directly how things have changed.

    I honestly think the death of forum culture was a huge mistake. Reddit was so convenient woth its single login but wow is it not the place to build a subculture.

    • Meh [comrade/them]
      ·
      2 months ago

      Discord has been awful for this as well. So much information is now unsearchable and walled off unless you just happen to be sitting in the right discord servers.