you're probably not even guaranteed to meet real people on reddit anymore
Basically here, reddit, 4chan (gross), certain parts of twitter and youtube, are like the only places that kind of resemble the internet before everything was consolidated into a handful of major websites.
It wasn’t destroyed by fandoms, they were there from the start. It is relatively good now in the post-2016 era, after the original main demographic of early Gen Z girls matured. Heritage Posts is a good source for learning about tumblr history.
idk, this is pretty nice: https://64.media.tumblr.com/3fd78544258c586fb84400a58abe8201/tumblr_pz4fp46yOs1youvt4o1_1280.jpg
Idk if it's just me but Tumblr became so much better and Twitter became so much worse after the porn ban and mass exodus from Tumblr. Nowadays it's almost similar to here, mostly just shitposting and it's very easy to find communists
There's some other holdouts of the old internet, allthough they largely consist of the dril tweet "Is wario a libertarian?" variety.
It can be amusing to check into it sometimes, but you never wanted to be there anyways.
...... those are the major websites that it consolidated in to.
go on gemini if you want something that resembles the old internet
internet protocol alternative to http/https and gopher. It's supposed to be a middle ground between the bloated modern web and the spartan gopher network.
God I add reddit at the end of my searches too, to the point google just autofills it for me most of the time. This is a great post
Thing is too, some companies know this and if you're searching for more niche products which doesn't have a pretty general consensus they astroturf their products as a response with botted upvotes. All it takes it like 5 or 6 more updvotes as the top comment to make people think that particular product is the best.
And don't even get me started on the unofficial third party resellers on Amazon that sell inferior bootleg ass garbage like memory cards. It's a goddamn nightmare finding out which one is legit or not.
I actually buy stuff directly from brand websites for stuff I need to be legit and reliable even if it's less expensive on Amazon. Literally just last night I was about to pull out my hair trying to find a legit BBQ smoker probe thermometer. So many fake ones I just spent $30 more on the manufacturer's website to ensure it was real
Yeah I've had to do that a few times as well. Maybe it'll get bad enough that profits suffer at some point, but doubt it
you’re probably not even guaranteed to meet real people on reddit anymore
:astronaut-1:
It's so true. My favorite shitty search experience I've had was searching if gun shots sound like fireworks during a stressful moment and the first result linked was behind a paywall lmfao
countdown to subscription model for google search :countdown:
Lol nah they get too much data from it and they're basically the only game in town when it comes to that.
keep the data, charge 15.99 a month for "curated" (accurate) search results and no advertisments
The data is a lot less valuable when you get "curated" search results. Part of why people pay for the data isn't to sell ads directly, it's to know how to appear on the front page of relevant search results.
Stack exchange is still pretty reliable for info as long as it's for questions in a niche that stack exchange serves
But :yea: every once in awhile I find a niche enough hobby where it's still on an old school phpbb forum instead of gobbled up by Reddit and it makes my week just knowing it exists
Flat forums are undeniably better for actual community and discussion than link aggregators.
This link aggregator is better than some shit like discord when it comes to discussions, and whatever algorithm is in place for comment ordering isn't built to maximize engagement, which is nice. But it is still a link aggregator and I'm not sure how you create a synthesis of discussion forum and link aggregation without splitting your userbase.
Most of the holdouts from those seem to have been gobbled up by Discord over the last couple of years, unfortunately. Which is even more obnoxious when you're trying to search for information about something.
back in my day our websites had spinning skull gifs and guestbooks and widgets and it would play a midi version of a linkin park song and we liked it
A gif of caution tape and a worker with a sign saying “Under Construction” with a Midi of “Dont Speak” by No Doubt!
I remember when the Internet felt like the wild west and I was just discovering new shit every day, now I alternate between the same 5 websites because there is absolutely nothing to find out there :sadness-abysmal:
Reddit itself is a fucking piece of shit filled with the biggest pieces of shit on earth, which makes it even sadder that it's one of the only not completely garbage places on the Internet. 4chan was the only remaining site that still felt alive and different, but now after /pol/ution got to it literally almost every single board is just "hey /tg/ any one else really hate blacks" and an endless cycle of based cringe based cringe based cringe :wojak-nooo::gigachad::wojak-nooo::gigachad::wojak-nooo::gigachad::wojak-nooo::gigachad: to the point that it's literally impossible to even have a semi coherent discussion. I am 90% sure half that website is literally bots LMAO. Search engines feel almost useless cause they all return almost the same results that are just scam websites. All the small niche hobby forums are dying and moving on to different, mainstream platforms. There is literally nothing interesting to find out there. Which I mean works in my favor I suppose, since I can now finally almost log off by getting a RSS feed aggregator and just feed it the few subreddits and YT channels I like as well as plenty of news sources and podcasts, and I basically don't need to open the web at all, except maybe to look up something. I can finally actually touch grass, but, part of me still really, really, really wants to go back to how the Internet used to be :doomer:
Gemini comrade. It's the way the web used to be. That Wild West feel lives on.
Ok thanks for this, not even 10 minutes of browsing and I think I already found a chapo :sicko-hexbear:
Yeah Gemini leans very left for obvious reasons, and there are a few chapos (like me) on there!! There's even some social media on Station (station.martinrue.com) and midnight pub (midnight.pub) and a few other sites I'm forgetting. I have some poems on there at voidpoems.voyage as well.
About reddit, the redesign actually puts the titles of other posts (suggested content intended to trigger engagement) all over the page you're looking at. Google picks this up as SEO.
So when you find a post asking your question with zero replies, you also get 5+ unrelated posts in the google search results, because at the time Google crawled the page, the unanswered post you were looking for just happened to be in the engagement spam parts of the page.
Or your first result (if no better results exist) might be where one post matches half your keywords and an engagement spam post title matches the other half.
This balloons search results with garbage.
I haven't checked if this has been fixed. Pushshift is really good, much better for searches.
Old reddit is much more secure. I have a large banner across my personal bookmarking subreddit. It's so obstructive that it blocks the 'submit post' button. Unless of course you know the secret physical password, resizing the browsing window until a couple pixels at the top are above the banner. If I put that on every subreddit I mod, it'd be a captcha for low-effort posters. It deters me from posting in the subreddit only I can post in.
If Google had any real competition, this wouldn't be happening. But people won't even give other search engines a chance. They look at me like I'm an idiot when I suggest using anything else.
Try Qwant.com. It's run by Europeans so it's hostile to Google and America in general. Uncensored search results, unlike Google.
i recently made the switch from google to duckduckgo, but i might give this one a try as well
google is just straight up useless now
Try Qwant.com. It’s run by Europeans so it’s hostile to Google and America in general.
based
fuck it, can't be worse than google. Can I get it on the omnibar?
lmao, their privacy policy is in French. Makes sense, of course, since it's French.
I've used a lot of search alternative but not quant because I heard it was really rough but it looks really nice so I'll try running it and see how it goes
Google has always done this though. I remember back in like 2002 or 2003, talking to a family friend who worked for a Christian ministry. He said they spent a ton of money with Google on getting their website placed higher when people googled questions like "Does God exist?".
they have to keep "yes" at the top of the results like it's an aztec sacrifice or he'll cease to exist
spent a ton of money with Google
if they actually paid google directly, then it was for ad placement...
SEO companies will take money for this but google doesn't openly take bribes for search results, it's diffused
Ah must've been ads then, I'm remembering a conversation from nearly 20 years ago...
it's still hilarious either way, an ominpotent creator needing you to do paid advertising on the internet
I'm pretty sure the SEO compqnies pay Google for user data. Which is the perfect way of essentially selling a higher place on Google results without ruining Google's credibility.
Ah, for the days back when Google wasn't evil. The ads purchased by that church were clearly labeled as such. Now they reduce the color so little that the ads are almost undetctable.
It's gotten far, far worse to get around people gaming the system. One big change is that anything that is remotely tied to "health", results that have someone with "M.D." after their name automatically get put first, so you have to search through 5 or 10 pages to not get clickbait or institutional fluff.
Mostly fitness stuff is what I had in mind. You really have to know key phrases, otherwise you just get WebMD type shit instead of actual links to fitness forums like you used to get.
I hear what you are saying but it is better that they do this because people used to get recommended weird anti vax/"alternative medicine" shit all the time and it's kinda better now.
Those are the obviously fake ones, what really rules is that the legitimate review ones are pretty obviously fake now. If you check out like techradar or similar sites you'll notice their reviews mostly parrot the phrasing used in the marketing materials of the product reviewed. Often if you read more than one review site you'll see really similar general structure of the reviews. I'm pretty sure tech companies just email out review templates and each site changes it a bit.
