"[T]he transformation of the internet into this shitty mall."

August 28, 2023 6:52 PM

Ryan Broderick on The Verge writes on the possible end of the Googleverse. Mentioned: Usenet, Altavista, All Your Base Are Belong To Us, Myspace, AI, the sameness of recipe sites, Blogger, Google Reader, Perez Hilton and Anil Dash. Not mentioned: Google Plus.
posted by JHarris (71 comments total)

It really is astonishing how bad it’s gotten over the last year, even predating any AI bullshit.
posted by Artw at 7:31 PM on August 28, 2023 [34 favorites]

TFA blames the ad network, but it seems to me that it was inevitable once links had value. The ads hastened it's demise, because links to content had value only if the content had value, but any link with an ad to be displayed has value to the advertiser.

The question is, what will replace it. Page rank is just a heuristic, based on the value of content. If that's no longer valid, a new one will have to take its place. LLMs don't care about links, and so might be assumed to have value, but I suspect they'll be just as susceptible to SEO-like spamming as well.
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 7:47 PM on August 28, 2023 [2 favorites]

Perhaps we just need to go back en masse to gopher and reboot Veronica?
posted by meehawl at 8:03 PM on August 28, 2023 [12 favorites]

LLMs are fucking worthless, they will be the thing we are all struggling to avoid.
posted by Artw at 8:06 PM on August 28, 2023 [29 favorites]

Oh, is it time to do a Xerox on "googling"?

It's a cutesy name for searching the internet anyways, I think we're over that. Aren't we?

The article only barely touches on this, but if we continue to accept google in our lives, can we request that it eliminate Pinterest with extreme prejudice?

Pinterest is the most annoying thing about searching the internet via Google aside from that "feature" on mobile that is basically "you've seen 10 text links that aren't what you're looking for apparently so since you don't have the muscle memory to hit the 'more' link and/or accidentally scrolled too far, here's an endless array of picture links that are related to different searches that you didn't actually make!"
posted by Baethan at 8:13 PM on August 28, 2023 [23 favorites]

This just made me sad, but also brought back memories-- not bad, but not good, either-- of running fansites and having to play the SEO game as best as I could with what few resources I had. Also, ugh, that asinine "nigritude ultramarine" contest (which Google didn't run afaik, though the article says it did). I was trying to get a wiki off the ground around that time, and the spam from that contest was one of the things that led to me eventually giving it up. Running any sort of a small site with open registrations, posting, and/or editing was not fun while that contest was happening.
posted by May Kasahara at 8:18 PM on August 28, 2023 [4 favorites]

You know that terrible thing on mobile news sites where a couple of paragraphs in there’s a tiny “read rest of article” link that you’ll accidentally scroll past and then a mass of ads, links to other articles, and links to things that look like articles but are just garbage clickbait sites? Any good search is basically that now.
posted by Artw at 8:50 PM on August 28, 2023 [34 favorites]

Pinterest annoys me because it's just a bunch of pictures and if I want the source thing, can I get to that? Not so great. I used to use some clone of it that worked better, but that went under. What a pain.

I hate how the kids these days seem unable to do any kind of Internet search (unless it's on TikTok!), and thus call my office incessantly or send multiple emails wanting us to Google that for them. FFS. Even with the state of Google the way it is, I can still manage to find tedious things like "how do I sign up for X" without having to call a human multiple times.
posted by jenfullmoon at 9:04 PM on August 28, 2023 [16 favorites]

I've been using DuckDuckGo for many years now, and I've noticed that over time I've been using the !g operator to run the search on Google less and less often because the DDG results have gotten better and the Google results have gotten a lot worse.

As with so many things, the desire for always-growing fountains of money has caused people to destroy a perfectly good product that had already provided never-ending fountains of money. How can it never be enough?
posted by Ickster at 9:08 PM on August 28, 2023 [49 favorites]

I've been pretty disappointed with DDG also. Ads and corporate America have ruined the internet. Now it's a fight to keep from having your attention diverted to crap you don't care about.

So here I am, back on Metafilter after many years wandering in the desert. I like seeing well curated stories not served up by an algo intent on addicting you to small dopamine rushes. I like getting a little bit bored by this site. Everything doesn't need immediate attention all of the time. A lull in news stories is a good thing. Checking your favorite website and not seeing anything new is OK.

This is my first post here since 2010. Thanks to Metafilter for keeping it real and hanging on through all the crap.
posted by MaddCutty at 9:32 PM on August 28, 2023 [155 favorites]

Also a DuckDuckGo user - and I really don't use Google at all.

I regularly challenge people to being the most boring person using the internet - and to date, after they see my browsing history, they concede that status to me as I really am only using text based websites, either government or business.

And for the sites that I use or need, Google is worse than useless as it will regularly throw up incorrect or out of date pages. I actively advise my clients NOT to use Google if it is anything to do with legal, regulatory or government issues as the results will usually be squatters who are trying to charge for services that are free or low cost.
posted by Barbara Spitzer at 9:36 PM on August 28, 2023 [11 favorites]

I wonder what a search engine would look like that only included results for pages that haven't implemented ad-network ads/trackers. I guess this wouldn't automatically exclude the sort of SEO'd pages that are trying to sell you something directly, but it would automatically exclude all the outright ad-squatting spam. Google obviously can't do it because they own the biggest ad network/tracker, but could something like duckduckgo implement a no-ads mode optionally filtering its (reportedly mostly Bing-delivered) results?

Would it surface pockets of an old zine-like web that still exists out there but never gets found? Or would it just not be useful enough as a practical search tool.

(Separately, I was testing out a hunch about how Google seems to smear out your search query these days -- and beyond its explicit "showing results for" autocorrections -- when I noticed something: when did the URLs for Google's results pages start including 550+ extra characters beyond the simple www.google.com/search?q=test. I would have guessed maybe 12-20 characters thrown in there for internal use, but 550?!)
posted by nobody at 10:00 PM on August 28, 2023 [10 favorites]

it won't be long until I'll be able to replace "I'm so old, I remember back when iTunes was genuinely great software" with "I'm so old, I remember back when Google was a genuinely great search engine"
posted by DoctorFedora at 10:10 PM on August 28, 2023 [16 favorites]

I'm seeing people say that DuckDuckGo is based on Bing search with some Yahoo as well. Is that accurate?

They're also adding a chatGPT
posted by Zumbador at 10:18 PM on August 28, 2023 [1 favorite]

I've been using Kagi for a few months now, and it's pretty ok. Not least because I'm paying for it up front, instead of with personalized metrics (as far as I am aware).

I am not associated with that company at all.
posted by german_bight at 10:18 PM on August 28, 2023 [9 favorites]

A lot of the content-producers TFA call 'bloggers' are not of the sort I seek out when searching for new blogs to follow.
posted by Rash at 10:27 PM on August 28, 2023

Yay MaddCutty! Welcome back! The site has changed a lot, but it's also changed less than you'd think.
posted by JHarris at 11:03 PM on August 28, 2023 [4 favorites]

Enshittification comes for all web services eventually. I hold out hope that the pendulum will eventually swing back towards openness and away from the increasingly balkanized and unsearchable web that we have today. The decline of search isn't just that Google has gotten worse (it has) it's also that so much of the Internet doesn't happen in the open anymore. The digital commons has been devoured.

I wonder what a search engine would look like that only included results for pages that haven't implemented ad-network ads/trackers.

Mariginalia is this, sort of. It specifically rules out results to pages with modern design elements, like reliance on javascript or video. It can be a fun toy, but it will mostly surface minimalist tech blogs, academic websites, and abandoned/forgotten websites in my experience.

I was also going to recommend trying Millionshort only to discover that it now requires you to make an account, which rubs me the wrong way. The idea with this one is that it would drop the most popular results from a standard search for you so that you see the things you would normally be buried beneath SEO.
posted by forbiddencabinet at 11:15 PM on August 28, 2023 [17 favorites]

Hmm, I was just going to illustrate something I've seen recently where I get mostly LLM-generated fluff for product searches, but it actually was not that bad when I tried it now. I won't link to the search as everyone's Google results are different, but the search for "best table saw 2023" had mostly actual review on the first page, not LLM-generated fluff that starts with a three paragraph explanation of what a table saw is, followed by five random products with store links. Which has been my experience for months and months.

Let's hope it's more than just a blip, but anyway let the record show that on this morning the 29th of August 2023 Google search results were slightly better than they have been recently.
posted by Harald74 at 11:26 PM on August 28, 2023 [2 favorites]

It used to be that you could get better product reviews by limiting searches to the Reddit domain, but recent shenanigans where Spez wants to extract even more yacht money out of the site might mean that those days are soon over as well.
posted by Harald74 at 11:28 PM on August 28, 2023 [2 favorites]

1. search is bad
2. attempts to make search good in any meaningful sense are misguided
3. because search is bad
4. a good Internet is an Internet where it is hard to find things
5. a good Internet is an Internet where finding things requires following links on the pages you’ve already found
6. a good Internet has terrain
7. a good Internet has geography
8. a good Internet has geographers
9. a good Internet is an Internet where finding things requires a guide who already knows the way to what you’re looking for
10. good Internet is a zine a friend made for you
11. good Internet is a yellowed-paper rainswollen paperback you found in the gutter while on your way to a friend’s house
12. good Internet grows in the dark
13. good Internet is Internet that can hide
14. good Internet is found by touch, not sight
15. search is a spotlight
16. search is bad
17. web rings are good.

this has been yr bombastic lowercase etc. etc. for the day.
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 11:53 PM on August 28, 2023 [28 favorites]

I suspect a search engine that ranks pages according to levels of ad-freeness would face escalating lawsuits and smear campaigns, like ad-blocking software does.
posted by Ashenmote at 11:56 PM on August 28, 2023 [2 favorites]

Full-text search of third-party sites creates a requirement for active moderation for any indexed site that allows pseudonymous identities to post hyperlinks, as spammers (and abusers) use full-text search to identify and target sites. Preventing third-party indexing of a site also generally prevents it from being used to train chatbots. We were better off with curated lists (like Yahoo!), and while full text search indexing is absolutely lazier, it has wrecked society online. The most effective way to defend against spammers and harvesters is to put your site behind a password, and tell people what the password is in the dialog asking them to enter it. Any human being can work out how to visit the site effortlessly, while general web crawlers will not be able to proceed. This is, of course, friction; but if one password dialog is all it takes to diminish spam (and trolling, and harassment) by making a site safe from full-text search, then I wonder why we continue to allow harvesting at all.
posted by Callisto Prime at 11:58 PM on August 28, 2023 [2 favorites]

One of the biggest problems is that the internet is very US/English, and all of the english speaking countries are going through a fully Randian capitalist moment. America wants a lack of internet oversight to continue its soft power, but in general the idea of constraining capital by regulation is verboten at this point in time. So, if a company like Pinterest can make google image search useless by gaming the algo then, the thought goes, more power to them. Even if it’s generally the opposite of what people want.
posted by The River Ivel at 1:10 AM on August 29, 2023 [13 favorites]

"The most effective way to defend against spammers and harvesters is to put your site behind a password, and tell people what the password is in the dialog asking them to enter it. "

After I thought about whether I wanted to be harvested as fodder for AI training corpuses, I started setting robots.txt to deny most bots. Had considered just blocking known scraper ranges at the web server, but I'll give this some though.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 1:49 AM on August 29, 2023

Count me as another person shaking their fist at the clouds. The enshittification of Google is a persistent sadness. I really do like the metaphor of the "shitty mall," tho, as I was grumbling almost the exact same thing a day or so ago when Google kept serving me off-brand versions of the fancy thing that I was searching for instructions on how to build myself out of raw ingredients or spare parts.

Harald74, most everything passes on eventually. Reddit has problems, to be sure. By the same token, while MetaFilter has lasted a very long time, long-term trends re: site activity, size of the user base, etc. aren't good, even if they aren't catastrophic. Let's not write either off yet, eh?
posted by cupcakeninja at 3:57 AM on August 29, 2023 [2 favorites]

The article discusses the same-sameness of recipe sites - but doesn't really go far enough, I think. It discusses the whole habit of bloggers telling a story about a recipe before discussing the recipe; and yeah, that's a bit of a controversial take as to whether that's frustrating or friendly, and fortunately a number of food bloggers are now adding links up top for people to just skip ahead to the recipe if they want, and that's helped.

But something I've also noticed is a lot of food blogs now visually look similar - like they've all been using the same design template. Here's what I mean - I just did a search for "german chocolate cake," and here are three of the first four hits I got:

Upgraded German chocolate cake
The BEST German chocolate cake
Traditional German Chocolate cake

Visually, they all look VERY similar; white background, menu across the top, big main column on the left, and a smaller column on the right with a photo of the blogger at the top, just above a bio, with the links to different groups of tagged posts just below.

It's nothing too crazy. But it's a format that a lot of food bloggers use - here's a page from The Woks Of Life, and here's a page from Pinch of Yum, here's Love and Lemons, and here's Cookie and Kate, and Minimalist Baker, and Two Peas And their Pod, and Chocolate Covered Katie. Even Smitten Kitchen looks a little like this.

There's nothing inherently crazy about this - it's very likely this is a very basic layout template that most blogging platforms use. But I do a lot of recipe searching, and it's something I've grown to notice - that a lot of recipe sites all use some form of that layout, and do very little to customize it. I get it - I used a template to do the layout for my own blog, but at least I played around with it a bit to make things look a LITTLE different (black background instead of white, tinkering with the column widths a tiny bit), so I would visually look a little different from every other blog out there.

And a lot of the recipe blogs feel like they haven't - it's like they all reached for the same specific template and called it good. And I've been weirdly fascinated by that, and have been mildly curious about why that design and why there's that much visual uniformity. There very well could be some kind of typographic or graphic design reason that I'm ignorant about that could explain it; but if it's ubiquitous enough that I even noticed it, it's pretty damn ubiquitous.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 4:19 AM on August 29, 2023 [1 favorite]

The only thing which will save the internet is the destruction of free-market capitalism.

I'm sounding more and more like an extremist every day. I'm not sure if I'm concerned about that or not.
posted by harriet vane at 4:22 AM on August 29, 2023 [24 favorites]

Recipe sites! Where some fake persona with an apparently endless supply of different plates/bowls/wooden (or tiled) counter boards/napkins writing about their personal 'journey' to recipe bliss without actually getting to the recipe until you have scrolled 14 yards down the page only to find that one of the ingredients shown in the super glossy photos is not actually listed in the recipe and you realize that the 'recipe' requires an ingredient that is not in your cupboard or available at any nearby store while costing $90 if you order it from one of the provide links and is not really necessary for the actual recipe....
posted by IndelibleUnderpants at 4:24 AM on August 29, 2023 [5 favorites]

How can it never be enough?

Easy, it never being enough is the entire foundation of the whole system! Did you know these people think there is room for limitless growth with finite resources‽ It would be funny if it weren't destroying most everything around us.

My only gripe about the article so far is that when I searched for "capitalism" I found zero occurrences. Yes the details matter and are interesting, but the bottom line is this place has gotten progressively worse the more it's been infected by capitalism.
posted by SaltySalticid at 4:28 AM on August 29, 2023 [4 favorites]

(EmpressCallipygos: as someone who designed a couple web pages back in the ‘90s when they had to be hard coded in HTML2 or 3 (pre CSS days), and who has looked into WordPress and similar sites for creating modern web pages without having to be a programmer, there are only a limited number of ways to display menu and ‘about’ information that actually make sense to readers and are usable across variety of screen types/sizes/shapes and with accessibility concerns kept in mind. Like scrolling top to bottom as the standard way of navigating through a page. You sometimes see side to side scrolling, but not bottom to top, and a web page designed to scroll around like a Prezi presentation would drive readers up a wall no matter what the content.)
posted by eviemath at 4:29 AM on August 29, 2023 [4 favorites]

TFA touches on recipe sites specifically, and their seeming standardization. It’s all down to SEO, and the corner Google’s algo has pushed food blogger sites into.
posted by Thorzdad at 4:30 AM on August 29, 2023 [1 favorite]

TFA touches on recipe sites specifically, and their seeming standardization.

Right, but TFA only discusses the content of those pages. I'm also pointing out a visual design element that I've happened to notice. I freely admit I may be noticing a thing that isn't really a thing, it just had me curious.

there are only a limited number of ways to display menu and ‘about’ information that actually make sense to readers and are usable across variety of screen types/sizes/shapes and with accessibility concerns kept in mind.

I understand that, I'm just curious why that one specific way seems to have become something of a standard. I mean, why not put the "author info and tags archive" column on the LEFT sometimes? Or make the background pale pink or something? It'd be just as easy to search and read the content, plus it would be visually distinctive from other recipe blogs.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 4:43 AM on August 29, 2023 [6 favorites]

The article only barely touches on this, but if we continue to accept google in our lives, can we request that it eliminate Pinterest with extreme prejudice?

I've taken to using -site:pinterest.* pre-emptively if I am looking for an image.
posted by Karmakaze at 5:57 AM on August 29, 2023 [15 favorites]

The article doesn't mention Yahoo, which was predominant prior to Google, somehow still exists, and (heretically?) delivers better results now than Google. It subsumed and then discarded Altavista.

Dash is correct about AdSense being the turning point. It's been observed that AdSense pretty much operates as an unattended money printing machine for Google. All the other famously discontinued but useful Google services were simply attempts at finding another money printing machine that didn't pan out.

Even Yahoo dropped their Groups product.
posted by 3.2.3 at 6:01 AM on August 29, 2023 [3 favorites]

I don't think paywalling everything helped, though. Or turning the web into a (shopping) mall to begin with. So yeah, capitalism and enshitification are partners.
posted by 3.2.3 at 6:18 AM on August 29, 2023 [2 favorites]

Paywalling is huge yes, and how Google lets sites with them be indexed according to their paywalled content. Media sites will show Google's spider things they won't show the rest of us. That's ridiculous.

Paywalling isn't limited to just bigsites though. Patreon, while a useful too for independent artists and writers to make some money, also silos a lot of material away from the commons. Now everyone has to decide how much they want to give away, and how much they want to jealously guard away from the poors.
posted by JHarris at 6:22 AM on August 29, 2023 [5 favorites]

> TFA touches on recipe sites specifically, and their seeming standardization. It’s all down to SEO, and the corner Google’s algo has pushed food blogger sites into.

I seem to remember another non-SEO dimension to this. You can't copyright a recipe but you can copyright the roiling sea of creative writing that surrounds it.
posted by urbanwhaleshark at 6:23 AM on August 29, 2023 [11 favorites]

The $100 billion innovation is going to be figuring out how web content providers can deliver useful advertising.

Xers and boomers recall that pre-internet print advertising was more than anything else a useful and necessary reference to what was happening commercially. You literally paid to get the newspaper or magazine, or in the case of free weeklies, bothered to pick them up, in large part to see the ads. What does the supermarket or department store have for sale? Where can I get an apartment or a job? What's playing at the movie theater and when? What are the cool new purses and frocks for fall?
posted by MattD at 7:00 AM on August 29, 2023 [5 favorites]

I mean, why not put the "author info and tags archive" column on the LEFT sometimes? Or make the background pale pink or something? It'd be just as easy to search and read the content, plus it would be visually distinctive from other recipe blogs.

The reason almost all blogs have gone to the info column on the right--including this one, as in Metafilter--is that it's a lot easier to build a responsive design that puts that info on the bottom of the page for mobile devices if the column is on the right rather than the left (I assume the opposite is true for Right-to-Left written languages, but I'm not sure). And food blogs in particular need to be aware of the mobile browsers since so many people are going to pull up the recipe in the kitchen.

But I suspect a large part of it is that many food blog writers don't want to stand out too much. The article notes that the SEO advice for food blogs is widespread, universally followed, and not particularly correct. But even leaving that aside, if the design varies too much from the standard it could scare off potential readers: I don't know if I'd want to cook a recipe that looks like it came from the MySpace or Geocities era, and I would probably think twice about a recipe written in Comic Sans or Papyrus.
posted by thecaddy at 7:26 AM on August 29, 2023 [4 favorites]

I mean, why not put the "author info and tags archive" column on the LEFT sometimes? Or make the background pale pink or something? It'd be just as easy to search and read the content, plus it would be visually distinctive from other recipe blogs

Normal websites are like that too. You don't want your users spending their time learning how to use your site, unless that is a primary feature. Internet content is not art, and most people can barely use the internet as-is. According to research, you get something like an initial 5 seconds before someone nopes out or choses to use your site.
posted by The_Vegetables at 7:37 AM on August 29, 2023 [2 favorites]

The article doesn't really discuss the fact that Google went from being a search company to an advertising conglomerate with a side-hustle in search, and how this might affect their search results. Google has an incentive to up-rank a site with Google-placed ads, regardless of how useful a normal human might find that site as a result to their search. Of course we have no way of knowing how the algorithm works, but I can't help imagining that it works like that.
posted by adamrice at 7:48 AM on August 29, 2023 [5 favorites]

The moment we can look back at it when Google updated their algorithm and sites like Ask Metafilter started dropping out of the top of their search results and saw their AdWords partner revenue crash.

Googles results are increasingly full of garbage sites that are cluttered with ads and crash mobile browsers.
posted by interogative mood at 7:51 AM on August 29, 2023 [12 favorites]

Yep, web searches are crap now. You used to be able to find useful information about obscure things, and now most of the search returns are people selling crap or junk sites. I suspect part of it is the change from a lot of written websites to people making and posting videos instead. I'm a cranky old, so if the information is in a video and I am unlikely to watch it because dammit I don't have the patience for that, especially if I have to wade through scads of video ads first.
posted by fimbulvetr at 7:51 AM on August 29, 2023 [11 favorites]

I still remember when google would let you filter for "discussions", and the results would be a bunch of actual conversations about the topic and no ads. I really miss that.

I also miss when (-) actually worked, and when google didn't include "similar" results (more ads).
posted by Tarumba at 7:54 AM on August 29, 2023 [11 favorites]

I have to wade through scads of video ads first

I had a MRI on Sunday. They gave me headphones while I was in the tube for 40 minutes and asked which music I wanted. Turns out they just open a YouTube window, search for the artist name I give them, and let it run. This means for every three minutes and change of Huey Lewis, I had to lay there in the tube and endure five minutes or more of the audio from video ads for scam diets, scam products, scam services etc. Apparently there are a lot of products like laser flashlights that can start fires and a cell phone charger that also defrags the phone that are so powerful and amazing that the government is going to ban them soon, so you'd better buy them now for 50% off! Most all of the ad copy was read by the same (AI?) woman with many of the same phrases regardless of the product. You want Hell? I give you being trapped in an MRI tube with ads.
posted by Servo5678 at 8:04 AM on August 29, 2023 [58 favorites]

Back in the prehistoric days of internet, I found out about this website called suck.com. It was a daily commentary site about technology, culture, what have you, and no ads. A set of excellent writers created a really great place to go every morning to read. But after awhile, reality set in and suck.com had an ad on the page, a small, static image, you could click. The readers of suck.com raged like you wouldn’t believe, or maybe you would believe. The main guy wrote a piece about why they had to do it, kind of understandable, but still, ads? But he offered a solution. The ad was always in the same place on the screen, so just put a sticky note there on the screen to block it. Yes, it was simple times with simple solutions. Nowadays, I guess you just need to cover the whole screen with sticky notes, which kind of defeats the purpose of using the internet. To tie this all together, capitalism sucks.
posted by njohnson23 at 8:07 AM on August 29, 2023 [12 favorites]

I'm still forced to use something handy like a sticky to occlude the - what do they call it? Screen on screen or something? When you scroll past the video at the top and it reappears in the lower right corner. and won't go away no matter how much you scroll down. Sometimes clicking its 'X' doesn't make it go away, so...

Thankful for the browser extensions that prevent video auto-play; wish they'd make something that inhibits this pivot-to-video irritation.
posted by Rash at 8:12 AM on August 29, 2023 [6 favorites]

The only thing which will save the internet is the destruction of free-market capitalism.

I hate to be the person who sounds like that person always shouting, but yes, and here's why:

The reason things are shitty is because people are so fucking desperately poor compared to what it takes to live life comfortably these days, and so they can't just do things just to enjoy them anymore, without nervously thinking, "should I be trying to make money off of this?"

So you could make sites without ads just for the love of the thing, because even your shitty retail job let you hold down an apartment and still hang out with your friends and get pizza and beer afterwards. And you could put recipes on the web just because you wanted to help other people to cook, because you were just throwing it up in your spare time, not grimly taking photo-edited pictures of your dinner and hoping that enough people would like or visit your page so that you could make a cookbook so that you could have a little more income so that you could maybe afford to have reliable transportation.

No design change is going to fix that.
posted by corb at 8:16 AM on August 29, 2023 [43 favorites]

I run a pi-hole at home to block ads. I'm fine with accepting that I can't access some sites as they won't let me through for having an adblocker. However, I am always surprised by just how shitty a number of my daily favourite sites are without the adblocker -- ads everywhere, pop up stupid videos that are difficult to close, etc. -- when I end up browsing the internet without the pi-hole.
posted by fimbulvetr at 8:35 AM on August 29, 2023 [3 favorites]

> The reason things are shitty is because people are so fucking desperately poor compared to what it takes to live life comfortably these days, and so they can't just do things just to enjoy them anymore, without nervously thinking, "should I be trying to make money off of this?"

i've often said that my dream job is to live off the dole. this is because work is a waste of time and effort, and the things i get up to while not required to do wasteful work things are significantly better for both the world and for me.

but even if they weren't, my dream job would nevertheless be to live off the dole. if a hell existed i would hope that the demons there would make the afterlife extra spicy for reagan as payback for ruining my dream job.
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 8:40 AM on August 29, 2023 [12 favorites]

The reason things are shitty is because people are so fucking desperately poor compared to what it takes to live life comfortably these days, and so they can't just do things just to enjoy them anymore, without nervously thinking, "should I be trying to make money off of this?

False. The vast majority of actual successful internet influencers are already middle-class or higher before they became an internet influencer. The vast majority of actual poor are not taking pictures of their lunch in order to become internet influencers. Most of them that are doing influencer-type activities are doing so because they enjoy it, same as people did to make blogs or random websites in the past. Sorry the medium changed.
posted by The_Vegetables at 8:51 AM on August 29, 2023 [6 favorites]

> The vast majority of actual 💘🍧 >> 𝓈𝓊𝒸𝒸𝑒𝓈𝓈𝒻𝓊𝓁 << 💘🍧 internet influencers
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 8:58 AM on August 29, 2023 [2 favorites]

The idea that there’s some kid of undeserving overpaid Patreon elite out there unfairly denying you your content is… IMHO, way off and kind of ludicrous.
posted by Artw at 9:01 AM on August 29, 2023 [2 favorites]

The vast majority of actual 💘🍧 >> 𝓈𝓊𝒸𝒸𝑒𝓈𝓈𝒻𝓊𝓁 <>

Yeah, they are middle class first so they can afford to have quality production values and good equipment, cosmetology to be internet-presentable, have spare time to create new content etc. All that stuff acts as gateways.
posted by The_Vegetables at 9:10 AM on August 29, 2023 [1 favorite]

The real sign that google is dead is that in a recent Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, they mention "searching on DuckDuckGo" instead of "googling" something.
posted by tofu_crouton at 9:42 AM on August 29, 2023 [8 favorites]

I can put up with a lot of promoted content in results, since I can easily skip it, but it's the bad search function that drives me batty.

Yesterday, I was looking for current data about deployment of IIoT devices across certain industries (yes, very glamorous searching!) but Google kept delivering IoT based results. Now, I've been searching the Internet longer than Google has been around (I've seen references to Yahoo and AltaVista in this thread, but I haven't seen anybody reference Dogpile yet, which was my go-to for quite a while), and I'm pretty good about getting search engines to deliver what I want. Early on I learned how to apply boolean operators, I figured out all the tricks to eliminate content with minus signs or specify desired content inside quotation marks, etc. Even most people I work with are shocked by how much I'm able to get out of a search engine.

Yesterday, however, I could not get Google to not throw me up IoT results. After some deep digging into pages of results, I finally found some useful data that I could make work, but it shouldn't have taken me that long or been that hard.

I was especially frustrated because I had actually come across what had the potential to exactly the type of tailor made data I needed but I swear the report had been run backwards through Google Translate three or four times, because the explanation of the data make literally no sense, and there was no way I could cite that ungrammatical mishmash of nonsense, even if I think I understood what the research was trying to say.
posted by sardonyx at 9:50 AM on August 29, 2023 [2 favorites]

> The vast majority of actual 💘🍧 >> 𝓈𝓊𝒸𝒸𝑒𝓈𝓈𝒻𝓊𝓁 <>

achievement unlocked: become unquotable
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 10:27 AM on August 29, 2023 [4 favorites]

The idea that there’s some kid of undeserving overpaid Patreon elite out there unfairly denying you your content is… IMHO, way off and kind of ludicrous.

Well that's because it is, in the way you put it. Patreon serves a necessary and useful role to enable people to make money off of their work.

But at the same time, it's also all this content that would ordinarily be visible to all, that isn't, unless they pony up. Which isn't bad on its own no. But it also slows the growth of one's audience, and also means some people won't see it who might like it.

I am in a weird place here. I feel the responsibility to speak on behalf of my experience. I never have much spare money to spend on Patreons even though I'd like to. This isn't the first time I've felt self-conscious about taking this stance. Truthfully, if it's only one or two Patreons it isn't too ornerous, but if there's a lot of them they add up. And I don't mean to call out Patreon itself specifically, Medium paywalled content is the same kind of thing.

Like I said, I don't begrudge anyone the right to make money off their work, but it does mean that, practically, I probably can't see it. And even if I can see it, I feel like I can't link it to other people who might like it, because the first thing they'll see is a paywall.

But this has been the story of the internet since early on, it's hard to make money off of electrons, and any solution is going to be exclusionary in some way.
posted by JHarris at 11:04 AM on August 29, 2023 [1 favorite]

I have seen the future

And it is a Wordpress site with an ActivityPub plugin

For a turn of the wheel

Until the corporations get enough of their claws into the AP attention stream to co-opt it and become it’s main host and cut it off from its roots to feast on greater portions of everyone’s attention and money

And once again we are watching places like Facebook and Twitter devour the Internet

And once that, too has passed

There shall be a new protocol for the people to talk upon

And it will be a plugin

For Wordpress.
posted by egypturnash at 11:35 AM on August 29, 2023 [3 favorites]

I’m with fimbulvter here. We have a pi-hole (uh two actually) and have set them up for my Mom too. I find the internet unusable off my home network.
posted by hilaryjade at 11:39 AM on August 29, 2023 [1 favorite]

egypturnash: "I have seen the future

And it is a Wordpress site with an ActivityPub plugin"

I don't know if this was written as a prediction or a description, but the future is here now.
posted by adamrice at 12:06 PM on August 29, 2023 [1 favorite]

Dogpile was great! Learned about it in my bibliography class in grad school. A Jesuit priest/professor walked us through advanced web searches. IDK why I mention this, but it was pretty rad.
posted by Don.Kinsayder at 12:36 PM on August 29, 2023 [3 favorites]

adamrice, it was both - I have dabbled in the WP+AP plugin and I am giving serious thought to setting up a multiuser WP system next to the Mastodon instance I run. WP is a *lot* easier to keep running *and* to mod than Mastodon.
posted by egypturnash at 1:20 PM on August 29, 2023 [4 favorites]

nobody maybe it's not exactly what you described, but Marginalia search is pretty fun and designed specifically around non-commercial, non-ad-infested websites. Almost want to try setting it as my default for a while, just to see what happens
posted by gbhdrew at 3:01 PM on August 29, 2023 [6 favorites]

Now everyone has to decide how much they want to give away, and how much they want to jealously guard away from the poors.

How presumptuous of people, to want to get paid for their work!

Many of us don't love what advertising-supported content has done to the internet. But some of y'all also don't support paying directly for content.

"I want everyone to just give me their work for free" is not as enlightened a worldview as you seem to think it is.

My entire salary comes from working on articles that are published on a subscription-only site. I don't do that work for fun -- I do it for a living. As do my coworkers.

In conclusion, paywalls are good, actually. And it's good to pay for stuff if you find it valuable, to fairly compensate the people who create it, and to encourage them to make more.
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 7:12 PM on August 29, 2023 [8 favorites]

Yes, but if we destroy capitalism then people could do stuff because they want to, not because they have to pay their bills.

I pay for content that I find valuable. But I'm just one person. Several times now I've had a creator whose work I love shut down their Patreon and close up shop because they couldn't make enough money to earn a living. Or start churning out increasingly fluffy content to feed The Algorithm whatever it demands so they don't get de-monetised (or whatever that's called), which means that I don't value their content anymore.
posted by harriet vane at 4:40 AM on August 30, 2023 [5 favorites]

Now everyone has to decide how much they want to give away, and how much they want to jealously guard away from the poors.
How presumptuous of people, to want to get paid for their work!
"I want everyone to just give me their work for free" is not as enlightened a worldview as you seem to think it is.

It's not enlightened, it's practical, from my point of view. I'm just speaking to my experience, again, as one of the people in that group who runs into paywalls everywhere now but doesn't have a lot of money to distribute to each evenly. When toilets and shelters and wifi access points go pay-only, it's people like me who suffer, so it is with this, and it's okay for me to mention that fact. It's also the loss of the free-for-all commons of the early internet, which was a place where I could participate despite being perennially short.

I'm not demanding that it change. I recognize that there's good things about it too: it does result in creators getting paid (which, hey, I may be one of those someday!), and it does put a strong wall between creators' material and "AIs" that seek to exploit it for gain. But I also see that this is leading to an internet to which I will, to significant degree, be excluded.

There is this phenomenon on the internet where someone tries to argue for a point strongly, and people respond to it at maximum strength. I'm rejecting that with these comments: I know the situation is nuanced. I had hoped that I had couched my previous comments enough that that was evident, but I guess that didn't come through.
posted by JHarris at 7:08 AM on August 30, 2023 [8 favorites]

some of y'all also don't support paying directly for content.

Look, this just isn't true. But the internet has just never figured out how to create a fair and easy way to pay for content.

I was an assiduous reader of my daily newspaper. I would pay between fifty cents and a dollar - I'm sure it's more now - to pick up my copy of the newspaper, for which I would receive a large number of articles. Yes, I could obtain a subscription to the newspaper, but let's face it, I and most people I knew did not, and enjoyed the freedom not to do so. We were happy to pay for the newspaper. Yes, sometimes people would loan or borrow newspapers, but I would never go to the lengths to borrow a newspaper that I will go to read an article.

This is because in order to read a fucking article, websites want me to create a membership, and I goddamn refuse. I do not want to belong to any particular website. I do not have a single website that I like enough to make my regular paper. I would be willing to pay for some portion of articles that I read if there were a way to do so without making yet another fucking membership, creating yet another password and login that I will absolutely either not remember or create yet another vulnerability for a password I will remember and use on something important.

I would buy X funny money dollars that I could spend on all internet websites, but that will never happen because no one will ever standardize, and because the places that do standardize charge money to places to use them.

It's not people not wanting to pay for content, it's people not wanting bullshit nonsense hoops.
posted by corb at 7:51 AM on August 30, 2023 [16 favorites]

That is the thing--people have been saying that for decades now! Microtransactions are a great idea that people keep implementing badly. Recently I've even seen someone write that the reason they've never taken off is because people don't want them, and that's so stupid. The reason they've never taken off is everyone's versions of them, from Flooz to cryptocurrency, has had something essentially wrong with it.

Well if the internet is for anything it's for offering your own dubiously-considered opinions, so the reasons I think everyone seems determined to sabotage their micropayments solutions are:
1. It's not really hugely profitable? The idea of paying a quarter or so for reading an article, and shaving off a part of that, doesn't sound appealing?
2. Legal liability for funding things that lawmakers dislike cutting into that? Like, the danger that someone will use your system to fund child porn resulting in you yourself getting sued and destroying your process to the detriment of all.
3. You don't make an account, with the content maker's site anyway, and that deprives them of knowledge of their readers?
4. As with crypto, some solutions tie some kind of ideology to their system? "Why did I get only 23 cents out of the 25 cents paid? Ah, 8% went to pay for $ODIOUSTHING$, got it."
5. Money people have brain worms? I'd believe it. Being a member of an insular group that talks to each other and thinks disdainfully of outsiders results in dumb decisions, you see it all the damn time.

Being able to pay people A. without some central group to aggregate the payments and pay them out in bulk to avoid being eaten up by processing fees, while B. not requiring some power-devouring and speculative decentralized system like a blockchain, is a hard problem. Maybe someone will come up with a Fediversal payment solution? Would that even help? Am I just applying a buzzword now? And am I threadsitting? Aah I'm at DragonCon, I should stop reading Metafilter for a few days....
posted by JHarris at 10:04 AM on August 30, 2023 [8 favorites]

here's what we do:

* set pay equal for all as is our birthright or whatever. i don't care why
* additional state support for promising artists and other content creators
* additional funding available through contests and stuff
* send anyone who proposes decentralized distributed-ledger-based payment systems that will revolutionize commerce direct to gulag

<< yr b.l.p. for today is now ended >>
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 4:16 PM on September 5, 2023 [3 favorites]